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Total war

Total war is a type of 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.

Ruins of Warsaw's Napoleon Square in the aftermath of World War II

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."[1]

In the mid-19th century, scholars identified 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.[2]

Characteristics

According to an analysis by Tiziano Peccia of Stig Förster's works, total war is characterized on four dimensions:

  1. Total purposes (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 mobilization (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 centralization of the powers and orchestration of the activities of the countries in a small circle of dictators or oligarchs, with crossfunctional control over education and culture, media / propaganda, economic and political activities).

Tiziano Peccia adds a fifth dimension to Förster's: "total change". After a total war, the analysis shows that the political, cultural, economic and social assets persist beyond the end of the conflict ("total war is an earthquake that has the world as its epicenter").[3][4]

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

Background

The phrase "total war" can be traced back to the 1935 publication of German general Erich Ludendorff's World War I memoir, Der totale Krieg ("The total war"). Some authors extend the concept back as far as classic work of Carl von Clausewitz, On War, as "absoluter Krieg" (absolute war), even-though he did not use the term; others interpret Clausewitz differently.[6] Total war also describes the French "guerre à outrance" during the Franco-Prussian War.[7][8][9]

In his December 24, 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.[10]

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".[11]

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:

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, non-combatant workers, intelligence, transport, money, and provisions.[12]

18th and 19th centuries

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.[13][14][15]

American Civil War

Sherman's March to the Sea in the American Civil War – from November 15, 1864, through December 21, 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.[16]

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.[17][18] 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 (mass conscription). By August 23, 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 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 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.

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 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). 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.[19]

20th century

World War I

 
Damage and destruction of civilian buildings in Belgium, 1914
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 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. 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.[citation needed]

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 mobilization 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".[20]

Rationing

As young men left the farms for the front, domestic food production in Britain and Germany fell. In Britain, the response was to import more food, which was done despite the German introduction of unrestricted submarine warfare, and to introduce rationing. The Royal Navy's blockade of German ports prevented Germany from importing food and hastened German capitulation by creating a food crisis in Germany.[21]

Almost the whole of Europe and some of the European colonial empires mobilized soldiers. Rationing occurred on the home fronts. 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.

World War II

The Second World War was the quintessential total war of modernity.[22] 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.[23]

Shōwa Japan
 
Founding ceremony of the Hakkō ichiu Monument, promoting the unification of "the 8 corners of the world under one roof"

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.[24] 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 laborers[25] and pressed more than 18 million people in East Asia into forced labor.[26]

United Kingdom

Before the onset of the Second World War, Great Britain 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. Rationing of most goods and services was introduced, not only for consumers but also for manufacturers. This meant that factories manufacturing products that were irrelevant to the war effort had more appropriate tasks imposed. All artificial light was subject to legal blackouts.[27]

..There is another more obvious difference from 1914. The whole of the warring nations are engaged, not only soldiers, but the entire population, men, women and children. The fronts are everywhere to be seen. The trenches are dug in the towns and streets. Every village is fortified. Every road is barred. The front line runs through the factories. The workmen are soldiers with different weapons but the same courage."

— Winston Churchill on the radio, June 18; and House of Commons 20 August 1940:[28]

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.

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 adults of other classes. 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.

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. It was a very powerful tool but it further dehumanised war particularly when it suggested strategies that were counter-intuitive. 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.

Germany

In 1935 General Ludendorff in the book Der Totale Krieg gave life to the term "Total War" in the German lexicon.[29]

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 – in which the crowd was told "Totaler Krieg – Kürzester Krieg" ("Total War – Shortest War”.)[30]

 
Nazi rally on 18 February 1943 at the Berlin Sportpalast; the sign says "Totaler Krieg – Kürzester Krieg" ("Total War – Shortest War").

Goebbels and Hitler had spoken in March 1942 about Goebbels' idea to put the entire home front on a war footing. Hitler appeared to accept the concept, but took no action. Goebbels had the support of minister of armaments Albert Speer, economics minister Walther Funk and Robert Ley, head of the German Labour Front, and they pressed Hitler in October 1942 to take action, but Hitler, while outwardly agreeing, continued to dither. Finally, after the holidays in 1942, Hitler sent his powerful personal secretary, Martin Bormann, to discuss the question with Goebbels and Hans Lammers, the head of the Reich Chancellery. As a result, Bormann told Goebbels to go ahead and draw up a draft of the necessary decree, to be signed in January 1943. Hitler signed the decree on 13 January, almost a year after Goebbels first discussed the concept with him. The decree set up a steering committee consisting of Bormann, Lammers, and General Wilhelm Keitel to oversee the effort, with Goebbels and Speer as advisors; Goebbels had expected to be one of the triumvirate. Hitler remained aloof from the project, and it was Goebbels and Hermann Göring who gave the "total war" radio address from the Sportspalast the next month, on the 10th anniversary of the Nazi's "seizure of power".[31]

I ask you: Do you want total war? If necessary, do you want a war more total and radical than anything that we can even imagine today?

— Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, 18 February 1943, in his Sportpalast speech'

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. A major strategic defeat in the Battle of Moscow forced Speer as armaments minister to nationalize German war production and eliminate the worst inefficiencies.[32]

Under Speer's direction a threefold increase in armament production occurred and did not reach its peak until late 1944. 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. It was because the German economy through most of the war was substantially under-mobilized that it was resilient under air attack. Civilian consumption was high during the early years of the war and inventories both in industry and in consumers' possession were high. 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. 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
 
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. 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. 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.[33] The Axis lost over 5 million soldiers in the east as well as many thousands of civilians.[34]

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 a policy of total war.[citation needed][dubious ]

United States

The United States underwent an unprecedented mobilization of national resources for the Second World War. Although the United States was not in danger of an existential attack, the national sense after Pearl Harbor was to use all the nation's resources to defeat Germany and Japan. Most non-essential activities were rationed, prohibited or restrained, and most of the fit unmarried young men were drafted. There was little urgency before 1940, when the collapse of France ended the Phoney War and revealed urgent needs. Nevertheless President Franklin Roosevelt moved to first solidify public opinion before acting. In 1940 the first peacetime draft was instituted, along with Lend-Lease programs to aid the British, and covert aid was passed to the Chinese as well.[35] American public opinion was still opposed to involvement in the problems of Europe and Asia, however. In 1941, the Soviet Union became the latest nation to be invaded, and the U.S. gave its aid as well. 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.

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. 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. In response to these attacks, the U.K. and U.S. declared war the next day. 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.

As the United States began to gear up for a major war, information and propaganda efforts were set in motion. 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. 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. Within a few years of the U.S. entry into the Second World War, nearly every man without children fit for service, between 18 and 30, was 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.[36]

Previously untouched sections of the nation mobilized for the war effort. Academics became technocrats; home-makers became bomb-makers (massive numbers of women worked in industry during the war); union leaders and businessmen became commanders in the massive armies of production. 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.[37]

By the war's end a multitude of advances had been made in medicine, physics, engineering, and the other sciences. Even the theoretical physicists worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory on the Manhattan Project that culminated in the Trinity nuclear test and changed the course of history.

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.[38]

Unconditional surrender

Actually Dresden was a mass of munitions works, an intact government centre, and a key transportation point to the East. It is now none of these things.

— Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris, in a memo to the Air Ministry on 29 March 1945[39]

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.[40] 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.

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. 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. 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. 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.[41]

Present day

Since the end of World War II, no industrial nation has fought such a large, decisive war.[42] 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 logistically impractical and strategically irrelevant.[43]

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. Strategically, the equal balance of destructive power possessed by each side manifests in the doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD), which determines that a nuclear attack by one superpower would result in a nuclear counter-strike by the other.[44] 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".[45]

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. Instead, the superpowers fought each other through their involvement in proxy wars, military buildups, and diplomatic standoffs.

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.

During the Yugoslav Wars, NATO conducted strikes against the electrical grid in enemy territory using graphite bombs. NATO claimed that the objective of their strikes was to disrupt military infrastructure and communications.[46]

