Everything about Total War totally explained
» For the video game series, see Total War (video game series).Total war is a conflict of unlimited scope in which a faction mobilizes all available resources in order to destroy their rival's ability to defend themselves. The practice of total war has been in use for centuries, but it was only in the middle to late 19th century that total war was identified by scholars as a separate class of warfare. In total war there are no non-combatants; every person from a particular country, civilians and soldiers alike, are considered to be acceptable targets.
Conceptual development
The concept of total war is usually traced back to
Carl von Clausewitz. Clausewitz was actually concerned with the related philosophical concept of
absolute war, a war free from any political constraints, which Clausewitz held was impossible. The two terms, absolute war and total war, are often confused.
Christopher Bassford, professor of strategy at the
National War College, describes the difference: "Clausewitz's concept of absolute war is quite distinct from the later concept of 'total war.' Total war was a prescription for the actual waging of war typified by the ideas of General
Erich Ludendorff, who actually assumed control of the
German war effort during World War I. Total war in this sense involved the total subordination of politics to the war effort—an idea Clausewitz emphatically rejected—and the assumption that total victory or total defeat were the only options."
Indeed, it's General Erich Ludendorff during
World War I (and in his 1935 book "Total War") who first reversed the formula of Clausewitz, calling for total war - the complete mobilization of all resources, including policy and social systems, to the winning of war.
There are several reasons for the changing concept and for the 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 were to subdue a
Native American tribe in an extended campaign lasting years, it still took much 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.
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.
There is no single definition of total war, but there's general agreement among historians that the
First World War and
Second World War were both examples. A large number of historians consider the
American Civil War to be the earliest example, although some consider the wars of German unification the first, and others pick other starting points. Since the concept emerged gradually, however, there's no truly definite answer.
Thus, definitions do vary, but most hold to the spirit offered by
Roger Chickering's definition in
Total War: The German and American Experiences, 1871-1914: "Total war is distinguished by its unprecedented intensity and extent. Theaters of operations span the globe; the scale of battle is practically limitless. Total war is fought heedless of the restraints of morality, custom, or international law, for the combatants are inspired by hatreds born of modern ideologies. Total war requires the mobilization not only of armed forces but also of whole populations. The most crucial determinant of total war is the widespread, indiscriminate, and deliberate inclusion of civilians as legitimate military targets."
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 wag
Early history
The first documented total war was the
Peloponnesian War, as described by the historian
Thucydides. This war was fought between
Athens and
Sparta between 431 and 404 BC. Previously, Greek warfare was a limited and ritualized form of conflict. Armies of
hoplites would meet on the battlefield and decide the outcome in a single day. During the Peloponnesian War, however, the fighting lasted for years and consumed the economic resources of the participating city-states.
Atrocities were committed on a scale never before seen, with entire populations being executed or sold into
slavery, as in the case of the island of
Melos. The aftermath of the war reshaped the Greek world, left much of the region in poverty, and reduced once influential Athens to a weakened state, from which it never completely recovered.
Rome also practiced Total War particularly in the 'barbarian' western provinces, an example is the battle of Mons Graupius where the Roman Army defeated the Scottish celts' army and the women and children who had also come to watch the battle. This subdued the region but the Emperor of the time became wary of the general
Agricola and ordered him to withdraw and return to Rome.
The
Thirty Years War may also be considered a total war. This conflict was fought between 1618 and 1648, primarily on the territory of modern
Germany. Virtually all of the major European powers were involved, and the economy of each was based around fighting the war. Civilian populations were devastated. Estimates of civilian casualties are approximately 25-30%, with deaths due to a combination of armed conflict,
famine, and
disease. The size and training of armies also grew dramatically during this period, as did the cost of keeping armies in the field. Plunder was commonly used to pay and feed armies.
18th and 19th Centuries
French Revolution
The
French Revolution introduced some of the concepts of total war. The fledgling republic found itself threatened by a powerful coalition of European nations. The only solution, in the eyes of the
Jacobin government, was to pour the nation's entire resources into an unprecedented war effort - this was the advent of the
levée en masse. The following decree of the
National Convention on
August 23,
1793 clearly demonstrates the enormity of the French war effort:
August 23 decree French front line forces grew to some 800,000 with a total of 1.5 million in all services — the first time an army in excess of a million had been mobilized in Western history. Over the coming two decades of almost constant warfare it's estimated that somewhere in the vicinity of five million died — probably about half of them civilians — and France alone counted nearly a million (by some sources in excess of a million) deaths — a considerably higher portion of its population than perished in either of the world wars. In the
Russian campaign of 1812
Adam Zamoyski estimates almost a million died — this in under 6 months of fighting. In this campaign the Russians resorted to destroying infrastructure and agriculture in their retreat in order to hamper the French and strip them of adequate supplies. In the campaign of 1813 Allied forces in the German theater alone amounted to nearly one million whilst two years later in
the Hundred Days a French decree called for the total mobilization 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 1808-1814 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.
Taiping Rebellion
During the
Taiping Rebellion (
1850-
1864) that followed the secession of the Tàipíng Tiānguó (太平天國, Wade-Giles T'ai-p'ing t'ien-kuo) (Heavenly Kingdom of Perfect Peace) from the
Qing empire the first instance of total war in modern China can be seen. Almost every citizen of the Tàipíng Tiānguó was given military training and conscripted into the army to fight against the imperial forces.
