Robert Higgs

An economic blooming often is due as much to an outburst of confidence and optimism with the end of hostilities as to any particular element of industrial or economic rearrangement.
For example, part of the revival after World War II can be attributed to a change in the psychology of private investors; their distrust of New Deal policies began to melt as President Roosevelt drew on wealthy businessmen to run his war effort, and then President Truman signaled that he was warmer to free-market policies than the administration of the late 1930s had been.
It’s more complicated than the war got us out of the Depression, the way most people think it did.