See also

References

Notes

  1. ^ "Total war". Oxford Reference. Retrieved 3 March 2022.
  2. ^ Gunn, Edward (Spring 2006). "The Moral Dilemma of Atomic Warfare". Aegis: The Otterbein College Humanities Journal: 67. NB Gunn cites this Wikipedia article as it was on 27 September 2005, but on only for the text of the song "The Thing-Ummy Bob".
  3. ^ https:// www.conflittologia.it/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Rivista-n-25-completa.pdf
  4. ^ Peccia, T. (2015), Guerra Totale: interpretazione delle quattro dimensioni di Stig Förster ed il radicalecambiamento della società post-conflitto, Rivista italiana di conflittologia, pp. 51–65.
  5. ^ On the Road to Total War: The American Civil War and the German Wars of Unification, 1861–1871 (Publications of the German Historical Institute). German Historical Institute. August 22, 2002. p. 296. ISBN 978-0-521-52119-2.
  6. ^ Hew Strachan; Andreas Herberg-Rothe (2007). Clausewitz in the twenty-first century. Oxford University Press. pp. 64–66. ISBN 978-0-19-923202-4.
  7. ^ Roger Chickering; Stig Förster (2003). The shadows of total war: Europe, East Asia, and the United States, 1919–1939. Cambridge University Press. p. 8. ISBN 978-0-521-81236-8.
  8. ^ Bertrand Taithe (1999). Defeated flesh: welfare, warfare and the making of modern France. Manchester University Press. p. 35 and 73. ISBN 978-0-7190-5621-5.
  9. ^ Stig Förster (2002). On the Road to Total War: The American Civil War and the German Wars of Unification, 1861–1871. Cambridge University Press. p. 550. ISBN 978-0-521-52119-2.
  10. ^ "Letter of William T. Sherman to Henry Halleck, December 24, 1864". Civil War Era NC. 24 December 1864. Retrieved 28 March 2020.
  11. ^ DeGroot, Gerard J. (2004). The bomb: a life (1st Harvard University Press pbk. ed.). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard. p. 153. ISBN 978-0-674-01724-5.
  12. ^ Janice J. Terry, James P. Holoka, Jim Holoka, George H. Cassar, Richard D. Goff (2011). "World History: Since 1500: The Age of Global Integration". Cengage Learning. p. 717. ISBN 978-1-111-34513-6
  13. ^ See "From George Washington to Major General John Sullivan, 31 May 1779" National Archives
  14. ^ Fischer, Joseph R. (1997) A Well-Executed Failure: The Sullivan Campaign against the Iroquois, July–September 1779 Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press ISBN 978-1-57003-137-3
  15. ^ Understanding U.S. Military Conflicts through Primary Sources. ABC-CLIO. 2016. p. 149.
  16. ^ Caudill, Edward; Ashdown, Paul (16 September 2009). Sherman's March in Myth and Memory. Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. pp. 75–79. ISBN 9781442201279.
  17. ^ Bell, David A (12 January 2007). The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (First ed.). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. ISBN 978-0-618-34965-4. Retrieved 19 January 2017.
  18. ^ Bell, David A. (2023), Mikaberidze, Alexander; Colson, Bruno (eds.), "The First Total War? The Place of the Napoleonic Wars in the History of Warfare", The Cambridge History of the Napoleonic Wars: Volume 2: Fighting the Napoleonic Wars, Cambridge University Press, vol. 2, pp. 665–681, doi:10.1017/9781108278096.033, ISBN 978-1-108-41766-2
  19. ^ Broers, Michael (2008). "The Concept of 'Total War' in the Revolutionary—Napoleonic Period". War in History. 15 (3): 247–268. doi:10.1177/0968344508091323. S2CID 145549883.
  20. ^ Demm, Eberhard (1993). "Propaganda and Caricature in the First World War". Journal of Contemporary History. 28: 163–192. doi:10.1177/002200949302800109. S2CID 159762267.
  21. ^ Jürgen Kocka, Facing total war: German society, 1914–1918 (1984).
  22. ^ Donn, Hill (15 April 2014). "Total Victory Through Total War". United States War College Publications: 3, 19 – via USAWC.
  23. ^ Lizzie Collingham, Taste of war: World War II and the battle for food (Penguin, 2012).
  24. ^ Pauer, Japan's War Economy, 1999 pp. 13
  25. ^ Unidas, Naciones. World Economic And Social Survey 2004: International Migration, p. 23
  26. ^ Zhifen Ju, "Japan's atrocities of conscripting and abusing north China draftees after the outbreak of the Pacific war", 2002, Library of Congress, 1992, "Indonesia: World War II and the Struggle For Independence, 1942–50; The Japanese Occupation, 1942–45" Access date: February 9, 2007.
  27. ^ Angus Calder, The People's War: Britain 1939-45 (1969) online
  28. ^ Winston Churchill The Few The Churchill Centre
  29. ^ Eriksson 2013.
  30. ^ Statement from the banner in Sportpalast, 18 Feb 1943, Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-J05235 / Schwahn / CC-BY-SA 3.0
  31. ^ Reuth, Ralph Georg (1993) Goebbels Translated by Krishna Winston. New York: Harcourt Brace. pp/304, 309-313. ISBN 0-15-136076-6
  32. ^ A. S. Milward (1964)The End of the Blitzkrieg. The Economic History Review, New Series, Vol. 16, No. 3, pp. 499–518.
  33. ^ "Leaders mourn Soviet wartime dead". BBC.co.uk. 2005-05-09. Retrieved 5 August 2015.
  34. ^ German losses according to: Rüdiger Overmans, Deutsche militärische Verluste im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Oldenbourg 2000. ISBN 978-3-486-56531-7, p. 265, 272
  35. ^ James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The soldier of freedom (1940–1945). Vol. 2 (1970) pp. 3–63. online
  36. ^ John Phillips Resch, and D'Ann Campbell eds. Americans at War: Society, Culture, and the Homefront (vol 3 2004).
  37. ^ Arthur Herman, Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II (Random House, 2012).
  38. ^ McWilliams, Wayne (1990). The world since 1945: a history of international relations. Lynne Rienner Publishers.
  39. ^ Longmate, Norman; The Bombers, Hutchins & Co, (1983), ISBN 978-0-09-151580-5 p. 346
  40. ^ "The Casablanca Conference, 1943". Office of the Historian. United States Department of State. Retrieved 19 January 2017.
  41. ^ Ruth Wedgwood (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on March 8, 2008. Retrieved 2008-05-29. Wall Street Journal November 16, 2004
  42. ^ "World War II (1939–1945)". The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project. George Washington University. Retrieved 19 January 2017.
  43. ^ Baylis, Wirtz & Gray 2012, p. 55.
  44. ^ Castella, Tom de (15 February 2012). "How did we forget about mutually assured destruction?". BBC News. Retrieved 19 January 2017.
  45. ^ "1257. Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (1894–1971). Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations. 1989". Retrieved 5 August 2015.
  46. ^ Gordon, Michael (1999-05-04). "CRISIS IN THE BALKANS: THE OVERVIEW; NATO AIR ATTACKS ON POWER PLANTS PASS A THRESHOLD". The New York Times. Retrieved 6 December 2017.

