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Total war is a type ofwarfare that includes any and all (includingcivilian-associated) resources and infrastructure aslegitimate military targets, mobilises all of the resources of society to fight the war, and gives priority to warfare overnon-combatant needs.
The term has been defined as "A war that is unrestricted in terms of the weapons used, theterritory orcombatants involved, or the objectives pursued, especially one in which thelaws of war are disregarded."[1]
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 thewar effort.[2]
Total war is a concept that has been extensively studied by scholars of conflict and war. One of the most notable contributions to this field of research is the work of Stig Förster, who has identified four dimensions of total war: total purposes, total methods, total mobilisation, and total control. Tiziano Peccia has built upon Förster's work by adding a fifth dimension of "total change." Peccia argues that total war not only has a profound impact on the outcome of the conflict but also produces significant changes in the political, cultural, economic, and social realms beyond the end of the conflict. As Peccia puts it, "total war is an earthquake that has the world as its epicenter."[3][4]
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.[5][6]
Actions that may characterise the post-19th century concept of total war include:
The phrase "total war" seemingly originated amongst French writers during World War I and French writerLéon Daudet published a collection of essays calledLa Guerre Totale ("The total war") in 1918.[8][9] The phrase was popularised by the 1935 publication of German generalErich Ludendorff's World War I memoir,Der totale Krieg ("The total war").[10][11] Some authors extend the concept back as far as classic work ofCarl von Clausewitz,On War, as "absoluter Krieg" (absolute war), even though he did not use the term; others interpret Clausewitz differently.[12] Total war also describes the French "guerre à outrance" during theFranco-Prussian War.[13][14][15]
In his 24 December 1864 letter to hischief of staff during theAmerican Civil War, Union generalWilliam 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," defendingSherman's March to the Sea, the operation that inflicted widespread destruction of infrastructure in Georgia.[16]
United States Air Force GeneralCurtis LeMay updated the concept for thenuclear age. In 1949, he first proposed that a total war in the nuclear age would consist of delivering the entirenuclear arsenal in a single overwhelming blow, going as far as "killing a nation".[17]
Written by academics atEastern Michigan University, theCengage Advantage Books: World History textbook claims that while total war "is traditionally associated with the two global wars of the twentieth century... it would seem that instances of total war predate the twentieth century." They write:
As an aggressor nation, the ancient Mongols, no less than the modernNazis, practiced total war against an enemy by organizing all available resources, includingmilitary personnel,non-combatant workers,intelligence,transport,money, andprovisions.[18]
In his book,The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know it, David A Bell, aFrench History professor atPrinceton University argues that theFrench Revolutionary Wars introduced to mainland Europe some of the first concepts of total war, such as mass conscription.[19][20] He claims that the new republic found itself threatened by a powerful coalition of European nations and used the entire nation's resources in an unprecedented war effort that includedlevée en masse (mass conscription). By 23 August 1793, the 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 mobilised in Western history:
From this moment until such time as its enemies shall have been driven from the soil of the Republic all Frenchmen are in permanent requisition for the services of the armies. The young men shall fight; the married men shall forge arms andtransport provisions; the women shall make tents and clothes and shall serve in the hospitals; the children shall turn old lint into linen; the old men shall betake themselves to the public squares in order to arouse the courage of the warriors and preach hatred of kings and the unity of the Republic.
During theRussian 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 inthe 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 atWaterloo). During the prolongedPeninsular 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.[21]
The Franco-Prussian War was fought in breach of the recently signedGeneva Convention of 1864, when "European opinion increasingly expected that civilians and soldiers should be treated humanely in war".[22]
TheSullivan Expedition of 1779 was an example of total warfare. As Native American andLoyalist forces massacred American farmers, killed livestock and burned buildings in remote frontier areas, GeneralGeorge Washington sent GeneralJohn Sullivan with 4,000 troops to seek "the total destruction and devastation of their settlements" in upstate New York. There was only one small battle as the expedition devastated "14 towns and most flourishing crops of corn." The Native Americans escaped to Canada where the British fed them; they remained there after the war.[23][24][25]
Sherman's March to the Sea in theAmerican 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 termhard war. Some historians challenge this designation, as Sherman's campaign assaulted primarily military targets and Sherman ordered his men to spare civilian homes.[26]
Bombing civilians from the air was adopted as a strategy for the first time in World War I, and a leading advocate of this strategy wasPeter Strasser "Leader of Airships" (Führer der Luftschiffe;F.d.L.). Strasser, who was chief commander ofGerman Imperial NavyZeppelins during World War I, the main force operating German strategic bombing across Europe and the UK, saw bombing of civilians as well as military targets as an essential element of total war. He argued that causing civilian casualties and damaging domestic infrastructure served both as propaganda and as a means of diverting resources from the front line.
