Total war

Total war is a military conflict in which the warring sides use all available resources to destroy the enemy's ability to wage war. In contrast to limited war, combatants in total war mobilize their civilian as well as military assets and view the enemy's civilians, industrial facilities, and infrastructure as targets. While armies had been using the practice for centuries, it became the primary strategy for warfare in the nineteenth century and reached its peak in the twentieth century. With the invention of nuclear weapons, the idea of total war was viewed as outdated as using those weapons would cause such catastrophic damage it would negate any advantage of victory.

Early History

One of the first recorded examples of total war was the Peloponnesian War, fought between the Greek city-states of Athens and Sparta. Before the conflict, which lasted from 431 to 404 B.C.E., warfare in ancient Greece was mostly a formalized practice confined to the battlefield. During the Peloponnesian War, both city-states devoted their economic and societal resources to destroying the other, committing atrocities on a large scale and attempting to cripple their rival's ability to fight. The resulting war devastated the Greek peninsula, causing what the historian Thucydides called "sufferings without precedent."

The French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are considered by some historians to be the first example of modern total warfare. As Napoleon led the armies of France against the other powers of Europe, the country instituted a policy called levée en masse, requiring the entire French society to take part in the war effort. Young men of fighting age were conscripted into military service, older men were expected to forge weapons, and women were called on to make clothes and tents for soldiers and work in hospitals.

Shortly after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Prussian general and military strategist Carl von Clausewitz developed the term absolute war to describe the concept of forcing the enemy into surrender by decisive military tactics. The term total war was coined in the 1930s by German general Erich Ludendorff who believed wars were a battle for the survival of the nation, and that victory needed to be achieved at all costs. Ludendorff felt that winning a war required all of society to mobilize behind the effort and destroying both the enemy's army and people were necessary tactics.

Overview

One of the first military commanders to consciously use the tactic of total war as a strategy was General William Sherman during the American Civil War. In the waning days of the conflict, Sherman and his army of Union soldiers advanced through the South, capturing Atlanta in September of 1864. As an important industrial and transportation center for the Confederacy, the city's fall was a symbolic blow to the South. Rather than just occupy Atlanta, Sherman ordered his men to burn the city's business district. In November of 1864, Sherman began his "March to the Sea," looting and destroying farms and houses in the countryside as he closed in on Savannah, Georgia. His goal was not just to destroy the enemy's supply lines, but also to cripple the morale of Southerners and force them to demand an end to the war.

By the twentieth century, the concept of total war became an accepted strategy for warfare. The combatants of World War I poured much of their economic and civilian resources into fighting the war. Britain began a large-scale propaganda campaign in an attempt to influence young men to enlist in the army and for civilians to contribute to the war effort. When the United States entered the war in 1917, it instituted a military draft, conscripting almost three million men into the armed forces. The British navy organized a blockade of German ports, in an effort to cut off food supplies to the German people. Germany retaliated by attacking civilian merchant ships in the North Atlantic.

World War II saw an even greater use of the total war strategy. As in World War I, propaganda efforts and military drafts were common in the warring countries. German leader Adolf Hitler ordered his air force to begin a massive bombing campaign on London, attacking the city for months in 1940 and 1941. His belief was that the bombing would terrorize the British people into surrendering. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Hitler employed similar tactics of intimidation and destruction, referring to the attack as a "war of annihilation."

The bombing of London failed to have the impact Hitler desired. It instead strengthened the resolve of the British. In 1942, Britain answered back with its own saturation bombing campaign against Germany. Three years later, Allied forces firebombed the German city of Dresden, a cultural hub with little military value, in an effort to break the German spirit and force an early surrender. In August of 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing between one hundred thousand and two hundred thousand people and compelling Japan to surrender.

It was the invention of these nuclear weapons that reshaped the thinking of total war as a military strategy. There were already calls to end the practice after the destruction of World War I, but the millions of civilian deaths and wide-scale devastation of World War II ushered in a change of philosophy. Total war during the nuclear age would not only result in the complete destruction of an entire nation, but also could lead to a disruption of human civilization. Conflicts fought after World War II were based on the idea of limited war. This concept involves warfare that aims to achieve specific goals through restrained use of military power and attempts to minimize civilian casualties. Examples of this type of warfare are the Korean War of the 1950s and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the early twenty-first century.

Bibliography

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Bertram, Ian. "The Return of Limited War." Real Clear Defense, 13 Sept. 2016, www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2016/09/13/the‗return‗of‗limited‗war‗110053.html. Accessed 3 Nov. 2016.

Black, Jeremy. The Age of Total War, 1860–1945. Rowman & Littlefield, 2006.

Grimsley, Mark, and Clifford J. Rogers, editors. Civilians in the Path of War. U of Nebraska P, 2002.

Honig, Jan Willem. "The Idea of Total War: From Clausewitz to Ludendorff." National Institute for Defense Studies, www.nids.go.jp/english/event/forum/pdf/2011/08.pdf. Accessed 3 Nov. 2016.

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