I'd credit an increased US appetite for goods, a huge influx of trained workers (trained by the military for war purposes) and a excess war-related manufacturing capacity turned to domestic goods with the prices reduced by volume manufacturing.
All of which could be called "because the US won".
What's very sad is when you read a little further on about the USA economic decline after 1970 to today...
Anyway thank you for letting me know I was being a dingus!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_the_United...
WWII definitely effected the US less than a lot of countries though that is for sure. But I think certain industries benefited more from USA's post-war advantage than others (automotive maybe being an example).
Toyota had made less than 2000 vehicles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_AA#Toyota_passenger_car...
Neither was Germany. Hitler started pushing the people's car in 1934 or so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen#1932.E2.80.931938:_...
They were building nice cars in Germany, they just weren't building a lot of them.
Meanwhile Ford had produced ~15 million Model Ts and 4 million Model As prior to 1932 (when production of the Model A was stopped).
http://www.jato.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/JATO-Global-C...
GM VAG and Toyota all have similar shares of the global market. Depending on how you want to nitpick you can make The Americans, Germans or Japanese look like the dominant player in global vehicle sales but it's really too global of an industry to draw the lines based on the country the CEO's office happens to be in.
Secondly, we are talking about post-war USA, so very generally '45 -> circa '70, not 2016 and the modern globalised world that are not representative of the world back then where even the internet didn't exist.
Why do you think the USA automobile market exploded post-war? It's because the two biggest automobile manufactures - Germany and Japan - were flattened to smouldering ashes and took around 30-40 years to recover.
That's why the USA auto industry declined on an enormous scale after the 80's, because in the end the USA was never automobile king. There was never the "good old Detroit days". It was just a temporary market vacuum that the USA capitalised on, while Germany and Japan, who simply were better at making cars (debatable of course, but they make more money and that's probably the most reliable metric here), were rebuilding their entire country from catastrophe.