We who strike the enemy where his heart beats have been slandered as 'baby killers' ... Nowadays, there is no such animal as a noncombatant. Modern warfare is total warfare.
— Peter Strasser[27]
One of the features of total war in Britain was the use of governmentpropaganda posters to divert all attention to the war on thehome front. Posters were used to influence public opinion about what to eat and what occupations to take, and to change the attitude of support towards the war effort. Evenmusic halls were used as propaganda, with propaganda songs aimed at recruitment.[28]
After the failure of theBattle of Neuve Chapelle, the large British offensive in March 1915, the British Commander-in-ChiefField Marshal John French blamed the lack of progress on insufficient and poor-qualityartillery shells. This led to theShell Crisis of 1915 which brought down both theLiberal government andPremiership ofH. H. Asquith. He formed a new coalition government dominated by Liberals and appointedDavid Lloyd George asMinister 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.[29]
Carl Schmitt, a supporter ofNazi 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".[30]
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 ofunrestricted submarine warfare, and to introduce rationing. The Royal Navy'sblockade of German ports prevented Germany from importing food and hastened German capitulation by creating a food crisis in Germany.[31]
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.
TheSecond World War was the quintessential total war of modernity.[32][33][34][35] The level of national mobilisation of resources on all sides of the conflict, thebattlespace being contested, the scale of thearmies,navies, andair forces raised throughconscription, the active targeting of non-combatants (and non-combatant property), the general disregard forcollateral damage, and the unrestricted aims of the belligerents marked total war on an unprecedented and unsurpassed, multicontinental scale.[36]
During the first part of theShōwa era, the government ofImperial Japan launched a string of policies to promote a total war effortagainst China andoccidental powers and increase industrial production. Among these were theNational Spiritual Mobilization Movement and theImperial Rule Assistance Association.[citation needed]
TheState General Mobilization Law had fifty clauses, which provided for government controls over civilian organisations (includinglabour unions),nationalisation of strategic industries, price controls andrationing, and nationalised thenews media.[37] 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.[citation needed]
To improve its production, Imperial Japan used millions ofslave labourers[38] andpressed more than 18 million people inEast Asia into forced labour.[39]
Before the onset of the Second World War, Great Britain drew on its First World War experience to prepare legislation that would allow immediate mobilisation 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 legalblackouts.[40]
..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 to be seen. 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."
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 asLand Girls to aid farmers and theBevin Boys were conscripted to work down the coal mines.
Enormous casualties were expected in bombing raids, sochildren were evacuated from London and other cities en masse to the countryside for compulsorybilleting in households. In the long term this was one of the most profound and longer-lasting social consequences of the whole war for Britain.[42] 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 theslums, but the children got a chance to see animals and the countryside, often for the first time, and experience rural life.[42]
The use of statistical analysis, by a branch of science which has become known asOperational 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 byPatrick Blackett's team on the optimum size and speed of convoys and the introduction ofbomber streams, by theRoyal Air Force to counter the night fighter defences of theKammhuber Line.
