Total war

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The mushroom cloud produced by the atomic bombing of the city of Hiroshima during World War II. The bombing was an act of total war.

Total war is warfare that includes any and all civilian-associated resources and infrastructure as legitimate military targets, mobilizes all of the resources of society to fight the war, and gives priority to warfare over non-combatant needs. The American-English Dictionary defines total war as "war that is unrestricted in terms of the weapons used, the territory or combatants involved, or the objectives pursued, especially one in which the laws of war are disregarded."

In the mid-19th century, scholars identified "total war" as a separate class of warfare. In a total war, to an extent inapplicable in less total conflicts, the differentiation between combatants and non-combatants diminishes and sometimes it even vanishes entirely because opposing sides can consider nearly every human resource, even that of non-combatants, to be a part of the war effort.^[1]

Actions that may characterize the post-19th century concept of total war include:

• Strategic bombing, as during World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War (Operations Rolling Thunder and Linebacker II)
• Blockade and sieging of population centers, as with the Allied blockade of Germany and the Siege of Leningrad during the First and Second World Wars
• Scorched earth policy, as with the March to the Sea during the American Civil War and the Japanese "Three Alls Policy" during the Second Sino-Japanese War
• Commerce raiding, tonnage war, and unrestricted submarine warfare, as with privateering, the German U-Boat campaigns of the First and Second World Wars, and the United States submarine campaign against Japan during World War II
• Collective punishment, pacification operations, and reprisals against populations deemed hostile, as with the execution and deportation of suspected Communards following the fall of the 1871 Paris Commune or the German reprisal policy targeting resistance movements, insurgents, and Untermenschen such as in France (e.g. Maillé massacre) and Poland during World War II
• The use of civilians and prisoners of war as forced labor for military operations, as with Japan and Germany's massive use of forced laborers of other nations during World War II (see Slavery in Japan and Forced labor under German rule during World War II)^[2]
• Giving no quarter (i.e. take no prisoners), as with Hitler's Commando Order during World War II.

Etymology[edit]

The phrase can be traced back to the 1935 publication of the World War I memoir of German General Erich Ludendorff, Der totale Krieg ("The total war").^{[citation needed]} Some authors extend the concept back as far as classic work of Carl von Clausewitz, On War, as "absoluter Krieg" (absolute war); however, different authors interpret the relevant passages in diverging ways.^[3] Total war also describes the French "guerre à outrance" during the Franco-Prussian War.^[4][5][6]

In his letter to his Chief of Staff, Union General Henry Halleck on 24 December 1864 described that 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," defending Sherman's March to the Sea, the operation that inflicted widespread destruction of infrastructure in Georgia.^[7]

United States Air Force General Curtis LeMay updated the concept for the nuclear age.^{[citation needed]} In 1949, he first proposed that a total war in the nuclear age would consist of delivering the entire nuclear arsenal in a single overwhelming blow, going as far as "killing a nation".^[8]

Early history[edit]

During the Middle Ages, destruction under the Mongol Empire in the 13th century effectively exemplified total war. The military forces of Genghis Khan slaughtered whole populations and destroyed any city that resisted:

As an aggressor nation, the ancient Mongols, no less than the modern Nazis, practiced total war against an enemy by organizing all available resources, including military personnel, noncombatant workers, intelligence, transport, money, and provisions.^[9]

18th and 19th centuries[edit]

Intertribal warfare[edit]

Author and historian Mark van de Logt wrote: "Although military historians tend to reserve the concept of 'total war' for conflicts between modern industrial nations, the term nevertheless most closely approaches the state of affairs between the Pawnees and the Sioux and Cheyennes. Both sides directed their actions not solely against warrior-combatants but against the people as a whole. Noncombatants were legitimate targets. Indeed, the taking of a scalp of a woman or child was considered honorable because it signified that the scalp taker had dared to enter the very heart of the enemy's territory."^[10]

French and American Revolutionary Wars and Napoleonic Wars[edit]

In The American Revolution, also known as the American Revolutionary War, many basic tactics of Total War were created in a modern form, I.E. Scorched Earth. in 1779, The Sullivan Expedition began, marching through Western Pennsylvania and up through New York, burning Iroquois villages to the ground, leaving nothing behind but smoldering ruin and dead bodies. In the Southern theater of the American Revolutionary War, The British and American Militia did similar campaigns of Extermination, but to their neighbors. Whole towns where depopulated. The British Cavalry led by Banastre Tarleton join the militia in the creation of the inferno called "South Carolina".^{[citation needed]}

The drownings at Savenay during the War in the Vendée, 1793

Napoleon's retreat from Russia in 1812. Napoleon's Grande Armée had lost about half a million men.

