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Total war is a type of that mobilizes the totality of national resources to sustain war production, blurring the line between military and civilian activities and legitimate attacks on civilian targets as part of a war without restriction as to the combatants, territory or objectives involved.
The term has been defined as "A war that is unrestricted in terms of the weapons used, the territory or involved, or the objectives pursued, especially one in which the laws of war are disregarded."
In the mid-19th century, scholars identified what later became known as total war as a separate class of warfare. In a total war, the differentiation between combatants and non-combatants diminishes due to the capacity of opposing sides to consider nearly every human, including non-combatants, as resources that are used in the war effort. NB Gunn cites this Wikipedia article as it was on , but on only for the text of the song "The Thing-Ummy Bob".
The four dimensions of total war identified by Förster are:
1) Total purposes: The aim of continuous growth of the power of the parties involved and hegemonic visions.
2) Total methods: Similar and common methodologies among countries that intend to increase their spheres of influence.
3) Total mobilisation: Inclusion in the conflict of parties not traditionally involved, such as women and children or individuals who are not part of the armed bodies.
4) Total control: Multisectoral centralisation of the powers and orchestration of the activities of the countries in a small circle of dictators or oligarchs, with cross-functional control over education and culture, media/propaganda, economic, and political activities.
Peccia's contribution of "total change" adds to this framework by emphasising the long-term effects of total war on society.
5) Total change: This includes changes in social attitudes, cultural norms, and political structures, as well as economic and technological developments.
In Peccia's view, total war not only transforms the military and political landscape but also has far-reaching and long-time implications for society as a whole.Peccia, Tiziano (2015). 'Guerra Totale: interpretazione delle quattro dimensioni di Stig Förster – Il radicale cambiamento della società post-conflitto', Rivista Italiana di Conflittologia, no. 25, pp. 51-65. ISSN 1971-1921. Stampato per Cuam University Press Edizioni Labrys.
Actions that may characterise the post-19th century concept of total war include:
In his 24 December 1864 letter to his chief of staff during the American Civil War, Union general William Tecumseh Sherman wrote the Union was "not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war, as well as their organized armies," defending Sherman's March to the Sea, the operation that inflicted widespread destruction of infrastructure in Georgia.
United States Air Force General Curtis LeMay updated the concept for the nuclear age. In 1949, he first proposed that a total war in the nuclear age would consist of delivering the entire nuclear arsenal in a single overwhelming blow, going as far as "killing a nation".
During the Russian campaign of 1812 the Russians retreated while destroying infrastructure and agriculture in order to effectively hamper the French and strip them of adequate supplies. In the campaign of 1813, Allied forces in the German theatre alone amounted to nearly one million whilst two years later in the Hundred Days a French decree called for the total mobilisation of some 2.5 million men (though at most a fifth of this was managed by the time of the French defeat at Waterloo). During the prolonged Peninsular War from 1808 to 1814 some 300,000 French troops were kept permanently occupied by, in addition to several hundred thousand Spanish, Portuguese and British regulars, an enormous and sustained guerrilla insurgency—ultimately French deaths would amount to 300,000 in the Peninsular War alone.
The Franco-Prussian War was fought in breach of the recently signed Geneva Convention of 1864, when "European opinion increasingly expected that civilians and soldiers should be treated humanely in war".According to Karine Varley, Was the Franco-Prussian War a Modern or Total War?, 03/06/2018, History of Modern France at War, "the besieged cities, most notably Paris, Strasbourg, Metz and Belfort came closest to experiencing total war. German forces regularly bombarded civilian areas with the intention of damaging morale. In Paris, up to 400 shells a day were fired at civilian areas".
Sherman's March to the Sea in the American Civil War—from 15 November 1864, through 21 December 1864—is sometimes considered to be an example of total war, for which Sherman used the term hard war. Some historians challenge this designation, as Sherman's campaign assaulted primarily military targets and Sherman ordered his men to spare civilian homes. (2026). 9781442201279, Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. ISBN 9781442201279
After the failure of the Battle of Neuve Chapelle, the large British offensive in March 1915, the British Commander-in-Chief Field Marshal John French blamed the lack of progress on insufficient and poor-quality artillery shells. This led to the Shell Crisis of 1915 which brought down both the Liberal government and Premiership of H. H. Asquith. He formed a new coalition government dominated by Liberals and appointed David Lloyd George as Minister of Munitions. It was a recognition that the whole economy would have to be geared for war if the Allies were to prevail on the Western Front.
