Total war

Abstract

This article reviews the five volume series, published by Cambridge University Press, on the history of total war from the American Civil War and Wars of German Unification to World War II. The discussion focuses on two questions: how to define total war; and is total war a useful conceptual tool for understanding warfare during this period? Although the editors were unable to come up with a definition of total war, they did identify elements or tendencies that together contributed to the growing totalization of war during the nineteenth and especially twentieth centuries. Regarding the second question, the editors suggest that total war is best thought of as an ideal type, one to which reality can approach but never reach. If this use of total war facilitates comparison between wars (and different aspects of one war) by providing a common standard, it leaves open the question of how to undertake such a comparison.

Key words:

• Historiography
• Total War
• World Wars

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Andrew Barros, Peter Jackson and Martin Thomas for commenting on earlier drafts of the article.

Notes

¹Stig Förster and Jörg Nagler (eds.), On the Road to Total War: The American Civil War and the German Wars of Unification, 1861 – 1871 (Cambridge: CUP 1997); Manfred F. Boemke, Roger Chickering and Stig Förster, (eds.), Anticipating Total War: The German and American Experiences, 1871 – 1914 (Cambridge: CUP 1999); Roger Chickering and Stig Förster (eds.), Great War, Total War: Combat and Mobilization on the Western Front, 1914 – 1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000); Roger Chickering and Stig Förster (eds.), The Shadows of Total War: Europe, East Asia, and the United States, 1919 – 1939 (Cambridge: CUP 2003); and Roger Chickering, Stig Förster and Bernd Grenier (eds.), A World at Total War: Global Conflict and the Politics of Destruction, 1937 – 1945 (Cambridge: CUP 2005). Each is referred to in the text under its year of publication.

²The search was undertaken in ABC Clio: Historical Abstracts.

³Among the many studies, see John Horne, ‘War and Conflict in Contemporary History, 1914 – 2004’, Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History 3 (2004), 347 – 62; Frédéric Rousseau (ed.), Guerres, paix et sociétés 1911 – 1946 (Paris: Atlande 2004); Bruno Thoβ and Hans-Erich Volkmann (eds.), Erster Weltkrieg Zweiter Weltkrieg. Ein Vergleich: Krieg, Kriegserlebnis, Kriegserfahrung in Deutschland (Paderborn: Schöningh 2002); Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau et al. (eds.), Violence de guerre: approches comparées des deux conflits mondiaux (Brussels: Editions Complexe 2002); and Omer Bartov, Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity (Oxford: OUP 2000).

⁴Maureen Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I (Cambridge: CUP 2004).

⁵Jay Winter, Dreams of Peace and Freedom: Utopian Moments in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale UP 2007). I would like to thank Andrew Barros for drawing my attention to this reference.

⁶J. Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Rise and Fall of the Nazi Germany Economy (London: Allen Lane 2006), 550.

⁷One of the editors, Stig Förster, repeated the call for more research in a separate volume. See his ‘Einführende Bemerkungen’, Thoβ and Volkmann, Erster Weltkrieg Zweiter Weltkrieg, 36.

⁸For the nature of the conflict, see the chapters by Richard E. Berenger, Hans L. Trefousse, Herman H. Hattaway, Jörg Nagler, Michael Fellman and Redi Mitchell.

⁹Also see Strachan's essay in volume four on the inter-war period (2003), 35 – 54.

¹⁰A related volume, edited by Stig Förster, looks at the reaction of various national military organizations during the inter-war period to the prospect of a future war that, it was widely assumed, would be total in nature. See Förster (ed.), An der Schwelle zum Totalen Krieg: Die militärische Debatte über den Krieg der Zukunft 1919 – 1939 (Paderborn: Schöningh 2002).

¹¹Examples for the pre-1914 volume include the contributions of Bruce White, Jean Quataert, Alfred Kelly and Raimund Lammersdorf; for the inter-war volume examples include the contributions by Hartmut Lehmann, Bernd Greiner, Markus Pöhlmann and Benedikt Stuchtey.

¹²Stephen Broadberry and Mark Harrison, ‘The Economics of World War I: An Overview’, Broadberry and Harrison (eds.), The Economics of World War I (Cambridge: CUP 2005), 36. Also see the chapters by Keith Grieves and Elisabeth Glaser in Chickering and Förster (eds.), Great War, Total War; and the chapters by Mark Harrison and by Stephen Broadberry and Peter Howlett in Chickering, Förster and Greiner, A World at Total War.

¹³See the comments in John Horne, ‘Introduction: Mobilizing for “Total War”, 1914 – 1918’, Horne (ed.), State, Society, and Mobilization in Europe during the First World War (Cambridge: CUP 1997), 2, 1 – 17.