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  • Hoffman, Christopher S. Major General William T. Sherman's total war in the Savannah and Carolina campaigns (US Army Command and General Staff College, School for Advanced Military Studies Fort Leavenworth, 2018) online.
  • Hsieh, Wayne Wei-Siang. "Total War and the American Civil War Reconsidered: The End of an Outdated" Master Narrative"." Journal of the Civil War Era 1.3 (2011): 394-408. online
  • Markusen, Eric; Kopf, David (1995), The Holocaust and Strategic Bombing: Genocide and Total War in the Twentieth Century
  • Marwick, Arthur, Clive Emsley, and Wendy Simpson. Total war and historical change: Europe 1914–1955 (Open University Press, 2001).
  • Neely, Mark E. Jr., "Was the Civil War a Total War?", Civil War History, 50: 2004
  • Royster, Charles. The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans (1993)
  • Sutherland, Daniel E.; McWhiney, Grady (1998), The Emergence of Total War, US Civil War Campaigns and Commanders Series
  • Walters, John Bennett. "General William T. Sherman and total war." journal of Southern history 14.4 (1948): 447-480. online
    • Walters, John Bennett. Merchant of terror: General Sherman and total war (1973); adds nothing new says John F. Marszalek, Journal of American History (Dec., 1974), pp. 784-785.

External links

  • Israel's 1948 War of Independence as a Total War
  • A collection of papers relating to the Sullivan Expedition
  • Daniel Marc Segesser: Controversy: Total War, in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War.

