The broken glass meme is nonsense. Although some economists say the Depression was not ended by WWII, it seems to me it was. Does broken glass work on a huge scale?
In order to win WW2 Roosevelt had to release US businesses from their socialist New Deal purgatory. So yes, WW2 was good for the economy, but in the same way that an enema is good for your stomach. The both removed a roadblock to increased activity.
If the Depression was ended by WWII mobilization, production and consumption, then why didn't the USA plunge right back into Depression when 12 million soldiers returned home and war spending was reduced by 90%?
Arrgghhh!
WWII ended UNEMPLOYMENT. Living standards actually declined during the war. The economic activity was not real. It was not producing goods & services.
The depression ended a couple of years after the war when the soldiers came home, FDR was gone, and America got back to work.
It really wasn't.
It's true that the rampant unemployment of the Depression disappeared, but that will happen when the government forces 9 million men into the Armed Services.
Virtually all production of consumer goods was halted and what remained was severely rationed. Though the nation certainly pulled together, very few lived well during those years.
And though the production of war goods was incredible, virtually all of it ended up destroyed, sunk, or rusting away in mothballs at the end of the war. An economy that produces only to destroy its production isn't going to boom.
Now, we did what we certainly had to do, but it was the removal of the New Deal era government regulations in 1946 that enabled the country to switch back over to consumer production and employ those 9 million young men returning from the Pacific and Europe.
It was then that the Depression ended.
WW2 only ended the Depression because the government swept up every able-bodied man AND woman to make USEFUL goods and perform USEFUL work. If we’d tried a ‘hero project’ like the Soviet Union it would have ended about as well.