(^350) Chapter Nine
sop up unemployment through programs of public works rather than
through military mobilization; and, also like Hitler, it was only when
military mobilization got going on a significant scale that the American
government really succeeded in eliminating unemployment from the
scene.
Among western nations, Germany took the initiative in rearming,
starting in 1935. Rearmament, supplemented by large expenditure for
public works, allowed Hitler to put the Germans back to work sooner
than full employment returned to any other industrial country. He
reaped much credit for the feat at home and abroad. In France and
Britain, however, heartfelt aversion to any new war checked moves
toward rearmament. New weapons were therefore ordered on a
smaller scale than in Germany and unemployment remained a prob
lem until after war broke out. Russia, on the other hand, responded to
Hitler’s threats with a large-scale effort to reequip the Red Army and
air force. American rearmament, when it got underway in 1939, was
also as much a reaction to German as to Japanese power.
As all the principal industrial countries of the world, one after
another, expanded arms manufacture, the pace of improvement in
weapons design, having slowed drastically at the end of World War I,
suddenly accelerated, especially for airplanes and tanks. Uncontrolled
and uncontrollable technical aspects of the arms race, which had be
come so troublesome in naval design on the eve of World War I, now
came to the fore across the whole spectrum of armaments, and in a
most confusing way. Superior design of a given year, once put into
production, had the effect of saddling the armed forces with obsolete
airplanes and tanks two or three years later. The French and Russians,
having armed themselves early, suffered from this embarrassment in
1940 and 1941.^77 Conversely, holding back until after a prospective
enemy had committed his production lines to a given design could
allow a straggler to produce a better machine. The British enjoyed this
advantage in 1940 when their new Spitfires proved superior to any
German pursuit plane then in existence. On the other hand, the Spit
“The New Deal and the Analogue of War,” in John Braeman et al., eds., Change and
Continuity in Twentieth Century America (Columbus, Ohio, 1964), pp. 82–143; John A.
Garraty, "The New Deal, National Socialism, and the Great Depression,” American
Historical Review 78 (1973): 907–44.
- John F. Milson, Russian Tanks, 1900–1920 (London, 1970), pp. 59–64. Of
some 24,000 Russian tanks operational in June 1941, only 967 were of a new design
equivalent or superior to the German tanks of that time. Cf. Andreas Hillgruber,
Hitler's Strategie: Pohtik and Knegsführung 1940–1941 (Frankfurt am Main, 1965),
p. 509.