total, other, uses, disambiguation, type, warfare, that, includes, civilian, associated, resources, infrastructure, legitimate, military, targets, mobilizes, resources, society, fight, gives, priority, warfare, over, combatant, needs, ruins, warsaw, napoleon, . For other uses see Total war disambiguation Total war is a type of 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 Ruins of Warsaw s Napoleon Square in the aftermath of World War II 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 1 In the mid 19th century scholars identified 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 2 Contents 1 Characteristics 2 Background 3 History 3 1 Middle Ages 3 2 18th and 19th centuries 3 2 1 North America 3 2 2 American Civil War 3 2 3 Europe 3 3 20th century 3 3 1 World War I 3 3 1 1 Propaganda 3 3 1 2 Rationing 3 3 2 World War II 3 3 2 1 Shōwa Japan 3 3 2 2 United Kingdom 3 3 2 3 Germany 3 3 2 4 Soviet Union 3 3 2 5 United States 3 3 2 6 Unconditional surrender 4 Present day 5 See also 6 References 6 1 Bibliography 7 External linksCharacteristics EditAccording to an analysis by Tiziano Peccia of Stig Forster s works total war is characterized on four dimensions Total purposes aim of continuous growth of the power of the parties involved and hegemonic visions Total methods similar and common methodologies among countries that intend to increase their spheres of influence Total mobilization inclusion in the conflict of parties not traditionally involved such as women and children or individuals who are not part of the armed bodies Total control multisectoral centralization of the powers and orchestration of the activities of the countries in a small circle of dictators or oligarchs with crossfunctional control over education and culture media propaganda economic and political activities Tiziano Peccia adds a fifth dimension to Forster s total change After a total war the analysis shows that the political cultural economic and social assets persist beyond the end of the conflict total war is an earthquake that has the world as its epicenter 3 4 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 Maille massacre 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 labor for military operations as with Japan USSR 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 5 Giving no quarter i e take no prisoners as with Hitler s Commando Order during World War IIBackground EditThe phrase total war can be traced back to the 1935 publication of German general Erich Ludendorff s World War I memoir Der totale Krieg The total war Some authors extend the concept back as far as classic work of Carl von Clausewitz On War as absoluter Krieg absolute war even though he did not use the term others interpret Clausewitz differently 6 Total war also describes the French guerre a outrance during the Franco Prussian War 7 8 9 In his December 24 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 10 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 11 History EditMiddle Ages Edit 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 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 non combatant workers intelligence transport money and provisions 12 18th and 19th centuries Edit North America Edit 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 13 14 15 American Civil War Edit Sherman s March to the Sea in the American Civil War from November 15 1864 through December 21 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 16 Europe Edit 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 17 18 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 levee en masse mass conscription By August 23 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 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 drownings at Savenay during the War in the Vendee 1793 Napoleon s retreat from Russia in 1812 Napoleon s Grande Armee 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 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 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 19 20th century Edit World War I Edit Damage and destruction of civilian buildings in Belgium 1914 Propaganda Edit Main article Propaganda in World War I 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 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 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 citation needed 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 mobilization 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 20 Rationing Edit Main article Home front during World War I As young men left the farms for the front domestic food production in Britain and Germany fell In Britain the response was to import more food which was done despite the German introduction of unrestricted submarine warfare and to introduce rationing The Royal Navy s blockade of German ports prevented Germany from importing food and hastened German capitulation by creating a food crisis in Germany 21 Almost the whole of Europe and some of the European colonial empires mobilized soldiers Rationing occurred on the home fronts 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 World War II Edit The Second World War was the quintessential total war of modernity 22 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 23 Shōwa Japan Edit Founding ceremony of the Hakkō ichiu Monument promoting the unification of the 8 corners of the world under one roof 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 24 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 laborers 25 and pressed more than 18 million people in East Asia into forced labor 26 United Kingdom Edit Main article United Kingdom home front during World War II Before the onset of the Second World War Great Britain 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 Rationing of most goods and services was introduced not only for consumers but also for manufacturers This meant that factories manufacturing products that were irrelevant to the war effort had more appropriate tasks imposed All artificial light was subject to legal blackouts 27 There is another more obvious difference from 1914 The whole of the warring nations are engaged not only soldiers but the entire population men women and children