Anatomy of a miracle

Seeking to solve their problems by the most primitive means, the most advanced nations of Asia and Europe ended up back in the Stone Age and rediscovered the key to progress: technological innovation.

The swarms of planes were so numerous that they darkened the sky. Their mission was summed up in a laconic expression: “carpet bombing”, dropping as many waves of explosives as necessary so that the entire enemy territory would be carpeted with nothing but debris. They achieved their goal, and finally broke the will of Japan and Germany to continue fighting.

After the end of hostilities in 1945, there were practically no cities, bridges or factories left in these two countries: only hunger and misery.

The landscape could not have been more different when they hosted the Tokyo Olympics in 1964 and Munich in 1972: in less than a generation they had gone from absolute poverty to the highest levels of wealth, and were on the heels of the United States, the great victorious power of World War II; with the difference that, in the case of the defeated, most of the capital accumulated by previous generations had been wiped out with the stroke of a pen and they had to start almost from scratch. Such an unprecedented achievement deserved the unanimous qualification of “miracle”.

But how could an improbable event happen twice?

As Neanderthals or Sumerians

In the 1930s, the logic of the economic wisdom of their time dragged the ruling classes of the most advanced nations of Asia and Europe to a diabolical conclusion: if the flow of raw materials required for their development was not to be subject to the fickle will of their neighbors, with whom they maintained old rivalries, there was no choice but to accumulate the war power necessary to seize by force the territories in which these natural riches were to be found.

At first, the plan seemed to work: Japan and Germany unleashed their mighty war machines, taking over their respective continents almost without resistance and establishing themselves at the head of their respective empires. This barbaric behavior was not without precedent and, in fact, has characterized the great powers throughout human history. The novelty was – on this occasion – the energetic reaction of third parties with the capacity to force the aggressors to retreat, and to settle for the small territories poor in natural resources granted to them by that history which, with this war of aggression, they had desperately tried to rectify in their favor. Only it all went wrong, and now they were in ruins. Far from fulfilling the purpose for which they were produced, the weapons turned out to be a boomerang, bringing as much destruction and misery to those who wielded them as to those who were attacked with them.

An unexpected treasure

In the rearguard of the war effort, on the contrary, it was the experience of building each of those weapons that ended up endowing both nations with the greatest of riches, hitherto unsuspected: the most technologically competitive labor force in the world; it was as if a critical mass of Germans and Japanese had been recruited to participate in the most ambitious experiment designed to equip them – quickly and intensively – with the knowledge and skills needed to undertake the manufacture of all kinds of manufactured goods.

Two examples that I had the opportunity to hear casually in Germany allowed me to understand the mechanics of the “miracle”.

As the war progressed, men meeting the minimum height typically required by the air force became scarcer, and there was no choice but to train crewmen of all sizes still available. As soon as this new batch of pilots reported that many missions failed due to the difficulties they had to see through the windshield, or to reach the pedals from the seat, simply because their torsos and legs were shorter or longer than the distances that the aircraft designers defined according to a “normal” or “ideal” height, those who installed the seats managed to adapt mechanisms that allowed them to adjust their height to that of less standardized pilots.