I'm Duncan Weldon, and you're listening to World War II, the economic battle on the BBC World Service.

This is London. You will now hear a statement by the prime minister.

I am speaking to you from the cabinet room of Ten Downing Street.

In September 1939, Hitler invaded Poland. Mumps of tension gave way to all out war.

By June 1940, just ten mumps later, the map of Europe had been transformed

by the Nazi conquest of Poland, Norway, Denmark, the low countries, and France.

I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received,

and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.

Political leaders and military strategists in the 1930s and 40s were formed on the battlefields

of the Great War. They knew a vital part of modern military conflict lay in the economy,

the control of resources, industrial capacity, and logistical constraints.

I'm an economist by background, and in this program I'll be looking at the Second World War

as an economic battle. How the powers produced the weapons and mobilised the soldiers that fought.

How they secured the oil for tanks and planes. How they fed or didn't, their populations.

Economics was crucial to how the war was won by the Allies, and just as crucial as the how it was

lost by the access powers. I'm starting with Britain, a country which recognised how important

industrial and financial factors would be in any conflict early on. In fact, they even fought of

them as the so-called fourth arm of defence. Britain in the 1920s, a tough decade,

the upper-middle classes might have existed in a heady party-driven sphere, but the economy

struggled. Growth was sluggish, and UK exports expensive. An economy once driven by war and the

need to produce was stagnating. Unemployment rose to two million, with heavily industrialised

areas such as Wales being hit the most severely. The Britain that emerged from the Great War might

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