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 sustained a war became as much a legitimate target for military action as an army that waged war on its behalf.’ The reason this came about was because it became clear that it was no longer just good enough to have more men than your opponent; you had to out produce him too. This was highlighted by the fact that the although the Confederacy deployed a near equal number of troops in the field as the Union, it could still not compete with the industrialised north since most of the south was still agricultural. Consequently each side attacked the other’s civilian population that was working to feed and arm their armies. This was the first time that the principle of non-combatant immunity had been clearly and obviously been breached. Therefore there was a movement towards a more ‘total war’ as the nineteenth century progressed, and this was linked to the growth and spread of the industrialization of the major powers. I will now turn to the World Wars and consider just how ‘total’ they were.
If one was to look at just the huge increase in the firepower used in the world wars one would jump to the conclusion that they were ‘total’. For example on the first day of the battle of the Somme British artillery fired 1.7 million shells, and at Passchendale on 31st July the British fired 4.2 million shells. New weapons such as gas, flamethrowers and the tank had all emerged by the end of the war, and in order to produce all these the civilian effort ‘back home’ had to be substantially more than previous conflicts. One can also draw this conclusion from the dramatic development growth in numbers of fighters and bombers and the corresponding ordnance in the Second World War. The development of these weapon systems meant that long-range bombers could now target the production lines, and bombing raids on factories and the surrounding areas were designed to cripple plant and crush morale. The, ‘limited dynastic aims,’ of the pre-Napoleonic era, ‘had given way to sweeping territorial aggrandisement and the total destruction of states and peoples.’ The Nazis set out to do this in Poland, the Ukraine, and Russia, with their policy of Lebensraum and the aim of exterminating Jews and Slavs.
Governments were also responsible for contributing to the effects of that the civilian population felt with emergency legislation being passed to nationalise industries, establish new ministries, introduce conscription, to both the armed forces and industries such as mining, and rationing, and enforce such measures as the black out. These were all necessary for a government which was trying to fight a ‘total war’ because it needs to control the economy in order to mobilize all its resources to survive. During both wars the ‘war industries’ expanded substantially, however had the industrial revolution not occurred along with the accompanying population shift from rural to urban areas there would not have been the manpower to build and then work in the new factories. Perhaps one of the reasons that contributed to France’s poor showing in both wars was the fact until 1948 less than 50% of her population lived in urban areas so she was never able to mobilize her population completely and so she would not have been able to have fought a ‘total war’. The same principle could apply to all states before the industrial revolution, so was ‘total war’ only possible in the industrial age, and it took until the twentieth century for the concept to be fully realised.
So far we have seen that society in the second half of the nineteenth century and the twentieth century have been more involved and affected to a greater extent by war as war has become more and more industrialised. However if we go back to the definition of ‘total war’ as being when the state mobilizes its whole population and resources in order to win the war, then we must ask ourselves if any state in the twentieth century did actually mobilize its whole population and all of its resources. If none did in the twentieth century, when it was for the first time possible for a state to do that, then it certainly would not be possible for the concept of ‘total war’ to be applied to any war earlier than the twentieth century. In 1943 Churchill addressed United States’ Congress and said, ‘modern war is total.’ This is a misleading assumption and it is this point that is key in determining whether the World Wars were ‘total’. A modern war can be defined as one which is fought with the contemporary fruits of, ‘industrialization and technological innovation.’ Hence ‘total war’ does not have to be and is not always modern war, and modern war does not have to be and is not always total war. For a ‘total war’ to be modern it must be fought with the most modern and up-to-date weapon technology, but for a modern war to ‘total’ the resources of the combatant states must be fully mobilized. Consequently if two states go to war with each other and one is less economically advanced than the other, the less advanced state will have to make a greater effort to mobilize its resources to reach the level of the more economically advanced state. Therefore, “‘total war’ is more likely to be exercised by the less modern state,” while, “the more advanced state will engage in a war that is certainly modern but possibly not total.” An example of this would be the more advanced United States against the less advanced Japan in the Second World War. From this we can see that in the two World Wars some states would have been waging a ‘total war’ and others a modern war, but the societies that were involved in modern war would still have felt the effects of war and it is this that we now turn to when examining the Hundred Years’ War and war in the seventeenth century.