= The French Revolutionary Wars introduced to mainland Europe some of the first concepts of total war, such as mass conscription.^[11] The fledgling republic found itself threatened by a powerful coalition of European nations.^{[citation needed]} The only solution, in the eyes of the Jacobin government, was to pour the entire nation's resources into an unprecedented war effort—this was the advent of the levée en masse.^{[citation needed]} The following decree of the National Convention on August 23, 1793 demonstrates the immensity of the French war effort, when 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 mobilized 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 and transport 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.

The wars merged into the Napoleonic Wars of the First French Empire from ca. 1803.^{[citation needed]} Over the coming two decades of almost constant warfare it is 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.^{[citation needed]}

In the Russian campaign of 1812 the Russians resorted to destroying infrastructure and agriculture in their retreat in order to hamper the French and strip them of adequate supplies.^{[citation needed]} 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).^{[citation needed]} 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.^{[citation needed]}

Taiping Rebellion[edit]

A scene of the Taiping Rebellion

The Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864) was one of the deadliest wars in history.^{[12][citation needed]} About 20 million people died, many due to disease and famine.^[13] It followed the secession of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom from the Qing Empire.^[14] Almost every citizen of the Heavenly Kingdom was given military training and conscripted into the army to fight against the Imperial forces.^[14]

American Civil War[edit]

During the American Civil War, Union Army General Philip Sheridan's stripping of the Shenandoah Valley, beginning on September 21, 1864 and continuing for two weeks, was considered "total war".^{[citation needed]} Its purpose was to eliminate food and supplies vital to the South's military operations, as well as to strike a blow at Southern civilian morale.^{[citation needed]} Sheridan took the opportunity when he realized opposing forces had become too weak to resist his army.^[15]

Union Army General William Tecumseh Sherman's 'March to the Sea' in November and December 1864 destroyed the resources required for the South to make war. General Ulysses S. Grant and President Abraham Lincoln initially opposed the plan until Sherman convinced them of its necessity.^[16]

Scholars taking issue with the notion that Sherman was employing "total war" include Noah Andre Trudeau. Trudeau believes that Sherman's goals and methods do not meet the definition of total war and to suggest as much is to "misread Sherman's intentions and to misunderstand the results of what happened".^[17]

20th century[edit]

World War I[edit]

Damage and destruction of civilian buildings in Belgium, 1914

Almost the whole of Europe and the European colonial empires mobilized to wage World War I.^{[citation needed]} Young men were removed from production jobs to serve in military roles, and were replaced on the production line by women.^{[citation needed]} Rationing occurred on the home fronts.^{[citation needed]} Bulgaria went so far as to mobilize a quarter of its population or 800,000 people, a greater share of its population than any other country during the war.^{[citation needed]} One of the features of Total War in Britain was the use of government propaganda posters to divert all attention to the war on the home front.^{[citation needed]} 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.^{[citation needed]} Even the Music Hall was used as propaganda, with propaganda songs aimed at recruitment.^{[citation needed]}

After the failure of the Battle of Neuve Chapelle, the large British offensive in March 1915, the British Commander-in-Chief Field Marshal John French blamed the lack of progress on insufficient and poor-quality artillery shells.^{[citation needed]} This led to the Shell Crisis of 1915 which brought down both the Liberal government and Premiership of H. H. Asquith.^{[citation needed]} He formed a new coalition government dominated by Liberals and appointed David Lloyd George as Minister of Munitions.^{[citation needed]} 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.^{[citation needed]}

As young men left the farms for the front, domestic food production in Britain and Germany fell.^{[citation needed]} In Britain the response was to import more food, which was done despite the German introduction of unrestricted submarine warfare, and to introduce rationing.^{[citation needed]} The Royal Navy's blockade of German ports prevented Germany from importing food and hastened German capitulation by creating a food crisis in Germany.^{[citation needed]}

Founding Ceremony of the Hakkō ichiu Monument, promoting the unification of "the 8 corners of the world under one roof."