It has been argued that during the two world wars of this century democratic regimes were better able than their authoritarian counterparts to mobilize national resources, partly because they enjoyed greater legitimacy and partly because they succeeded in finding a sustainable balance between military and civilian needs. This argument, however, arguably downplays the important financial and economic advantages that the victors in World Wars I and II enjoyed. See Jay M. Winter, ‘Some Paradoxes of the First World War’, in Richard Wall and Jay M. Winter (eds.), The Upheaval of War: Family, Work and Welfare in Europe, 1914 – 1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988), 35 – 41; Jay M. Winter and Jean-Louis Robert (eds.), Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin 1914 – 1919 (Cambridge: CUP 1997), 3 – 24; and Antoine Prost and Jay Winter, Penser la Grande Guerre: Un essai d'historiographie (Paris: Seuil 2004), 155 – 9.

¹⁴On the growth of wartime state surveillance, see Peter Holquist, ‘“Information is the Alpha and Omega of Our Work”: Bolshevik Surveillance in its Pan-European Context’, Journal of Modern History 69/3 (1997), 415 – 50.

¹⁵See Jean H. Quataert's chapter in Förster and Nagler, On the Road to Total War as well as the chapters of Quataert, David I. MacLeod, Derek S. Linton and Thomas Rohkrämer in Boemeke, Chickering and Förster, Anticipating Total War. For an insightful case-study of bottom-up mobilization in support of expansion by military force, see Louise Young, Japan's Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press 1998).

¹⁶For Nazi Germany, see the chapter by Stig Förster and Myriam Gessler in Chickering, Förster and Greiner, A World at Total War. For Imperial Japan see the chapter by Louise Young in ibid.

¹⁷See the chapter by Gerhard Weinberg in Chickering, Förster and Greiner, A World at Total War; and, more generally, Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II (Cambridge: CUP 1994).

¹⁸The literature on strategic bombing in World War II is massive, but a good starting point is Tami Davis Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare: The Evolution of British and American Ideas about Strategic Bombing, 1914 – 1945 (Princeton UP, 2002), esp. 214 – 88. Also see Overy's chapter in Förster and Greiner, A World at Total War.

¹⁹Although figures vary for total deaths in World War II, there appears to be no doubt that civilian deaths outnumbered those of the military. Variations in the figures are largely due to the difficulties – and hence disagreements – in calculating the total figure for Soviet deaths, which are estimated to lie somewhere between 27 and 43 million. For Soviet figures, see Michael Haynes, ‘Counting Soviet Deaths in the Great Patriotic War’, Europe-Asia Studies 55/2 (2003), 303 – 9; and Mark Harrison, ‘Counting Soviet Deaths in the Great Patriotic War: Comment’, Europe-Asia Studies 55/6 (2003), 939 – 44.

²⁰Förster, ‘Einführende Bermerkungen’, Thoβ and Volkmann, Erster Weltkrieg Zweiter Weltkrieg, 35.

²¹See, for example, John U. Nef, La route de la guerre totale: essai sur les relations entre la guerre et le progrès humain (Paris: A. Colin 1949); Raymond Aron, Les guerres en chaîne (Paris: Gallimard 1951); Ian F.W. Beckett, ‘Total War’, Clive Emsley et al., (eds.), War, Peace and Social Change in Twentieth-Century Europe (Milton Keynes, UK: Open UP 1989), 26 – 44; and John Horne, ‘Civilian populations and wartime violence: towards an historical analysis’, International Social Science Journal 54/4 (2002), 483 – 90.

Also see Stig Förster's list in ‘Der totale Krieg, konzeptionnelle Überlegungen für einen historischen Strukturvergleich der Epoche von 1861 bis 1945’, Rüdiger Voigt (ed.), Krieg – Instrument der Politik. Bewaffnete Konflikte im Übergang vom 20. zum 21. Jahrhundert (Baden-Baden: Nomis 2002), 61 – 2.

²²Howard, ‘Total War: Some Concluding Remarks’, Chickering, Förster and Greiner, A World at Total War, 375 – 83.

²³Aron, Les guerres en chaîne, 44.

²⁴Jeffrey Legro, Cooperation under Fire: Anglo-German Restraint during World War II (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP 1995).

²⁵Förster and Gessler, ‘The Ultimate Horror: Reflections on Total war and Genocide’, Chickering, Förster and Greiner, A World at Total War, 68.

²⁶For Nazism, war and the Holocaust, see Richard Bessel, Nazism and War (New York: Modern Library 2004); Omer Bartov, ‘Defining Enemies, Making Victims: Germans, Jews, and the Holocaust’, American Historical Review 103/3 (1998), 771 – 816; and esp., Mark Mazower, ‘Violence and the State in the Twentieth Century’, American Historical Review 107/4 (2002), 1158 – 78.

²⁷Strachan, ‘Total War: The Conduct of War 1939 – 1945’, Chickering, Förster and Greiner, A World at Total War, 45.

²⁸For recent research, see Christian Hartmann, Johannes Hürter and Ulrike Jureit (eds.), Verbrechen der Wehrmacht: Bilanz einer Debatte (München: Beck, 2005); and Christopher R. Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 – March 1942 (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press 2004).

