The third chapter defines the evolved concept of Total War, supporting the idea that the concept of Total War is rooted in a time prior to a post-war era, with particular reference to the Total Wars of the twentieth century, the First World War and the Second World War.
Whilst the origins of Total War belong in the detailed history and theory of warfare alluded to in the previous chapter the reality of Total War belong very much in the Twentieth century. On the 28th July 1914, a week after the the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungaria the reality of Total War was realised, the ensuing failure of diplomacy in Europe brought the Great War than many had feared for years before.
Whilst modern warfare of previous centuries and conflicts took place on the battlefields of Europe, the Americas, Africa and the Imperial Colonies, the World Wars of the Twentieth century were endured by all, far from the frontline and fighting. The war did not live up to its expectations as a short, sharp and decisive conflict, but instead delivered a prolonged and terrible struggle, a struggle that did not solely remain confined to the peoples of Europe, the “the First World War was truly ‘the Great War’ (Townshend 2005:117), eventually involving thirty two nations, it touched the lives of people all over the world with its scale and intensity. In the terms of Clausewitz, The Great War is the first example of Total War, “‘absolute war’, war without restraints or limits” (Clausewitz in Townshend 2005:8). It is in the context of the two World Wars of the Twentieth century that the model of Total War is found.
In the context of this dissertation it is useful to consider a concept of Total War in the terms alluded to earlier in the first chapter. In the same way that “modern war is the product of three distinct kinds of change: administrative, technical, and ideological” (Townshend 2005:3), Total War is then the combination of these factors in their uppermost capacity. By this admission in a theoretical sense, Total War is thus when the means of social and administrative organisation are at capacity, technology and industry the vanguard of innovation and a potent form of ideology; nationalism prevails.
Of course the concept of Total War has many more features and qualities, but in essence they can all be attributed in one way or another to the characteristics mentioned above. Also, by compartmentalising the changes in warfare as such, we are able to illustrate a set of realities that characterise the emergence of Total War.
In a technical sense we can point to the advances of technology and industry; the innovation of ever more destructive weapons and a revolution in logistical capacities as evidence for warfare on a mass scale. Whilst in an administrative sense the mobilisation of societies and economies toward the objectives of warfare in the World Wars of the Twentieth century further demonstrate the scale and presence of Total War. The emergence of military education and war planning alongside the development of ever more powerful and destructive weapons that facilitated warfare on such a vast scale are also an indication of ideological changes that typify the Total Wars of the Twentieth century; the fall of the distinction between public and private, and the subsequent legitimisation of economic, industrial and civil targets; the emphasis upon undermining the ability of an opponent to deal a decisive impact to military, economic, industrial or political capacities. The strong presence of nationalistic and patriotic feeling and ideology that facilitated the initial slide into war also played an important role in stimulating the mobilisation and reorganisation of whole societies and economies throughout both World Wars.
What follows is a discussion and exploration of such realities in the World Wars of the Twentieth century as to confirm a concept of Total War and its existence prior to the post-war era.
The failure of early offensives in the First World War arose from the unreckoned power of modern artillery and infantry weapons to defeat offensive plans and “frustrate the quest for the decision at arms” (Chickering 2000:38). The consequential war of attrition became reliant upon the industrial and economic power of the belligerent states, as well as their ability to dispense it. Rather than exacting a decisive military victory, modern warfare, as Total War, now focussed upon undermining the ability of an opponent to deal a decisive impact upon economic, industrial and political forces.
Thus in an existential sense Total War meant combining total social mobilisation; the organisation of society for war with total destruction; establishing the military, industrial, technologic, economic and civilian capacities of a society as legitimate targets. In doing so the distinction between the public and private spheres were eradicated. The distinction between combatant and non-combatant, military and civilian broke down, thus legitimising non military, civilian targets. Consequentially the mobilisation of society to this end also brought economic, industrial and technological capacities into the crosshair, thus imposing a mode of “degenerate war” (Shaw 2005:42).