World War II[edit]

The Second World War was the quintessential total war of modernity.^{[citation needed]} The level of national mobilization of resources on all sides of the conflict, the battlespace being contested, the scale of the armies, navies, and air forces raised through conscription, the active targeting of non-combatants (and non-combatant property), the general disregard for collateral damage, and the unrestricted aims of the belligerents marked total war on an unprecedented and unsurpassed, multicontinental scale.^{[citation needed]}

Shōwa Japan[edit]

During the first part of the Shōwa era, the government of Imperial Japan launched a string of policies to promote a total war effort against China and occidental powers and increase industrial production. Among these were the National Spiritual Mobilization Movement and the Imperial Rule Assistance Association.^{[citation needed]}

The National Mobilization Law had fifty clauses, which provided for government controls over civilian organizations (including labor unions), nationalization of strategic industries, price controls and rationing, and nationalized the news media.^[18] The laws gave the government the authority to use unlimited budgets to subsidize war production, and to compensate manufacturers for losses caused by war-time mobilization. Eighteen of the fifty articles outlined penalties for violators.^{[citation needed]}

To improve its production, Shōwa Japan used millions of slave labourers^[19] and pressed more than 18 million people in East Asia into forced labor.^[20]

United Kingdom[edit]

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.^{[citation needed]}

Rationing of most goods and services was introduced, not only for consumers but also for manufacturers.^{[citation needed]} This meant that factories manufacturing products that were irrelevant to the war effort had more appropriate tasks imposed.^{[citation needed]} All artificial light was subject to legal blackouts.^{[citation needed]}

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 as Land Girls to aid farmers and the Bevin Boys were conscripted to work down the coal mines.^{[citation needed]}

Enormous 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.^{[citation needed]} This is because it mixed up children with the adults of other classes.^{[citation needed]} 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.^{[citation needed]}

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.^{[citation needed]} It was a very powerful tool but it further dehumanised war particularly when it suggested strategies which were counter intuitive.^{[citation needed]} 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.^{[citation needed]}

Germany[edit]

In contrast, Germany started the war under the concept of Blitzkrieg. Officially, it did not accept that it was in a total war until Joseph Goebbels' Sportpalast speech of 18 February 1943.

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 the Operation Barbarossa.^{[citation needed]} A major strategical defeat in the Battle of Moscow forced Albert Speer, who was appointed as Germany's armament minister in early 1942, to nationalize German war production and eliminate the worst inefficiencies.^[22]

Under Speer's direction a threefold increase in armament production occurred and did not reach its peak until late 1944.^{[citation needed]} 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.^{[citation needed]} It was because the German economy through most of the war was substantially under-mobilized that it was resilient under air attack.^{[citation needed]} Civilian consumption was high during the early years of the war and inventories both in industry and in consumers' possession were high.^{[citation needed]} These helped cushion the economy from the effects of bombing.^{[citation needed]}

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.^{[citation needed]} 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).^{[citation needed]}

Soviet Union[edit]

Three men burying victims of Leningrad's siege, in which about 1 million civilians died.

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.^{[citation needed]} 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.^{[citation needed]} Only those factories which were useful for war production were moved because of the total war commitment of the Soviet government.^{[citation needed]}

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 (see World War II casualties). The fighting involved millions of German, Hungarian, Romanian 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 at most 27 million Soviet citizens died during the war, including at least 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.^[23] The Axis lost over 5 million soldiers in the east as well as many thousands of civilians.^[24]

During the Battle of Stalingrad, 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.

United States[edit]

The United States underwent an unprecedented mobilization of national resources for the Second World War.^{[citation needed]} Conditions in the United States were not as strained as they were in the United Kingdom or as desperate as they were in the Soviet Union, but the United States greatly curtailed nearly all non-essential activities in its prosecution of the Second World War and redirected nearly all available national resources to the conflict, including reaching the point of diminishing returns by late 1944, where the U.S. military was unable to find any more males of the correct military age to draft into service.^{[citation needed]}

The strategists of the U.S. military looked abroad at the storms brewing on the horizon in Europe and Asia, and began quietly making contingency plans as early as the mid-1930s; new weapons and weapons platforms were designed, and made ready. Following the outbreak of war in Europe and the ongoing aggression in Asia, efforts were stepped up significantly.^{[citation needed]} The collapse of France and the airborne aggression directed at Great Britain unsettled the Americans, who had close relations with both nations, and a peacetime draft was instituted, along with Lend-Lease programs to aid the British, and covert aid was passed to the Chinese as well.^{[citation needed]}

American public opinion was still opposed to involvement in the problems of Europe and Asia, however.^{[citation needed]} In 1941, the Soviet Union became the latest nation to be invaded, and the U.S. gave her aid as well.^{[citation needed]} American ships began defending aid convoys to the Allied nations against submarine attacks, and a total trade embargo against the Empire of Japan was instituted to deny its military the raw materials its factories and military forces required to continue its offensive actions in China.^{[citation needed]}

In late 1941, Japan's Army-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.^{[citation needed]} Planning for this action included surprise attacks on American and British forces in Hong Kong, the Philippines, Malaya, and the U.S. naval base and warships at Pearl Harbor.^{[citation needed]} In response to these attacks, the U.K. and U.S. declared war on the Empire of Japan the next day.^{[citation needed]} Nazi Germany declared war on the U.S. a few days later, along with Fascist Italy; the U.S. found itself fully involved in a second world war.^{[citation needed]}

