Total war
Total war is a type of warfare that mobilizes the totality of national resources to sustain war production, blurring the line between military and civilian activities and legitimate attacks on civilian targets as part of a war without restriction as to the combatants, territory or objectives involved.
The term has been defined as "A 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 what later became known as total war as a separate class of warfare. In a total war, the differentiation between combatants and non-combatants diminishes due to the capacity of opposing sides to consider nearly every human, including non-combatants, as resources that are used in the war effort.
Characteristics
Total war is a concept that has been extensively studied by scholars of conflict and war. One of the most notable contributions to this field of research is the work of Stig Förster, who has identified four dimensions of total war: total purposes, total methods, total mobilisation, and total control. Tiziano Peccia has built upon Förster's work by adding a fifth dimension of "total change." Peccia argues that total war not only has a profound impact on the outcome of the conflict but also produces significant changes in the political, cultural, economic, and social realms beyond the end of the conflict. As Peccia puts it, "total war is an earthquake that has the world as its epicenter."The four dimensions of total war identified by Förster are:
1) Total purposes: The aim of continuous growth of the power of the parties involved and hegemonic visions.
2) Total methods: Similar and common methodologies among countries that intend to increase their spheres of influence.
3) Total mobilisation: Inclusion in the conflict of parties not traditionally involved, such as women and children or individuals who are not part of the armed bodies.
4) Total control: Multisectoral centralisation of the powers and orchestration of the activities of the countries in a small circle of dictators or oligarchs, with cross-functional control over education and culture, media/propaganda, economic, and political activities.
Peccia's contribution of "total change" adds to this framework by emphasising the long-term effects of total war on society.
5) Total change: This includes changes in social attitudes, cultural norms, and political structures, as well as economic and technological developments.
In Peccia's view, total war not only transforms the military and political landscape but also has far-reaching and long-time implications for society as a whole.
Actions that may characterise the post-19th century concept of total war include:
- Strategic bombing, as during World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War
- Blockade and besieging of population centres, 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 and Poland during World War II
- Industrial warfare, as with all belligerents in their respective home fronts during World War I and World War II
- The use of civilians and prisoners of war as forced labour for military operations, as with Japan, USSR and Germany's massive use of forced labourers of other nations during World War II
- Giving no quarter, as with Hitler's Commando Order during World War II
Background
In his 24 December 1864 letter to his chief of staff during the American Civil War, Union general William Tecumseh Sherman wrote 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.
United States Air Force General Curtis LeMay updated the concept for the nuclear age. 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".
History
Middle Ages
Written by academics at Eastern Michigan University, the Cengage Advantage Books: World History textbook claims that while total war "is traditionally associated with the two global wars of the twentieth century... it would seem that instances of total war predate the twentieth century." They write:18th and 19th centuries
Europe
In his book, The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know it, David A Bell, a French History professor at Princeton University argues that the French Revolutionary Wars introduced to mainland Europe some of the first concepts of total war, such as mass conscription. He claims that the new republic found itself threatened by a powerful coalition of European nations and used the entire nation's resources in an unprecedented war effort that included levée en masse. By 23 August 1793, 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 mobilised in Western history:File:SavenayDrownings.jpg|thumb|The drownings at Savenay during the War in the Vendée, 1793
File:National Museum in Poznan - Przejście przez Berezynę.JPG|thumb|Napoleon's retreat from Russia in 1812. Napoleon's Grande Armée had lost about half a million men.
During the Russian campaign of 1812 the Russians retreated while destroying infrastructure and agriculture in order to effectively hamper the French and strip them of adequate supplies. In the campaign of 1813, Allied forces in the German theatre alone amounted to nearly one million whilst two years later in the Hundred Days a French decree called for the total mobilisation of some 2.5 million men. During the prolonged Peninsular War from 1808 to 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.
The Franco-Prussian War was fought in breach of the recently signed Geneva Convention of 1864, when "European opinion increasingly expected that civilians and soldiers should be treated humanely in war".
North America
The Sullivan Expedition of 1779 was an example of total warfare. As Native American and Loyalist forces massacred American farmers, killed livestock and burned buildings in remote frontier areas, General George Washington sent General John Sullivan with 4,000 troops to seek "the total destruction and devastation of their settlements" in upstate New York. There was only one small battle as the expedition devastated "14 towns and most flourishing crops of corn." The Native Americans escaped to Canada where the British fed them; they remained there after the war.Sherman's March to the Sea in the American Civil War—from 15 November 1864, through 21 December 1864—is sometimes considered to be an example of total war, for which Sherman used the term hard war. Some historians challenge this designation, as Sherman's campaign assaulted primarily military targets and Sherman ordered his men to spare civilian homes.
South America
Historian Milda Rivarola from Harvard University states that the Paraguayan War was the first total war of the American continent, citing both Paraguay's vision of victory or utter defeat and mobilizing the whole of Paraguayan society, economy and territory.20th century
World War I
Air Warfare
Bombing civilians from the air was adopted as a strategy for the first time in World War I, and a leading advocate of this strategy was Peter Strasser "Leader of Airships". Strasser, who was chief commander of German Imperial Navy Zeppelins during World War I, the main force operating German strategic bombing across Europe and the UK, saw bombing of civilians as well as military targets as an essential element of total war. He argued that causing civilian casualties and damaging domestic infrastructure served both as propaganda and as a means of diverting resources from the front line.Propaganda
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. 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. Even music halls were used as propaganda, with propaganda songs aimed at recruitment.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. This led to the Shell Crisis of 1915 which brought down both the Liberal government and Premiership of H. H. Asquith. He formed a new coalition government dominated by Liberals and appointed David 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.
Carl Schmitt, a supporter of Nazi Germany, wrote that total war meant "total politics"—authoritarian domestic policies that imposed direct control of the press and economy. In Schmitt's view the total state, which directs fully the mobilisation of all social and economic resources to war, is antecedent to total war. Scholars consider that the seeds of this total state concept already existed in the German state of World War I, which exercised full control of the press and other aspects economic and social life as espoused in the statement of state ideology known as the "Ideas of 1914".