The fronts are everywhere to be seen The trenches are dug in the towns and streets Every village is fortified Every road is barred The front line runs through the factories The workmen are soldiers with different weapons but the same courage Winston Churchill on the radio June 18 and House of Commons 20 August 1940 28 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 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 adults of other classes 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 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 It was a very powerful tool but it further dehumanised war particularly when it suggested strategies that were counter intuitive 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 Germany Edit See also Reich Plenipotentiary for Total War In 1935 General Ludendorff in the book Der Totale Krieg gave life to the term Total War in the German lexicon 29 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 in which the crowd was told Totaler Krieg Kurzester Krieg Total War Shortest War 30 Nazi rally on 18 February 1943 at the Berlin Sportpalast the sign says Totaler Krieg Kurzester Krieg Total War Shortest War Goebbels and Hitler had spoken in March 1942 about Goebbels idea to put the entire home front on a war footing Hitler appeared to accept the concept but took no action Goebbels had the support of minister of armaments Albert Speer economics minister Walther Funk and Robert Ley head of the German Labour Front and they pressed Hitler in October 1942 to take action but Hitler while outwardly agreeing continued to dither Finally after the holidays in 1942 Hitler sent his powerful personal secretary Martin Bormann to discuss the question with Goebbels and Hans Lammers the head of the Reich Chancellery As a result Bormann told Goebbels to go ahead and draw up a draft of the necessary decree to be signed in January 1943 Hitler signed the decree on 13 January almost a year after Goebbels first discussed the concept with him The decree set up a steering committee consisting of Bormann Lammers and General Wilhelm Keitel to oversee the effort with Goebbels and Speer as advisors Goebbels had expected to be one of the triumvirate Hitler remained aloof from the project and it was Goebbels and Hermann Goring who gave the total war radio address from the Sportspalast the next month on the 10th anniversary of the Nazi s seizure of power 31 I ask you Do you want total war If necessary do you want a war more total and radical than anything that we can even imagine today Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels 18 February 1943 in his Sportpalast speech 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 A major strategic defeat in the Battle of Moscow forced Speer as armaments minister to nationalize German war production and eliminate the worst inefficiencies 32 Under Speer s direction a threefold increase in armament production occurred and did not reach its peak until late 1944 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 It was because the German economy through most of the war was substantially under mobilized that it was resilient under air attack Civilian consumption was high during the early years of the war and inventories both in industry and in consumers possession were high 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 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 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 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 33 The Axis lost over 5 million soldiers in the east as well as many thousands of civilians 34 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 a policy of total war citation needed dubious discuss United States Edit Main article United States home front during World War II The United States underwent an unprecedented mobilization of national resources for the Second World War Although the United States was not in danger of an existential attack the national sense after Pearl Harbor was to use all the nation s resources to defeat Germany and Japan Most non essential activities were rationed prohibited or restrained and most of the fit unmarried young men were drafted There was little urgency before 1940 when the collapse of France ended the Phoney War and revealed urgent needs Nevertheless President Franklin Roosevelt moved to first solidify public opinion before acting In 1940 the first peacetime draft was instituted along with Lend Lease programs to aid the British and covert aid was passed to the Chinese as well 35 American public opinion was still opposed to involvement in the problems of Europe and Asia however In 1941 the Soviet Union became the latest nation to be invaded and the U S gave its aid as well 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 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 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 In response to these attacks the U K and U S declared war the next day 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 As the United States began to gear up for a major war information and propaganda efforts were set in motion 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 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 Within a few years of the U S entry into the Second World War nearly every man without children fit for service between 18 and 30 was 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 36 Previously untouched sections of the nation mobilized for the war effort Academics became technocrats home makers became bomb makers massive numbers of women worked in industry during the war union leaders and businessmen became commanders in the massive armies of production 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 37 By the war s end a multitude of advances had been made in medicine physics engineering and the other sciences Even the theoretical physicists worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory on the Manhattan Project that culminated in the Trinity nuclear test and changed the course of history 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 38 Unconditional surrender Edit This section may contain material unrelated or insufficiently related