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In the wake of the Iraq War, it has become axiomatic that the aftermath of a war should be planned for. This article disentangles the different strands woven into Allied planning for 'postwar relief' in the early 1940s. The rhetorical planners – great and good people such as Leonard Woolf and veterans of relief work – feared that the humanitarian aftermath of the second world war would be even worse than that of the first. The political planners had to reconcile many conflicting forces: the need to keep allied governments in exile happy, the British blockade, the interests of the Russians, and the concerns of the United States Congress. The new instrument they produced, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, struggled to establish itself under the weak leadership of Governor Herbert Lehman. In practice, therefore, military planning mattered most. Allied armies discovered, in Italy in 1943-44, the necessity in modern warfare of feeding, fumigating and rehousing civilians and, in the process, developed expertise in new medical technologies such as DDT, nutrition, and penicillin, which prevented the expected epidemics. But the reluctance of the military to 'do welfare' or to engage in rehabilitation also became apparent. The main achievement of the long planning process was in creating the dominant mental construct of postwar relief, that of the 'displaced person', on which the hierarchy of assessment of refugees' needs was based, and new institutional mechanisms of doubtful effectiveness. Planning, some contemporaries concluded, did not in itself guarantee success.