As the United States began to gear up for a major war, information and propaganda efforts were set in motion.^{[citation needed]} 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.^{[citation needed]} 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.^{[citation needed]} Within a few years of the U.S. entry into the Second World War, nearly every man fit for service, between 18 and 30, had been 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.^{[citation needed]}

Previously untouched sections of the nation mobilized for the war effort.^{[citation needed]} Academics became technocrats; home-makers became bomb-makers (massive numbers of women worked in heavy industry during the war); union leaders and businessmen became commanders in the massive armies of production.^{[citation needed]} The great scientific communities of the United States were mobilized as never before, and mathematicians, doctors, engineers, and chemists turned their minds to the problems ahead of them.^{[citation needed]}

By the war's end a multitude of advances had been made in medicine, physics, engineering, and the other sciences.^{[citation needed]} Even the theoretical physicists, whose theories were not believed to have military applications (at the time), were sent far into the Western deserts to work at the Los Alamos National Laboratory on the Manhattan Project that culminated in the Trinity nuclear test and changed the course of history.^{[citation needed]}

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 two superpowers after the war.^[26]

Unconditional surrender[edit]

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.^[28] 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.^{[citation needed]}

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.^{[citation needed]} 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 II Romanian People's Tribunals.^{[citation needed]} 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 did not cover them.^{[citation needed]} Further, the collapse of the Axis regimes created a legal condition of total defeat (debellatio) so the provisions of the 1907 Hague Convention over military occupation were not applicable.^[29]

Postwar era[edit]

Since the end of World War II, no industrial nation has fought such a large, decisive war.^[30] This is likely due to the availability of nuclear weapons, whose destructive power and quick deployment render a full mobilization of a country's resources such as in World War II unnecessary.^[31] Such weapons are developed and maintained with relatively modest peacetime defense budgets.^{[citation needed]}

By the end of the 1950s, the ideological stand-off of the Cold War between the Western World and the Soviet Union had resulted in thousands of nuclear weapons being aimed by each side at the other.^{[citation needed]} Strategically, the equal balance of destructive power possessed by each side situation came to be known as Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), considering that a nuclear attack by one superpower would result in nuclear counter-strike by the other.^[32] 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".^[33]

During the Cold War, the two 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.^{[citation needed]} Instead, the superpowers fought each other through their involvement in proxy wars, military buildups, and diplomatic standoffs.^{[citation needed]}

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 Vietnam War and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.^{[citation needed]}

During the Yugoslav Wars, NATO conducted strikes against the electrical grid in enemy territory using graphite bombs. Some observers^[who?] considered this to be an act of total war, owing to the fact that powerplants supported by the electrical grid were essential to water purification and thus the strike represented a direct attack on civilian resources. NATO claimed that the objective of their strikes was to disrupt military infrastructure and communications. ^[34]

See also[edit]

Notes[edit]

References[edit]

• Baylis, John; Wirtz, James J.; Gray, Colin S., eds. (2012), Strategy in the Contemporary World (4, illustrated ed.), Oxford University Press, p. 55, ISBN 9780199694785 

Further reading[edit]

• Bell, David A. (2007), The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It 
• Broers, Michael. "The Concept of Total War in the Revolutionary – Napoleonic Period." War in History 15.3 (2008): 247–68.
• Craig, Campbell. Glimmer of a new Leviathan: Total war in the realism of Niebuhr, Morgenthau, and Waltz (Columbia University Press, 2004), Intellectual history.
• Förster, Stig, and Jorg Nagler. On the Road to Total War: The American Civil War and the German Wars of Unification, 1861–1871 (Cambridge University Press, 2002).
• Hewitson, Mark. "Princes’ Wars, Wars of the People, or Total War? Mass Armies and the Question of a Military Revolution in Germany, 1792–1815." War in History 20.4 (2013): 452–90.
• Markusen, Eric; Kopf, David (1995), The Holocaust and Strategic Bombing: Genocide and Total War in the Twentieth Century 
• Neely Jr., Mark E., "Was the Civil War a Total War?", Civil War History, 50: 2004 
• Sutherland, Daniel E.; McWhiney, Grady (1998), The Emergence of Total War, US Civil War Campaigns and Commanders Series 
• Walters, John Bennett. Merchant of terror: General Sherman and total war (1973).

External links[edit]

• Israel's 1948 War of Independence as a Total War
• A collection of papers relating to the Sullivan Expidition