²⁹Studies that directly or indirectly address these questions include Catherine Merridale, Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939 – 1945 (New York: Metropolitan Books 2006); Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia's Continuum, of Crisis, 1914 – 1921 (Cambridge, MA: Havard UP 2002); and Richard J. Overy, Russia's War (New York: Penguin 1998).

³⁰For a brilliant study of the link between revolution and war, admittedly in the case of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, see MacGregor Knox, ‘Conquest, Foreign and Domestic, in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany’, Journal of Modern History 56/1 (1981), 1 – 57.

³¹Young, ‘Ideologies of Difference and the Turn to Atrocity: Japan's War on China’, Chickering, Förster and Greiner, A World at Total War, 333.

³²John W. Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986).

³³On this question, see Stig Förster, ‘Der deutsche Generalstab und die Illusion des kurzen Krieges, 1871 – 1914. Metakritik eines Mythos’, Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen 54 (1995), 61 – 98; and idem, ‘Im Reich des Absurden: Die Ursachen des Ersten Weltkrieges’, Bernd Wegner (ed.), Wie Kriege entstehen: Zum historischen Hintergrund von Staatenkonflikten (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2000), 211 – 52.

³⁴Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin 2005), 22. Also see Thomas Rohkrämer's comments in his chapter in Boemeke, Chickering and Förster, Anticipating Total War, 189 – 91.

But see Mazower's reservations in ‘Violence and the State in the Twentieth Century’, 1158 – 78.

In his latest book, Niall Ferguson identifies three big causes for the crescendo of war and violence in the twentieth century: the prominence of ethnicity (or race), the collapse of empires, and economic upheaval. See his The War of the World: Twentieth Conflict and the Descent of the West (New York: Penguin 2006).

³⁵The best account of the ideological nature of the 1917 – 19 period remains Arno J. Mayer, Political Origins of the New Democracy, 1917 – 1918 (New Haven, CT: Yale UP 1959: and Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counterrevolution at Versailles, 1918 – 1919 (New York: Knopf 1967).

³⁶This is not to dismiss arguments concerning the continuity of war aims between the two world wars. Long ago, Hans Gatzke and Fritz Fischer both made the case for continuity in the case of Germany. But if racial factors were not absent from German war aims during 1914 – 18, they did not predominant as they did in 1939 – 45. See Gatzke, Germany's Drive to the West (Drang nach Westen): A Study of Germany's Western Aims during the First World War (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press 1950); and Fritz Fischer, Griff nach der Weltmacht: die Kriegszielpolitik des kaiserlichen Deutchlands 1914 – 18 (Düsseldorf: Droste 1962).

³⁷For Soviet spending, see Mark Harrison, ‘The Soviet Union: The Defeated Victor’, in Harrison (ed.), The Economics of World War II: Six Great Powers in International Comparison (Cambridge: CUP 1998), 287.

³⁸For Ludendorff, see Chickering's chapter in Chickering and Förster, The Shadows of Total War, 151 – 78. Also see Thomas Lindemann, ‘Ludendorff et la guerre totale. Une approche “percepetuelle”’, in François Géré and Thierry Widemann (eds.), La Guerre totale (Paris: Economica 2001), 23 – 37.

For the gap between totalitarian pretensions and reality, see the work of Sheila Fitzpatrick on the Soviet Union under Stalin, especially Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (Oxford: OUP 1999); and Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (Oxford: OUP 1994).

³⁹Also see Stig Förster' comment in ‘Introduction’, Chickering and Förster, Great War, Total War, 9.

⁴⁰Jean-Yves Guiomar, L'Invention de la guerre totale (Paris: Félin 2004), 12 – 20, 27 – 153; and David Bell, ‘Les origines culturelles de la guerre absolue 1750 – 1815’, Jean-Clément Martin (ed.), La Révolution à l'œuvre : Perspectives actuelles dans l'histoire de la Révolution française (Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2005), 237 – 8.

⁴¹Volker Berghahn stresses the determination of those whom he calls ‘men of violence’ to use means of destruction during the first half of the twentieth century. See his Europe in the Era of the Two World Wars: From Militarism and Genocide to Civil Society (Princeton UP 2006).

⁴²The following two paragraphs owe a great deal to Hew Strachan, ‘Essay and Reflection: On Total War and Modern War’, International History Review 22/2 (2000), 341 – 70.

⁴³Roger Chickering, ‘Militärgeschichte als Totalgeschichte im Zeitalter des totalen Krieges’, in Thomas Kühne and Benjamin Ziemann (eds.), Was its Militärgeschichte? (Paderborn: Schöningh 2000), 308.

⁴⁴Chickering, ‘Militärgeschichte als Totalgeschichte im Zeitalter des totalen Krieges’, 307. For this reason, Chickering prefers the term ‘extensity’ (Extensität) which refers to the increasing impact of war on civilian populations.