Carl Schmitt, a supporter of Nazi Germany, wrote that total war meant "total politics"—authoritarian domestic policies that imposed direct control of the press and economy. In Schmitt's view the total state, which directs fully the mobilisation of all social and economic resources to war, is antecedent to total war. Scholars consider that the seeds of this total state concept already existed in the German state of World War I, which exercised full control of the press and other aspects economic and social life as espoused in the statement of state ideology known as the "Ideas of 1914".
Almost the whole of Europe and some of the European colonial empires mobilised soldiers. Rationing occurred on the home fronts. Bulgaria went so far as to mobilise a quarter of its population, or 800,000 people, a greater share of its population than any other country during the war.
The State General Mobilization Law had fifty clauses, which provided for government controls over civilian organisations (including ), nationalisation of strategic industries, price controls and rationing, and nationalised the news media.Pauer, Japan's War Economy, 1999 p. 13 The laws gave the government the authority to use unlimited budgets to subsidise war production and to compensate manufacturers for losses caused by war-time mobilisation. Eighteen of the fifty articles outlined penalties for violators.
To improve its production, Imperial Japan used millions of Unidas, Naciones. World Economic And Social Survey 2004: International Migration, p. 23 and pressed more than 18 million people in East Asia into forced labour.Zhifen Ju, " Japan's atrocities of conscripting and abusing north China draftees after the outbreak of the Pacific war", 2002, Library of Congress, 1992, "Indonesia: World War II and the Struggle For Independence, 1942–50; The Japanese Occupation, 1942–45" Access date: 9 February 2007.
Not only were men conscripted into the armed forces from the beginning of the war (something which had not happened until the middle of World War I), but women were also conscripted as Land Girls to aid farmers and the Bevin Boys were conscripted to work down the coal mines.
Enormous casualties were expected in bombing raids, so children were evacuated from London and other cities en masse to the countryside for compulsory in households. In the long term this was one of the most profound and longer-lasting social consequences of the whole war for Britain.Brown, p. ix This is because it mixed up children with adults of other classes. Not only did the middle and upper classes become familiar with the urban squalor suffered by working class children from the , but the children got a chance to see animals and the countryside, often for the first time, and experience rural life.
The use of statistical analysis, by a branch of science which has become known as Operational Research to influence military tactics, was a departure from anything previously attempted. It was a very powerful tool but it further dehumanised war particularly when it suggested strategies that were counter-intuitive. Examples, where statistical analysis directly influenced tactics include the work done by Patrick Blackett's team on the optimum size and speed of convoys and the introduction of , by the Royal Air Force to counter the night fighter defences of the Kammhuber Line.
Therefore, Germany started the war under the concept which was later named blitzkrieg. Officially, it did not accept that it was in a total war until Joseph Goebbels' Sportpalast speech of 18 February 1943—in which the crowd was told " Totaler Krieg – Kürzester Krieg" ("Total War – Shortest War".)Statement from the banner in Sportpalast, 18 February 1943, Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-J05235 / Schwahn / CC-BY-SA 3.0
Goebbels and Hitler had spoken in March 1942 about Goebbels' idea to put the entire home front on a war footing. Hitler appeared to accept the concept, but took no action. Goebbels had the support of minister of armaments Albert Speer, economics minister Walther Funk and Robert Ley, head of the German Labour Front, and they pressed Hitler in October 1942 to take action, but Hitler, while outwardly agreeing, continued to dither. Finally, after the holidays in 1942, Hitler sent his powerful personal secretary, Martin Bormann, to discuss the question with Goebbels and Hans Lammers, the head of the Reich Chancellery. As a result, Bormann told Goebbels to go ahead and draw up a draft of the necessary decree, to be signed in January 1943. Hitler signed the decree on 13 January, almost a year after Goebbels first discussed the concept with him. The decree set up a steering committee consisting of Bormann, Lammers, and General Wilhelm Keitel to oversee the effort, with Goebbels and Speer as advisors; Goebbels had expected to be one of the triumvirate. Hitler remained aloof from the project, and it was Goebbels and Hermann Göring who gave the "total war" radio address from the Sportspalast the next month, on the 10th anniversary of the Nazi's "seizure of power".Reuth, Ralph Georg (1993) Goebbels Translated by Krishna Winston. New York: Harcourt Brace. pp. 304, 309–313.
