- This article is about total warfare. For the computer game series see Total War series.
Total war describes an international war in which countries or nations use all of their resources to destroy another organized country's or nation's ability to engage in war. The practice of total war has been in use for centuries, but it was
only in the middle to late nineteenth century that total war
was recognized as a separate class of warfare. Total war is most easily distinguished
from other forms of warfare through a blurring and combining of strategy and
grand strategy.
Development of the concept of total war
There are several reasons for changing concept and recognition of total war in the nineteenth century. The main reason is
industrialization. As countries' natural and capital
resources grew, it became clear that some forms of conflict demanded more resources
than others. For example, if the United States was to subdue a Native American tribe in an extended
campaign lasting years, it still took many fewer resources than waging a month of war during the American Civil War. Consequently, the greater cost of warfare became
evident. An industrialized nation could distinguish and then choose the intensity of warfare that it wished to engage in.
This is also the same time when nations were fighting colonial wars. A country such as Britain
would have no need to mobilize troops, or begin rationing at home when fighting a
native enemy in Africa. But when Britain was fighting in the First World War
(note that this was not necessarily a fight for her life), a different form of warfare was needed. As such, strategies (in the
generic sense) were needed to adapt to this new grand strategy.
Additionally, this is the time when warfare was becoming more mechanized. A factory in a city would have more to do with warfare than it did before. The factory itself would become a target, because it
contributed to the war effort. It follows as well that the factory's workers would also be targets.
Consequences of Total War
The most identifiable consequence of total war in modern times has been the inclusion of civilians and civilian infrastructure as targets in destroying a country's ability to engage in war. The targeting
of civilians developed from two distinct theories. The first theory was that if enough
civilians were killed, factories could not function. The second theory was that if civilians were killed, the country would be so
demoralized that it would have no ability to wage further war.
Total war also resulted in the mobilization of the home front. Propaganda became a required component of total war in order to boost production and
maintain morale. Rationing took place
to provide more material for waging war.
Another consequence was the expansion of the peace time military. A navy could not be built overnight, and it had to be large enough to fight any potential enemy. This
lead to the dreadnought arms race before World War I. To justify the huge expenditure, populations had to become accustomed to thinking of the most
likely potential enemy, as an enemy, which helped to foster war hysteria and jingoism. Large standing armies for countries with land borders close to a
potential enemy and strong navies for maritime powers were the only way to prevent defeat before the economy could be
mobilized.
Post Total War
There has been a cessation of large decisive wars between industrialized nations since the end of World War II, because their ability to wage war on each other had become so destructive that the
advantages to be won in such a war were more than offset by the losses which could be suffered. With nuclear weapons, the
fighting of a war became something that instead of taking years, and the full mobilisation of a country's resources such as in
World War II, would instead take hours and was developed and maintained with relatively modest peace time defence budgets. By the
end of the 1950s, the super-power rivalry resulted in the development of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) in which a war
could destroy civilisation and would result in hundres of millions of deaths in a world where, in the words of Edward Heath, "The dying will envy the dead".
As the tensions between industrialized nations have diminished, European continental powers have for the first time in 200
years started to question if conscription is still necessary. Many are moving back to the pre-Napoleonic ideas of having small
professional armies. This is something which despite the experiences of the first and second world wars is a model which the
English speaking nations had never abandoned during peace time, probably because they have never had a common border with a
potential enemy with a large standing army. In Admiral Jervis's famous phrase, "I do not say, my Lords, that the French will not come. I
say only they will not come by sea".
The cessation of total war has not led to the end of war involving industrial nations, but a shift back to the limited wars of
the type fought between the competing European powers for much of the 19th
century and could be summed up the the phrase The Great Game.
During the Cold War, wars between industrialized nations were fought by proxy over national prestige, tactical strategic advantage or colonial and
neocolonial resources. Examples include the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the Afghanistan War. Since the end of the Cold War
some industrialised countries have been involved in a number of small wars with strictly limited strategic objectives which have
motives closer to those of the colonial wars of the 19th century than those of total war, examples of which are the Australian
led UN intervention in East Timor, the NATO intervention in Kosova, the internal Russian conflict with Chechnya,
and the American lead coalitions which invaded Afghanistan and twice fought the Iraqi regime of
Saddam Hussein.
Examples of Total Warfare Strategies
Punic Wars
Punic Wars. During the Punic Wars, Rome and Carthage fought with navies and armies across several theaters. In the end, Rome destroyed the city-state of Carthage, and destroyed
the empire's ability to wage war by enslaving or committing genocide on the Carthaginian populace.
American Civil War
US Army General William Tecumseh Sherman's
'March to the Sea' during the American Civil War destroyed the resources required for the South to make war. He is considered one of
the first military commanders to deliberately, consciously and knowingly use total war as a military tactic.
World War I
Almost the whole of Europe mobilized to conduct World War I. Young men were removed from production jobs, and were replaced by women. Rationing
occurred on the home fronts.
One of the features of Total War in Britain was the use of propaganda posters to divert all attention to the War on the home
front. Posters were used to influence people's decision on what to eat, what occupations to take (Women were used as nurses and
in munitions factories), and to change the attitude of support towards the war effort.
After the failure of the Battle of Neuve
Chapelle, the large British Offensive in March 1915, the British Commander-in-Chief
Field Marshal Sir John French
claimed that it failed due to a lack of shells. This led to the Shell Crisis of 1915 which brought down the Liberal British government under the Premiership of Henry Asquith. He formed a new
coalition government dominated by Liberals and appoint 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.
Total War is a war fought on the home front as well as the battle front.
World War II
The United Kingdom
Before the onset of the Second World War, the United Kingdom drew on its First World War experience to prepare legislation that would allow immediate mobilization of the economy for
war, should future hostilities break out.
