Total war

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 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.

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) 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 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 so called 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 military. Because wars were no longer local affairs, soldiers had to be deployed globally. Additionally, a navy could not be built overnight, and it had to be prepared for warfare. Standing armies and strong navies were the only way to ensure victories or prevent defeats before the economy could be mobilized.

The final consequence of total war eventually became, ironically, an end to war between industrialized nations. After World War II, industrialized nations' ability to wage war between each other became terribly destructive, and at the end of the 1950s, resulted in the development of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction). With nuclear weapons, the conclusion of total war became something that instead of taking years, such as in World War I, would instead take hours. Essentially, the consequences of total war became so terrible for both sides in the conflict that no clear economic winner could emerge. The economic impetus for open war directly between industrialized nations had ended.

Instead of wars fought directly between world powers, wars between industrialized nations were fought by proxy over national prestige, tactical strategic advantage or colonial and neocolonial resources. Examples include the US war in Vietnam, the Six Day War, and the Soviet War in Afghanistan.

Examples of Total Warfare Strategies

Punic Wars

Punic Wars. During the Punic Wars, Rome and Carthage fought with navies and armies across several theatres. In the end, Rome destroyed the city-state of Carthage, and destroying 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

World War I. Almost the whole of Europe mobilized to conduct the war. Young men were removed from production jobs, and were replaced by women. Rationing occurred on the home fronts.

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 lead the Shell Crisis of 1915 which bought 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.

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. Forign 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

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations by or about Total war.

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)

"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?" Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels 18 February 1943, see Sportpalast speech for full text.

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)