More than 400,000 American service members died during the period of U.S. involvement in World War II, starting in 1941 and ending with Allied victory in 1945.
While those deaths were tragedies for friends and family back home and for our entire nation, the threat posed by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan left the United States no choice but to fight with all we had.
That required the full mobilization of America’s economy and resources, which was enormously costly in dollar terms. But of course the alternative — defeat at the hands of the Nazis and Japanese — was unthinkable. Therefore, most Americans probably did not question the need for the federal government to borrow whatever money it took to secure victory.
Just how deep in debt did we go?
Well, figures from the U.S. Treasury Department and the Office of Management and Budget indicate that by 1946, the national debt represented a staggering 122 percent of our gross domestic product. GDP is the total value of all goods and services produced in our country in one year. So during that time period, we actually owed more than all that we produced in a year.