Can the concept of 'total war' be usefully applied to any war earlier than the twentieth century?

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Comparative Themes: War and Society

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2. Can the concept of ‘total war’ be usefully applied to any war earlier than the twentieth century?

   The concept of ‘total war’ immediately brings to mind the First and Second World Wars since they are said to have ‘touched’ the lives of everyone in all the states that were involved. The experience of the troops on the Western Front and the Blitz bombing are seen as stereotypical examples of ‘total war’ since nothing like that had been experienced before then. These are just sweeping generalisations, and in order to discover if the concept of ‘total war’ can be usefully applied to any war earlier than, or in fact during, the twentieth century it is necessary to determine what the concept of ‘total war’ actually is. ‘Total war’ can be defined as one in which, ‘the whole population and all the resources of the combatants are committed to complete victory,’ and this means that the whole population become viable military targets. If one is to adhere strictly to this definition of a ‘total war’ then one can argue that a state would have to devote one hundred per cent of its resources to the war, and if anything less than that was committed then that state would not be involved in a ‘total war’. However for a state to commit all of its resources and efforts to a war would be an incredible achievement, and it would be done at the expense of everything else. Therefore the number of times when one can say that all the resources of a state have been committed to a war effort are few and far between. An example of a side using ‘total war’ could be the kamikaze attacks of Japanese pilots in the Second World War when they were seen to be making use of all available resources, or in the nineteenth century when a Zulu tribe or North American Indian tribe had to use all their resources against the British and Americans respectively to try to survive. Furthermore it has been argued that the United States did not fight a ‘total war’ in either of the World Wars because it was able to fight without the need to fully mobilize all of its resources because its resources were greater than those of Japan or Germany. Hence if the two World Wars have been the conflicts that have been closest to being ‘total wars’ but they actually never were completely ‘total’, how can any war before them come under the term ‘total war’, since the scale of those wars had not been seen previously? Here it is important not to get carried away with the minute details of the definition of ‘total war’, and we must realise that to compare the twentieth century conflicts with what had gone before we must look at how wars affected the societies that they involved, since the general understanding of ‘total war’ is one which affects everyone in the combatants’ societies. In order to do this I shall first discuss the concept of ‘total war’, how it developed and show that it does have profound effects on society. Then I shall compare the effects of twentieth century ‘total war’ with the Hundred Years War and war in the seventeenth century, and try to show that, although the scale was much reduced, where conflicts occurred the effects felt by the local populations were much the same.        

   The first time that the concept of a ‘total war’ emerged was in Napoleon’s Berlin Decree in 1806 in which he declared Britain as under blockade, all subjects should be arrested, and all trade and post links were to be prohibited. The effects of this declaration were never profound but the principle of declaring war on a state’s subjects was established. Further examples of the development of ‘total war’ emerged during the wars and conflicts of the nineteenth century. Stemming from Napoleon’s declaration were his mass armies of French citizens assembled with the help of the introduction of universal male conscription, and this is shows an attempt to start utilizing the total resources that were available. Prussia used conscription to a wide extent in the wars of German unification and, ‘states were rapidly accepting the national birth-rate as an index of military power.’ With the growth of the railways came a practical method of mobilizing a large army, transporting it to the battle and then sustaining it in the field with reinforcements and supplies. Industrialization also produced a revolution in the methods of fighting used in all theatre of war, with the increase in power, rate of fire, range and accuracy of artillery and guns in the field, battleships, submarines and, eventually, aircraft carriers transforming war at sea, and then the advent of airborne warfare. This dramatic ‘revolution’ in the way wars and battles were fought was bound to have an effect on the societies for which they were fighting. Railways enabled larger armies to be raised, and they had to be formed somehow so conscription was brought in on a more frequent scale. The increase in army size meant an increase in the demand for weapons and consequently a demand for more workers to make the weapons, and construct the ships and aircraft too. Military armament manufacturing had never been carried out on such a large scale before so more and more people became involved somewhere in the process. Therefore one could argue that the process of society becoming more involved with supporting a states armed force, either as a conscripted serving member or as a worker, was a natural progression as warfare was industrialised and the demand for ‘people’ increased.

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   Focusing on specific wars, the manpower problems that Britain experienced in the First World War were similar to those experienced during the Crimean War and so the ‘Kitchener Wants You!’ campaign may not have been so novel. It is generally agreed that the American Civil War was groundbreaking in many aspects such as the use of armoured trains, the first battle between armoured warships, the successful use of anti-shipping mines and torpedoes, and the first extensive use of the telegraph to communicate between commanders and troops. However it was also the first clearly recognised time that, ‘a society that ...

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