During this conflict both sides tried to deprive each other of the resources to continue the war and it became standard practice to destroy agricultural areas, butcher the population of cities and in general exact a brutal price from captured
enemy lands in order to drastically weaken the opposition's war effort. This war truly was total in that civilians on both sides participated to a significant extent in the war effort and in that armies on both sides waged war on the civilian population as well as military forces. In total between 20 and 50 million died in the conflict making it bloodier than the
First World War and possibly bloodier than the
Second World War as well if the upper end figures are accurate.
General
Phillip Sheridan's
stripping of the Shenandoah Valley starting from
September 21 1864 and continuing for two weeks was considered "total war" in that its purpose was to eliminate foodstuffs and supplies vital to the South's war plans. Sheridan took the opportunity when he realized opposing forces had become too weak to resist his army.
US Army General
William Tecumseh Sherman's '
March to the Sea' in November/December 1864 destroyed the resources required for
the South to make war. Sherman is considered one of the first military commanders to deliberately and consciously use total war as a military strategy. General
Ulysses S. Grant and President
Abraham Lincoln initially opposed the plan until Sherman convinced them of its necessity.
20th Century
World War I
Almost the whole of
Europe mobilized to wage
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 decisions about what to eat and 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 because of a lack of shells. This led to the
Shell Crisis of 1915 which brought down the
Liberal British government under the
Premiership of
H. H. Asquith. He formed a new coalition government dominated by Liberals and appointed
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.
As young men left the farms for the front, domestic food production in Britain and Germany fell. In Britain the response was to import more food, which was done despite the German introduction of unrestricted submarine warfare, and to introduce rationing. The Royal Navy's blockade of German ports prevented Germany from importing food, and the Germans failed to introduce food rationing. German capitulation was hastened in 1918 by the worsening food crises in Germany.
World War II
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 conscripted into the armed forces from the beginning of the war (something which hadn't 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, 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 which 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
bomber streams by the
Royal Air Force to counter the night fighter defences of the
Kammhuber Line.
Germany
In contrast,
Germany started the war under the concept of
Blitzkrieg. It didn't 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 or allowed to work in factories. The Nazi party adhered to the policy that a woman's place was in the home, and didn't change this even as its opponents began moving women into important roles in production.
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, nationalized German war production and eliminated the worst inefficiencies. Under his direction a threefold increase in armament production occurred and didn't 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 under-mobilized 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, both slave labour and labour from neighbouring countries who joined the
Anti-Comintern Pact with Germany, was used to augment German industrial labour which was under pressure by conscription into the
Wehrmacht (Armed Forces).
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union (USSR) 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. Only those factories which were useful for war production were moved because of the total war commitment of the Soviet government.
The Eastern Front of the
European Theatre of World War II encompassed the conflict in
central and
eastern Europe from June 22, 1941 to May 9, 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. The fighting involved millions of
German and
Soviet 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 as many as 27 million Soviet citizens died during the war, including some 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.
During the
battle of Leningrad, 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 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 and even allowed the reopening of
Russian Orthodox Churches as it was thought this would help the war effort.
The ruthless
population transfer of national groupings like the
Volga German and later the
Crimean Tatars,
Chechens and
Kalmyks (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), as well as the US and Canadian governments (for
Japanese-Americans).
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.
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'd 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 didn't cover them. Further the collapse of the Axis regimes created a legal condition of total defeat (
debellatio) so the provisions of the 1907
Hague Conventions over military occupation were not applicable.
Cold War Era
Since the end of World War II, no industrial nations have fought such a large, decisive war, due to the availability of weapons that are so destructive that their use would offset the advantages of victory. The fighting of a total war where nuclear weapons are used is something that instead of taking years and the full mobilisation of a country's resources such as in World War II, would instead take tens of minutes. Such weapons are developed and maintained with relatively modest peace time defence budgets.
By the end of the
1950s, the
ideological stand-off of the
Cold War between the
Western World and the
Soviet Union involved thousands of nuclear weapons being aimed at each side by the other. Strategically, the equal balance of destructive power possessed by each side situation came to be known as
Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), the idea that a nuclear attack by one superpower would result in 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
Superpowers sought to avoid open conflict between their respective forces, as both sides recognized that such a clash could very easily escalate, and quickly involve nuclear weapons. Instead, the superpowers fought each other through their involvement in
proxy wars, 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
Korean War, the
Vietnam War, and the
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Post Cold War
In the Post Cold War security environment, the militaries of
industrialized nations have been scaled back from their Cold War heights, especially in terms of personnel numbers. The militaries of industrialized nations have also been
'professionalized', and rely on highly trained,
standing armies of citizen volunteers, as opposed to mass
conscript forces. Of note,
Russia, having long relied on conscripts to make up the bulk of her forces, is now moving towards an all volunteer force.
Politically, these changes reflect further moves in the
Industrialized world away from preparations for total war with similar nations. Industrialized nations don't expect to fight total wars against each other in today's world, although they still consider the possibility. The
globalized nature of the
World economy means that nations are
interconnected economically.
As economies are no longer self-contained, and rely on each other, to fight would risk the economies of the nations involved. The growth of
global trade has emerged as decisive factor in global stability. Even rival industrialized nations trade with each other, and risk much more than they'd gain in any conflict with a trading partner. For example,
China and the
United States are power rivals in the Asia Pacific. But they're also economically dependent upon each other, and both nations benefit from the continued economic success of their rival.
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