5 IBM IN WORLD WAR II, 1939–1945

We, too, are proud of our service man, and glad too that he was employed by a company whose understanding and policies make it possible for him to do his duty with no worries about those at home. — Wife of An IBM Soldier, 19441 Europe Blew Itself up in 1914 and never resolved its issues in the 1920s and 1930s, so it collapsed into another continent-wide civil war in 1939, which spread worldwide. The damage caused by the two wars is difficult to fathom. In World War I, some18 million people died, many more were injured, and almost every government in the industrialized world collapsed. But all that was paltry when compared to World War II, during which an estimated 80 million people died, or 3 percent of the world's population. The Soviet Union lost 26.5 million lives and Germany over 5 million. Europe's colonial system disintegrated. Europe's economy never achieved the robustness it had enjoyed before 1914. The United States came out of World War I as the world's largest and healthiest economy, positions it kept throughout the twentieth century. Because World War I saw the marshaling of much information, C-T-R was able to ride that wave of opportunity, doubling its tiny revenue. C-T-R increased its employee count by 2.5 times, a big change for a small company in such a short time. Like everything else in World War II, events were bigger, more dramatic. IBM's revenue grew explosively from $38 million in 1939 to $138 million in 1945. Its number of employees rose from just over 11,000 in 1939 to over 18,000 in 1945, and exceeded 22,000 the next year, many of them returning veterans.2 In the United States alone, one out of every four IBM employees went into the military.