David Stockman
The war-weary Washington policy makers were absolutely correct when they brought America’s 12 million-man expeditionary force home from Asia, Europe and the Seven Seas after August 1945. So doing, of course, they also abruptly closed the sluice-gates to what was America’s Brobdingnagian $1.7 trillion war budget in today’s dollars (FY 2025 $). But as we noted in Part 1, that figure had shrunk by a stunning 93% to just $125 billion by 1948 as post-war demobilization proceeded apace.
And well it should have. Among the burned out and exhausted lands abroad after V-E Day and V-J Day there was absolutely no military threat anywhere on the planet to the homeland security and liberty of America.
Japan’s leading cities had been fried alive by horrendous nuclear and conventional bombing assaults; Germany’s industrial and urban areas had been laid waste by bomber storms night after night for months on end; Italy had long since hung its wartime leader in a convulsion of political upheaval; France was barely functioning economically and politically after four years of brutal Nazi occupation; England was utterly bankrupt and so demoralized that its electorate had thrown its wartime leader, Winston Churchill, to the political wolves; and that is to say nothing of the prostate corpus of Stalinist Russia.
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