The victory of the Allied forces in both World Wars was largely dependent upon the economic and industrial might that existed between them, but also upon social mobilisation, organisation and administration; the ability to protect and maintain such strength, transfer it into economic and political force as well as military power. The sheer intensity and weight of attrition posed by the coalition forces and their industries against Germany and its allies proved decisive, slowly but steadily driving the German war machine to defeat as Western economic and industrial strength was brought to bear.
In both conflicts modern weapons gave further importance to industrial and economic power. Whilst not only placing greater demands on societies to produce and distribute arms, modern weapons founded a deadlock of technology that helped to sustain the attritional nature of war; whereby the innovation of technology could not deliver a decisive breakthrough on either side as to render a tactical superiority. Accordingly the World Wars were characterised as Total Wars by the mechanisation of modern warfare that induced, “the paralysis of strategy by technological stalemate [only] answered by the vast expansion of national organisation to find ever more manpower and war material” (Townshend 2005:15).
In the First World War, the arrival of the tank in 1917 went someway to breaking this deadlock by allowing infantry units to penetrate German lines, cross ‘no man’s land’ into the killing zone. Although the potential of this new weapon was not realised at the time in its capacity to mount piercing attacks, it provided a new dynamic in ground offensives and afforded operational mobility superior to units on foot or in the saddle of the cavalry. Overhead, the introduction of aircraft in the warzone aided reconnaissance and preparations for planning artillery attacks, whilst later it provided a disruptive mechanism to gun or grenade positions ahead of advancing ground forces. The introduction of the United States into the war brought the might of its economy and industry, and as such the Allies were critically able to support these tentative technologies more readily, develop them and exploit their potential.
By the Second World War the continued revolution and innovation of technology delivered ever more destructive means, releasing warfare from its attrition nature and enabling the suppressed ‘offensive’ logic of war to be realised. The development of tanks and aircraft enabled rapid movement of ground forces as well as greater destruction to economic and industrial targets. The development of these technologies also furthered the rationale that civilian entities formed part of the ‘enemy’ now that such targets could be approached and attacked by accurate shelling and strategic bombing raids. The Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940 and the subsequent bombing raids by both the RAF and Luftwaffe epitomised this new mode of warfare.
Below the skies and beyond the battlefield, the totality of these wars was reflected by unprecedented social change on the home front during the mobilisation and reorganisation of societies. In respect to financing the wars, the early optimism of the British Cabinet and War Office (in the false knowledge that the wars would be short in duration) to allow the “market economy to respond to extraordinary pressures” was replaced by an early form of the Military-Industrial complex that embraces our societies today (Chickering 2000:39). The government tendered contracts to companies such as Vickers and Armstrong, to provide capital investment and produce guns, shells, explosives and other weaponry, notably the Vickers machine gun which was widely attached to aircraft. In Germany, companies such as Thyssen and Krupp sustained the arms industry with guns, ammunitions, warships and submarines.
As well as establishing the Military-Industrial complex, the privatisation of the war industry created many jobs. In Britain the scale of privatisation in the war industry was such that by early 1915 the War Office had issued “‘war contracts’ to a diverse collection of firms that numbered over 2500” (Chickering 2000:44). In World War One the formation of the Ministry of Munitions under the auspice of David Lloyd George provided the institutional and practical framework for the British government to coordinate the many facets of war production. In Britain, the growth of trade unions and expansion in their popularity as a reaction to state direction, perhaps best reflect the centralisation of production and labour control from the corporate power to the state. In Germany, the ‘War Raw Materials Section’ “managed the exploitation of materials in territories [and] became a pivot of the German war economy” whilst ‘War Materials Corporations’ combined the large firms that had dominated the core sectors in the years before the war to become the principal suppliers of weapons and munitions (Chickering 2000:49).
However, on both sides of the trenches the war industry heralded a much more significant social change to transcend the gender barrier that had existed whilst the public/private remained in placed. As many men were drawn out of the factories and away from the coal mines or foundries to the frontline, women came into the workplace. As well as replacing the displaced soldiers, women came to work in munitions factories and communication exchanges occupying the jobs that once men had held. Closer to the frontline they occupied hospitals, tending to the sick, wounded and dead. The granting of women’s suffrage in the United States and Britain soon after the end of the First World War serve as an indication of the scale and impact of social changes that were fashioned by the war.
