My family has some experience with this subject:
The "conventional wisdom" is that business people prosper from "war profiteering", which is not always true. Some do, some don't. My grandfather's business, the porcelain enamel coated signs that every gas station in America once had, went bust during WW2 because of wartime resource controls. They made it through the depression in good shape, but the second world war killed them. They couldn't get their raw materials and their machinery was not particularly useful for war production, so they just failed. It took him several years to get back into a related business and he ended up working for someone else.
I don't know how you would research DCM purchases, the records might still exist in a government warehouse along with the Ark of the Covenant.
