has become everybody's business and that also those not taken into the military must still "do their part" and "fight on the home front". History The importance of civilian manufacturing and support services in a nation's capacity to fight a war first became apparent during the twenty-five years of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars when the United Kingdom was able to finance and, to a lesser extent, arm and supply the various coalitions which opposed France. Although Britain had a much smaller population than France, its global maritime trade and its early industrialisation meant that its economy was much larger than that of France, which allowed Britain to offset the French manpower advantage. During the American Civil War, the capacity of Northern factories and agriculture proved as decisive in winning the war as the skills of the generals of either side. World War I During World War I, the British Shell Crisis of 1915 and the appointment of David Lloyd George as Minister of Munitions was a recognition that the whole economy would have to be geared for war if the Allies were to prevail on the Western Front. The United States home front during World War I saw the first ring World War II. World War II A factor in Allied victory in World War II was the ability of Allied nations to successfully and efficiently mobilize their civilian industries and domestic populations in order to turn out weapons and goods necessary for waging war. By contrast, mobilization of economic resources in Nazi Germany was so inefficient that some early historians of the Reich's economy concluded that the Nazi leadership must have had an intentional policy of favoring civilian over military production until late in the war. The British, by contrast, had already accomplished mobilization for total war by 1940, thereby increasing the output of weapons—especially heavy bombers—vastly. This view was for example presented quite early by John Kenneth Galbraith in Fortune magazine in 1945 "The simple fact is that Germany should have never lost the war ...". According to Adam Tooze this view was influenced by the post-war reports from Albert Speer and SS Wirtschaftsführer (economy leader) , which were not free from own interests. Tooze's alternative view is that Germany was extremely mobilising - already in 1939 there was a higher degree of mobilisation of women in Germany, for example, than Britain ever achieved during the