In 1935General Ludendorff in the bookDer Totale Krieg gave life to the term "Total War" in the German lexicon.[43] However, being followers of thestab-in-the-back myth, military and Nazi leadership believed that Germany hadn't lost World War I on the battlefield but solely on thehome front.[44]
Therefore,Germany started the war under the concept which was later namedblitzkrieg. Officially, it did not accept that it was in a total war untilJoseph Goebbels'Sportpalast speech of 18 February 1943—in which the crowd was told "Totaler Krieg – Kürzester Krieg" ("Total War – Shortest War”.)[45]
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 armamentsAlbert Speer, economics ministerWalther Funk andRobert Ley, head of theGerman 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 andHans Lammers, the head of theReich 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 GeneralWilhelm 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 andHermann Göring who gave the "total war" radio address from the Sportspalast the next month, on the 10th anniversary of theNazi's "seizure of power".[46]
I ask you: Do you want total war? If necessary, do you want a war more total and radical than anything that we can even imagine today?
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 theOperation Barbarossa. A major strategic defeat in theBattle of Moscow forced Speer to nationalise German war production and eliminate the worst inefficiencies.[47]
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 governingLiberals and the oppositionConservatives. The Conservatives elected as their national leaderArthur Meighen, who had been the cabinet minister responsible for implementingconscription during the First World War, and advocated for conscription again. Prime MinisterW.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.[48] 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".
The Soviet Union (USSR) was acommand 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 theUrals 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.[49]
The Eastern Front of theEuropean Theatre of World War II encompassed the conflict incentral andeastern 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 andcasualties and was notorious for its unprecedented ferocity, destruction, and immense loss of life (seeWorld War II casualties). The fighting involved millions ofGerman, Hungarian, Romanian andSoviet 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 againstHitler's armies or died inPOW camps. Millions of civilians died fromstarvation, exposure, atrocities, and massacres.[50] The Axis lost over 5 million soldiers in the east as well as many thousands of civilians.[51]
During theBattle of Stalingrad, newly builtT-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.[52][dubious –discuss]
The United States underwent an unprecedented mobilisation of national resources for the Second World War, creating amilitary-industrial complex. Although the United States was not in existential danger, the national sense after Pearl Harbor was to use all the nation's resources to defeat Germany and Japan. Most non-essential activities were rationed, prohibited or restrained, and most of the fit unmarried young men were drafted. There was little urgency before 1940, when the collapse of France ended thePhoney 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 withLend-Lease programs to aid the British, and covert aid was passed to the Chinese as well.[53]Americanpublic 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 theEmpire of Japan was instituted to deny its military the raw materials its factories and military forces required to continue its offensive actions in China.
In late 1941, Japan'sArmy-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 includedsurprise attacks on American and British forces in Hong Kong, the Philippines, Malaya, and the U.S. naval base and warships atPearl 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 withFascist Italy; the U.S. found itself fully involved in a secondworld 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.[54]
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.[55]
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 thetheoretical physicists working at theLos Alamos National Laboratory on theManhattan Project, which led to theTrinity nuclear test and thus brought about theAtomic 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 twosuperpowers after the war.[56]
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ActuallyDresden 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.
After the United States entered World War II,Franklin D. Roosevelt declared atCasablanca conference to the other Allies and the press thatunconditional surrender was the objective of the war against the Axis Powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan.[58] Prior to this declaration, the individual regimes of the Axis Powers could have negotiated anarmistice 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-warNuremberg Trials, because the trials appeared to be in conflict with Articles 63 and 64 of theGeneva 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 IIRomanian People's Tribunals. To circumvent this, the Allies argued that the majorwar 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 the1907 Hague Convention overmilitary occupation were not applicable.[59]
Since the end of World War II, no industrial nation has fought such a large, decisive war.[60] 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.[61]
By the end of the 1950s, theideological stand-off of theCold War between theWestern world and theSoviet 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 ofmutually assured destruction (MAD), which determines that a nuclear attack by one superpower would result in a nuclear counter-strike by the other.[62] This would result in hundreds of millions of deaths in a world where, in words widely attributed toNikita Khrushchev, "The living will envy the dead".[63]
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During the Cold War, the twosuperpowers 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 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 theVietnam War and theSoviet invasion of Afghanistan.
The following post-World War II conflicts have been characterized as "total war":
it was a total war and it included three modes of warfare not observed in previous wars since 1945: indiscriminate ballistic missile attacks on cities from both sides, but mainly by Iraq; the significant use of chemical weapons by Iraq; and approximately 520 attacks on third-country oil tankers in the Persian Gulf.