The effects of medieval warfare on society were somewhat to different to the effects of industrial warfare on nineteenth and twentieth century warfare because generally war was less destructive. Those not directly involved in the war, being those who were not in the locality of the fighting, were not affected as much as say a Londoner during the Blitz where the fighting was carried to the civilian population. However those that were in the locality of the fighting did experience several effects of the war. Non-combatants were deliberately targeted by enemy forces because, ‘it seemed easier, more profitable and less dangerous to bring the enemy to his knees by means of pressure brought upon his non-combatant population than to seek him out and defeat him in a battle, thereby risking defeat.’ If the enemy used this tactic then the civilian population would capitulate very rapidly and call on their rulers to surrender. In medieval warfare it was the towns that held the key to securing victory, but instead of attacking the towns directly it was the supplies that were targeted, especially the countryside on which the towns depended upon for their food. Hence mills, barns, fields of crops, orchards and vineyards were all attacked and destroyed at little cost to the offensive forces, and it was the civilian population of the towns and the peasants, whose livelihoods were destroyed, who suffered the most. The English also employed the so-called tactic of chevauchée which was a, ‘campaign of destruction, pillage and chaos,’ carried out in order to try to win over the French population to English rule. Towns and villages were pillaged, looted and destroyed and the effect on the civilians who experienced this was profound. In order to protect them from attacks towns often built their own defences and in the fourteenth century the town of Rouen spent a quarter of its municipal budget on building and maintaining these defences. However this was not ‘total war’ because as we have just seen Rouen did not put all of its resources towards its defence and war effort. In the war in general the populations and resources of England and France were certainly never mobilised completely because firstly there simply was not the means to do so, and secondly the scale of the battles, the numbers involved, and the length of the fighting did not call for an all out mobilization of resources, so there was no need for ‘total war’.
The warfare of the seventeenth century was not all that different from that of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and consequently the extent to which wars were ‘total’ remained at about the same level. The use of gunpowder weapons was more widespread but they were still quite primitive and so their effectiveness was poor. This meant that death rates on the battlefield were still relatively low and the need for an endless stream of bodies to fill the front line did not exist and so there was no demand for mass conscription. Again war had not industrialised so there was no need to mobilise the whole population of a state to work for a war that small in numbers of combatants and that was still localised. However what did change was the way in which war was localised with the huge increase in the use of siege warfare. During a siege the besieged town would have to mobilize all its resources in order to survive because there was no way of bringing in other resources to help relieve the situation. All the food that there was would have to rationed and the non-combatants were drafted in to help the garrison with such tasks as trench digging but more often they pushed into the front line to assist physically with the defence and be exposed to cannon and mortar fire. Once the rations had been used the civilians also had to endure starvation with the troops of the garrison. From this we can see that the civilian population of a besieged town was quite literally mobilized to defend their town from the besiegers. This could be argued to be localised ‘total war’ because the town did mobilize all of its resources for the war effort. The besieging army also had a profound effect on the outlying areas of the besieged town because peasants were conscripted by them to do laborious tasks, such as trench digging, and the local food supply was severely ‘dented’ by the army stationed there. However, war on the bigger scale during the seventeenth century was not ‘total’ because a state did not mobilize all of its resources when it went to war. Even in the English Civil War not all the population was mobilized and an English peasant, ‘when warned that the Battle of Marston Moor was about to be fought over his plot, was surprised to learn that the king and parliament had fallen out.’
From what we have seen the concept of ‘total war’ cannot be usefully applied to any war earlier than the twentieth century, apart from localised siege warfare, because the states and combatants involved did not mobilize their whole populations and resources in order to wage war. The reason for this was that there simply was not the need, or the means, for a huge total mobilization because the wars were fought on a much smaller scale with smaller numbers fighting on a relatively small battlefield. It was only from nineteenth century onwards that wars started becoming ‘more total’ as the effects of the industrial revolution were transferred to the theatre of war. This meant larger armies, with more powerful weapons in all respects, and consequently a higher death rate. Therefore the demand for more soldiers and more arms to equip the soldiers increased. At the same time the significance and scale of naval and, eventually, air warfare was increasing exponentially. These demands all needed to be catered for, and in response the state governments went about conscripting people to the armed forces and in to the factories. However the notion that because the two major wars of the twentieth century have been termed ‘world wars’ everyone assumes that must mean ‘total war’ because of the global scale. This is not the case since even the Second World War, was not fought on all continents, and the majority of the First World War was fought in Europe. Finally one can argue that the emergence of ‘total war’ was just a natural progression of warfare, and that until warfare had industrialised ‘total war’ would not, and did not need to, be possible.
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