By which I mean, where did the money come from, if it came at all, in a setting of total war? I’d imagine that the USA economy was strong enough for taxes and bonds to pay the American soldiers, but what about Britain, Germany, the USSR, Japan, Italy etc? Did the totalitarian regimes ever stop paying their soldiers altogether, and if not how did Germany, the USSR and Japan fund payments? Did Britain rely on the USA to fund its soldiers or was it still able to raise some funds through tax and bonds? Were soldiers from the British Empire (Canada, Australia, India, Jamaica, Kenya etc etc) paid by their own countries, or by the UK government, or by the USA?
And what were the physical practicalities of paying soldiers who were away from home for years on end?
But surely that would cause inflation which would make the payments worthless? Were they relying on the fact that being on the front made it impossible for the German soldiers to spend their imaginary money?
They didn’t think of economics in the way we do, and, when you’re fighting for your nation’s existence, you don’t worry about inflation. That’s a far more modern concern.
Actually I interpreted the question differently: did the soldiers receive checks or cash or coupon books or …? If a soldier wanted most of his paycheck to go to his family how did that happen?
Money is an IOU from the country that issues it. You only have to believe that that country is going to continue to exist, and be productive, for its currency to be valuable to you, and presumably many German soldiers did believe that.
For one, it was a rather short window and war time. Printing money like there’s no tomorrow when goods are both scarce and rationed and the economy is tightly controlled isn’t going to cause instant hyperinflation because of the very real examples being made of people who try to increase their prices too much (Hint: they get shot for “profiteering”).
No, what is draining off the excess cash isn’t the chasing of goods, it’s…
As I understand it, new soldiers in the US military nowadays are required to sign up for Direct Deposit if they want to get paid. You no longer have the option of receiving a paper check. If you don’t have a bank account, you get yanked aside at boot camp and taken to the nearest financial institution and told to get one right now, soldier! Clearly, this was not always the case and there would have most likely been transition periods where you could elect the “new” method or the “old” method. Clearly you could receive your pay as a check in the not-so-distant past, and it stands to reason that before that you could get it as an envelope of cash. How long was the transition period? If you were In The Army (or Navy, etc.) in 1970, could you ask for your pay in green folding stuff or did you have to take a check? How about 1960?
As late as the Korean war, US soldiers in the war zone were paid either in US dollars, or military ‘script’. This script was officially spendable only at the base PX, or sometimes at a few approved local businesses. In reality, many local bars, whorehouses, etc. would accept it; they had various corrupt ways to get it exchanged.
The German army basically had separate pay scales for draftees and for careers soldiers. For careers soldiers, pay depended on rank, age, martial status and whether you lived in barracks or in your own apartment/house.
There was extra pay for being deployed in combat as well as for flying personnel in the air force etc.
For those who can read German, here’s the pay scale for the German army in 1935 (which didn’t change significantly until the end of WW II):
My father was a British Army officer during and after WW2. His pay was paid directly into the bank that was allocated to him on the basis of his name. Presumably this was done to share the accounts evenly across the banks. He probably didn’t have an account before that.
As a child in British West Africa, I saw a number of pay parades. The Pay Corps officer sat at a table with his clerk, and my father sat to one side observing. The men would be lined up at ease on the parade ground.
When a soldier’s name was called, he would march to the desk, salute and repeat his name, rank and number. The Officer would state his pay amount, and the clerk would count it into the man’s hand in notes and coins. Another salute and march off.
This was in the 40s and I assume that it was the same all through the war. In fact it seems to have been the same during the Napoleonic wars.
It may be pertinent that the ‘pay’ was pretty low, even by the standards of the day. Of course a soldier was fed and clothed as well, so what was left of his pay, after he had some sent to his wife, and after deductions for things like lost kit, fines and breakages, was really just pocket money.
As far as Germany (and presumably also other belligerent countries during WWII) is concerned, the economy there was far from being a market economy where money plays a central role and inflation is a concern; it was a highly centralised and state-controlled war economy where constraints other than money played a pivotal part. Yes, the German Reichsbank did support the efforts through various schemes which, effectively, amounted to money printing - the Mefo bills are trhe most fanous example. Normally, this would cause inflation, but draconically enforced price controls, in combination with rationing whichb required you to have ration cards, on top of money, to buy most goods, repressed inflation, meaning prices didn’t rise as visibly as they would in a market economy (which, of course, does not mean they did not rise beyond the state-controlled system, i.e., on the black market). Eventually, this did become overt after the end of the war when the value of the Reichsmark plummeted to an extent a currency reform, leading to the Deutschmark, was necessary in 1948; but during the war itself, this was the least concern of the German government and of the general public.
I grew up in a military town. In the sixties and seventies soldiers being deployed abroad would sign over part of their pay to their wives before they went – they didn’t have to send money home as the wives could collect it weekly. I suspect this was a long standing arrangement for a country with an empire.
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