In a social ideological sense, Total War in World War One had tested the durability and strength of liberal politics and free market economies in the shift from normalcy to the emergency of wartime. In the First World War patriotic and nationalistic feelings were sufficient enough to stimulate and mobilise this vast social reorganisation. Such feelings were also powerful enough to demand the sacrifice of the many men and women on the frontline, the same energy persuaded those at the frontline to “kill and risk being killed” (Kaldor 1999:26). The willingness of societies to mobilise and enter into the war effort completes the sequence of mass mobilisation that arose from the French 1793 ‘levee en masse’. Where previously warfare was almost exclusively the endeavour of the state, and the labour of the military, the Total Wars of the Twentieth century incorporated the whole of belligerent societies into the war effort.
However the social consequences of Total War provided much “war weariness” and industrial unrest throughout Europe (Townshend 2005:136). In Russia the strain was such that Revolution occurred in1917. These pressures and the ensuing renunciation of progress in Western civilisation before World War Two lay evident in the accomplishments of radical ideologies on the right across Europe during the interwar years. The rise of right wing extremism under the veils of Fascism and Nazism in the USSR, Central Europe and Hitler’s Germany as motive for the Second World War reflect this transformation in all its entirety. The Allied nations in World War Two now fought not against the liberal free market or Nationalism, but against a more total, potent danger- Fascism. They fought “against Nazism and for the protection of their own ways of life. They fought in the name of democracy” (Kaldor 1999:26).
World War Two unravelled much in the same way to the First World War, in that it demanded again ever more destructive weapons, ever more industrious and mobilised economies, ever more innovative technologies and an ever more vociferous conviction for the cause. However, the efforts to wage Total War between 1914 and the end of 1945 ultimately culminated in a paradox that “developed the techniques of modern war to a point of sharply diminishing utility” (Kaldor 1999:27). The mass mobilisation of societies, industrialisation, and technological triumphs had “created the condition which would make it possible to return to the tradition of war fought with limited resources by armed forces” (Townshend 20005:157). Moreover, the new generation of weapons that had been developed were too expensive and sophisticated to be produced quickly and on a mass scale, in these conditions the mass mobilisation of societies would be unnecessary and futile. As Martin van Creveld puts it, “in 1945, modern war abolished itself” (van Creveld in Townshend 2005:18).What also made the Second World War different was its ending.
The atomic bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945, confirmed the end of not only the World War, but of Total industrial warfare. From that moment forward Total War between industrial states become obsolete, the power and implications of nuclear weapons subjugated the premise of all and any military, economic, industrial or political power. In this sense Total War belongs in the post-war era, an era created by the obsolescence of major interstate industrial warfare. Conducting a war of such totality would lead to nuclear war, a war too dangerous to wage, a war that would eventually lead to the annihilation of a great proportion of civilisation, if not more. The advent of nuclear weapons thus undermined the concept of Total War.
In conclusion it is evident that the World Wars of the Twentieth century were Total Wars. The realities of these wars extend the theory of warfare from the Nineteenth century; where the great mobilisation of society in the time of the American Civil War enabled industrialisation and technological innovation to be brought to bear in the military conduct of war; and where the logistical revolution in the time of the Franco-Prussian allowed the mass mobilisation of military force across a new theatre of war, and where the economic and political implications of modern warfare were realised. Modern warfare became characterised by each of these realities, however it is the totality of this modern warfare that is realised in the combination of these characteristics that give us the concept of Total War. This is a fact evident in the nature of the foregoing conversation. Whilst it may seem that in this discussion that the outline of the dialogue circles around and around, it is impossible to speak of Total War as one disjointed entity. The very nature of Total War and the World Wars as ‘Total’, demonstrate that Total War cannot be understood whilst the connections between the realities of warfare are independent from each other.
A concept of Total War now complete, I now move to the next chapter to discuss the impact of nuclear weapons upon this evolved concept of Total War and discuss its implications in a theory of modern warfare.