The commitment to the doctrine of the short war was a continuing handicap for the Germans; neither plans nor state of mind were adjusted to the idea of a long war until the failure of Operation Barbarossa. A major strategic defeat in the Battle of Moscow led Speer to nationalise German war production.A. S. Milward (1964) "The End of the Blitzkrieg". The Economic History Review, New Series, Vol. 16, No. 3, pp. 499–518.
The Eastern Front of the European Theatre of World War II encompassed the conflict in central Europe and eastern Europe from 22 June 1941, to 9 May 1945. It was the largest theatre of war in history in terms of numbers of soldiers, equipment and casualties and was notorious for its unprecedented ferocity, destruction, and immense loss of life (see World War II casualties). The fighting involved millions of Nazi army, Hungarian, Romanian and Red army troops along a broad front hundreds of kilometres long. It was by far the deadliest single theatre of World War II. Scholars now believe that at most 27 million Soviet citizens died during the war, including at least 8.7 million soldiers who fell in battle against Hitler's armies or died in POW camps. Millions of civilians died from starvation, exposure, atrocities, and massacres. The Axis lost over 5 million soldiers in the east as well as many thousands of civilians.German losses according to: Rüdiger Overmans, Deutsche militärische Verluste im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Oldenbourg 2000. , pp. 265, 272
During the Battle of Stalingrad, newly built T-34 tanks were driven—unpainted because of a paint shortage—from the factory floor straight to the front. This came to symbolise the USSR's commitment to a policy of total war.
In late 1941, Japan's Army-dominated government decided to seize by military force the strategic resources of South-East Asia and Indonesia since the Western powers would not give Japan these goods by trade. Planning for this action included on American and British forces in Hong Kong, the Philippines, Malaya, and the U.S. naval base and warships at Pearl Harbor. In response to these attacks, the UK and U.S. declared war the next day. Nazi Germany declared war on the U.S. a few days later, along with Fascist Italy; the U.S. found itself fully involved in a second world war.
As the United States began to gear up for a major war, information and propaganda efforts were set in motion. Civilians (including children) were encouraged to take part in fat, grease, and scrap metal collection drives. Many factories making non-essential goods retooled for war production. Levels of industrial productivity previously unheard of were attained during the war; multi-thousand-ton convoy ships were routinely built in a month and a half, and tanks poured out of the former automobile factories. Within a few years of the U.S. entry into the Second World War, nearly every man without children fit for service, between 18 and 30, was conscripted into the military "for the duration" of the conflict, and unprecedented numbers of women took up jobs previously held by them. Strict systems of rationing of consumer staples were introduced to redirect productive capacity to war needs.John Phillips Resch, and D'Ann Campbell eds. Americans at War: Society, Culture, and the Homefront (vol 3, 2004).
Previously untouched sections of the nation mobilised for the war effort. Academics became technocrats; home-makers became bomb-makers (massive numbers of women worked in industry during the war); union leaders and businessmen became commanders in the massive armies of production. The great scientific communities of the United States were mobilised as never before, and mathematicians, doctors, engineers, and chemists turned their minds to the problems ahead of them.Arthur Herman, Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II (Random House, 2012).
By the war's end, a multitude of advances had been made in medicine, physics, engineering, and the other sciences. This included the efforts of the theoretical physicists working at the Los Alamos National Laboratory on the Manhattan Project, which led to the Trinity nuclear test and thus brought about the Atomic Age.
In the war, the United States lost 407,316 military personnel, but had managed to avoid the extensive level of damage to civilian and industrial infrastructure that other participants suffered. The U.S. emerged as one of the two after the war.
The unconditional surrender of the major Axis powers caused a legal problem at the post-war Nuremberg Trials, because the trials appeared to be in conflict with Articles 63 and 64 of the Geneva Convention of 1929. Usually if such trials are held, they would be held under the auspices of the defeated power's own legal system as happened with some of the minor Axis powers, for example in the post-World War II Romanian People's Tribunals. To circumvent this, the Allies argued that the major war criminals were captured after the end of the war, so they were not prisoners of war and the Geneva Conventions did not cover them. Further, the collapse of the Axis regimes created a legal condition of total defeat ( debellatio) so the provisions of the 1907 Hague Convention over military occupation were not applicable.Ruth Wedgwood The Wall Street Journal 16 November 2004
By the end of the 1950s, the ideology stand-off of the Cold War between the Western world and the Soviet Union had resulted in thousands of nuclear weapons being aimed by each side at the other. Strategically, the equal balance of destructive power possessed by each side manifests in the doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD), which determines that a nuclear attack by one superpower would result in a nuclear counter-strike by the other. This would result in hundreds of millions of deaths in a world where, in words widely attributed to Nikita Khrushchev, "The living will envy the dead".