Rationing of most goods and services was introduced, not only for consumers but also for manufacturers. This meant that
factories manufacturing products that were irrelevant to the war effort had more appropriate tasks imposed. All artificial light
was subject to legal Blackouts.
Not only were men and women 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.
Huge casualties were expected in bombing raids, so children were evacuated from London and other cities en masse to the
countryside for compulsory billeting in households. In the long term this was one of
the most profound and longer lasting social consequences of the whole war for Britain. This is because it mixed up children with
the 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 slums, but the children got a chance to see animals and the countryside for the first time and experience
how the other half lived. Many went back to the cities with their social horizons broadened.
Germany
In contrast Germany started the war under the concept of Blitzkrieg. It did not accept that it was in a total war until Joseph Goebbels' Sportpalast speech of 18 February 1943. For example, women were not conscripted into the armed forces.
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 it was too late to help win the war. Germany's armament minister Albert Speer, who assumed office in early 1942, rationalized German war production
and eliminated the worst inefficiencies. Under his direction a threefold increase in armament production occurred and did not
reach its peak until late 1944. To do this during the damage caused by the growing strategic Allied bomber offensive, is an
indication of the degree of industrial under-mobilization in the earlier years. It was because the German economy through most of
the war was substantially undermobilized that it was resilient under air attack. Civilian consumption was high during the early
years of the war and inventories both in industry and in consumers' possession were high. These helped cushion the economy from
the effects of bombing. Plant and machinery were plentiful and incompletely used, thus it was comparatively easy to substitute
unused or partly used machinery for that which was destroyed. Foreign labour (some of it slave labour) was used to augmented
German industrial labour which was under pressure by conscription into the Wehrmacht (Armed Forces).
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union was a command 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. As only those factories which were useful for war production were moved it was a
part of the total war commitment of the Soviet government.
During the siege of Leningrad, newly-built T-34 tanks were driven - unpainted due to a paint shortage - from the factory floor
straight to the front. This came to symbolise the USSR's commitment to the Great Patriotic War and demonstrated the government's total war policy.
To encourage the Russian people to work harder, the communist government
encouraged the people's love of the Motherland Rodina and even allowed the
reopening of Russian Orthodox Churches as it was
thought this would help the war effort.
The ruthless movement of national groupings like the Volga German and
later the Crimean Tartars (who Stalin thought might be sympathetic to
the Germans) was a development of the conventional scorched earth
policy. This was a more extreme form of internment, implemented by both the UK
government (for Axis aliens and British Nazi
sympathisers), and the US government (for Japanese internment in the United States).
Descent into barbarism
The suspension of many of the rules of war on the Eastern Front during World War II coupled with an escalation in criminal actions caused human misery
on a scale never seen before. Many actions which ignored the rules of war were initiated or at least condoned by the authorities
on both sides . They argued that in such a clash of ideology (and for the Nazis coupled to a race war) that any methods in a
total war which achieved victory over the enemy were justified.
Strategic bombing
Britain and Germany made a distinct attempt to destroy the other's ability to produce war materials. They did this by the use
of strategic bombing campaigns upon each others' cities. When the
United States entered the war, it executed similar campaigns against both Germany and Japan.
Unconditional surrender
After the United States entered World War II, President 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. The allied war aim
of unconditional surrender inevitably increased the determination and the ferocity of the defence of the Axis powers when they
knew the war was lost.
Quotes
Quotes WWII: Total War
- "...There is another more obvious difference from 1914. The whole of the warring nations are engaged, not only soldiers, but
the entire population, men, women and children. The fronts are everywhere. the trenches are dug in the towns and streets. Every
village is fortified. Every road is barred. The front line runs through the factories. the workmen are soldiers with different
weapons but the same courage...". Winston Churchill on the
Radio, June 18 ; and House of Commons August 20, 1940.[1] (http://www.winstonchurchill.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=420)
Quotes WWII: Strategic Bombing
- "preference is to be given to those where attacks are likely to have the greatest possible effect on civilian life ... terror
attacks of a retaliatory nature are to be carried out against towns other than London." Hitler
- "bomb every building in England marked with three stars in the Baedeker Guide", Baron Gustav Braun von Stum,
1942
- "The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was
going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a dozen other places, they put their rather naive theory into
operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind." Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris officer commanding RAF Bomber Command having just witnessed the German bombing of London
which inspired Bomber Command's campaign against Germany.
- "Actually Dresden was a
mass of munitions works, an intact government centre, and a key transportation point to the East. It is now none of these
things." Written by Air Marshal Harris in a memo to the Air Ministry on 29 March 1945.
- "It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the
terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed ... The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the
conduct of Allied bombing." Winston Churchill
Quotes Other
- Chorus from a popular WWII British song:
-
- It's a ticklish sort of job making a thing for a thing-ummy-bob
- Especially when you don't know what it's for
- But it's the girl that makes the thing that drills the hole
- that holds the spring that works the thing-ummy-bob
- that makes the engines roar.
- And it's the girl that makes the thing that holds the oil
- that oils the ring that works the thing-ummy-bob
- that's going to win the war.
- "Second thing is—and this concerns me a lot—no stages. This is a total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies.
There are lots of them out there. And all this talk about, well, first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq, then
we will take a look around and see how thing stand, that is entirely the wrong way to go about it. Because these guys all talk to
each other and are all working with one another." – Michael Ledden October 29, at a meeting of the American Enterprise
Institute: The Battle for Ideas in the U.S. War on Terrorism (http://www.aei.org/events/filter.,eventID.364/transcript.asp) repeated by Richard Perle [2] (http://pilger.carlton.com/print/124759)
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