During the Cold War, the two sought to avoid open conflict between their respective forces, as both sides recognised that such a clash could very easily escalate, and quickly involve nuclear weapons. Instead, the superpowers fought each other through their involvement in Proxy war, military buildups, and diplomatic standoffs.
In the case of proxy wars, each superpower supported its respective allies in conflicts with forces aligned with the other superpower, such as in the Vietnam War and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Nonetheless, there are cases of states enduring total war who were not nuclear powers nor closer allies, such as the 1980s Iraq-Iran conflict.
Nazi Germany
In 1935 General Ludendorff in the book Der Totale Krieg gave life to the term "Total War" in the German lexicon. However, being followers of the stab-in-the-back myth, military and Nazi leadership believed that Germany hadn't lost World War I on the battlefield but solely on the home front. (1994). 9780198202905, Clarendon Press. ISBN 9780198202905
Canada
In Canada early use of the term concerned whether or not the country was committing enough to mobilising its resources, rather than whether or not to target civilians of the enemy countries. During the early days of the Second World War, whether or not Canada was committed to a "total war effort" was point of partisan political debate between the governing Liberals and the opposition Conservatives. The Conservatives elected as their national leader Arthur Meighen, who had been the cabinet minister responsible for implementing conscription during the First World War, and advocated for conscription again. Prime Minister W.L. Mackenzie King argued that Canada could still be said to have a "total war effort" without conscription, and delivered nationally broadcast speeches to this effect 1942. Meighen failed to win his seat in by-election in 1942, and the issue subsided for a short time. But eventually, national conscription was introduced in Canada in 1944, as well as dramatically increased taxation, another symbol of the "total war effort".
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union (USSR) was a planned economy which already had an economic and legal system allowing the economy and society to be redirected into fighting a total war. The transportation of factories, and whole labour forces east of the Urals as the Germans advanced across the USSR in 1941, was an impressive feat of planning. Only those factories which were useful for war production were moved because of the total war commitment of the Soviet government.
United States
The United States underwent an unprecedented mobilisation of national resources for the Second World War, creating a military-industrial complex. Although the United States was not in existential danger, the national sense after Pearl Harbor was to use all of the nation's resources to defeat Germany and Japan. Most non-essential activities were rationed, prohibited or restrained, and most fit, unmarried young men were drafted. There was little urgency before 1940, when the collapse of France ended the Phoney War and revealed urgent needs. Nevertheless, President Franklin Roosevelt moved to first solidify public opinion before acting. In 1940 the first peacetime draft was instituted, along with Lend-Lease programs to aid the British, and covert aid was passed to the Chinese as well.James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The soldier of freedom (1940–1945). Vol. 2 (1970) pp. 3–63. online
American public opinion was still opposed to involvement in the problems of Europe and Asia, however. In 1941, the Soviet Union became the latest nation to be invaded, and the U.S. gave its aid as well. American ships began defending aid convoys to the Allied nations against submarine attacks, and a total trade embargo against the Empire of Japan was instituted to deny its military the raw materials its factories and military forces required to continue its offensive actions in China.
Unconditional surrender
After the United States entered World War II, Franklin D. Roosevelt declared at Casablanca Conference to the other Allies and the press that unconditional surrender was the objective of the war against the Axis Powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan. Prior to this declaration, the individual regimes of the Axis Powers could have negotiated an armistice similar to that at the end of World War I and then a conditional surrender when they perceived that the war was lost.
Post-World War II
Since the end of World War II, no industrial nation has fought such a large, decisive war. This is likely due to the availability of nuclear weapons, whose destructive power and quick deployment render a full mobilisation of a country's resources such as in World War II logistically impractical and strategically irrelevant.
Other conflicts
The following post-World War II conflicts have been characterized as "total war":
See also
Bibliography
(2026). 9780335207947, Open University Press. ISBN 9780335207947
External links
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