to the topic of the article Please help improve this section or discuss this issue on the talk page January 2020 Learn how and when to remove this template message Main article Unconditional surrender Actually Dresden was a mass of munitions works an intact government centre and a key transportation point to the East It is now none of these things Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris in a memo to the Air Ministry on 29 March 1945 39 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 40 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 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 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 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 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 41 Present day EditSee also Proxy war Coercive diplomacy and Deterrence theory Since the end of World War II no industrial nation has fought such a large decisive war 42 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 logistically impractical and strategically irrelevant 43 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 Strategically the equal balance of destructive power possessed by each side manifests in the doctrine of mutually assured destruction MAD which determines that a nuclear attack by one superpower would result in a nuclear counter strike by the other 44 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 45 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 Instead the superpowers fought each other through their involvement in proxy wars military buildups and diplomatic standoffs 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 During the Yugoslav Wars NATO conducted strikes against the electrical grid in enemy territory using graphite bombs NATO claimed that the objective of their strikes was to disrupt military infrastructure and communications 46 See also Edit War portalThe bomber will always get through Conventional warfare Economic warfare Industrial warfare Roerich Pact Total defence War crime War economy War of annihilation World warReferences EditNotes Total war Oxford Reference Retrieved 3 March 2022 Gunn Edward Spring 2006 The Moral Dilemma of Atomic Warfare Aegis The Otterbein College Humanities Journal 67 NB Gunn cites this Wikipedia article as it was on 27 September 2005 but on only for the text of the song The Thing Ummy Bob https www conflittologia it wp content uploads 2021 03 Rivista n 25 completa pdf Peccia T 2015 Guerra Totale interpretazione delle quattro dimensioni di Stig Forster ed il radicalecambiamento della societa post conflitto Rivista italiana di conflittologia pp 51 65 On the Road to Total War The American Civil War and the German Wars of Unification 1861 1871 Publications of the German Historical Institute German Historical Institute August 22 2002 p 296 ISBN 978 0 521 52119 2 Hew Strachan Andreas Herberg Rothe 2007 Clausewitz in the twenty first century Oxford University Press pp 64 66 ISBN 978 0 19 923202 4 Roger Chickering Stig Forster 2003 The shadows of total war Europe East Asia and the United States 1919 1939 Cambridge University Press p 8 ISBN 978 0 521 81236 8 Bertrand Taithe 1999 Defeated flesh welfare warfare and the making of modern France Manchester University Press p 35 and 73 ISBN 978 0 7190 5621 5 Stig Forster 2002 On the Road to Total War The American Civil War and the German Wars of Unification 1861 1871 Cambridge University Press p 550 ISBN 978 0 521 52119 2 Letter of William T Sherman to Henry Halleck December 24 1864 Civil War Era NC 24 December 1864 Retrieved 28 March 2020 DeGroot Gerard J 2004 The bomb a life 1st Harvard University Press pbk ed Cambridge Mass Harvard p 153 ISBN 978 0 674 01724 5 Janice J Terry James P Holoka Jim Holoka George H Cassar Richard D Goff 2011 World History Since 1500 The Age of Global Integration Cengage Learning p 717 ISBN 978 1 111 34513 6 See From George Washington to Major General John Sullivan 31 May 1779 National Archives Fischer Joseph R 1997 A Well Executed Failure The Sullivan Campaign against the Iroquois July September 1779 Columbia South Carolina University of South Carolina Press ISBN 978 1 57003 137 3 Understanding U S Military Conflicts through Primary Sources ABC CLIO 2016 p 149 Caudill Edward Ashdown Paul 16 September 2009 Sherman s March in Myth and Memory Rowman and Littlefield Publishers pp 75 79 ISBN 9781442201279 Bell David A 12 January 2007 The First Total War Napoleon s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It First ed Houghton Mifflin Harcourt ISBN 978 0 618 34965 4 Retrieved 19 January 2017 Bell David A 2023 Mikaberidze Alexander Colson Bruno eds The First Total War The Place of the Napoleonic Wars in the History of Warfare The Cambridge History of the Napoleonic Wars Volume 2 Fighting the Napoleonic Wars Cambridge University Press vol 2 pp 665 681 doi 10 1017 9781108278096 033 ISBN 978 1 108 41766 2 Broers Michael 2008 The Concept of Total War in the Revolutionary Napoleonic Period War in History 15 3 247 268 doi 10 1177 0968344508091323 S2CID 145549883 Demm Eberhard 1993 Propaganda and Caricature in the First World War Journal of Contemporary History 28 163 192 doi 10 1177 002200949302800109 S2CID 159762267 Jurgen Kocka Facing total war German society 1914 1918 1984 Donn Hill 15 April 2014 Total Victory Through Total War United States War College Publications 3 19 via USAWC Lizzie Collingham Taste of war World War II and the battle for food Penguin 2012 Pauer Japan s War Economy 1999 pp 13 Unidas Naciones World Economic And Social Survey 2004 International Migration p 23 Zhifen Ju Japan s atrocities of conscripting and abusing north China draftees after the outbreak of the Pacific war 2002 Library of Congress 1992 Indonesia World War II and the Struggle For Independence 1942 50 The Japanese Occupation 1942 45 Access date February 9 2007 Angus Calder The People s War Britain 1939 45 1969 online Winston Churchill The Few The Churchill Centre Eriksson 2013 Statement from the banner in Sportpalast 18 Feb 1943 Bundesarchiv Bild 183 J05235 Schwahn CC BY SA 3 0 Reuth Ralph Georg 1993 Goebbels Translated by Krishna Winston New York Harcourt Brace pp 304 309 313 ISBN 0 15 136076 6 A S Milward 1964 The End of the Blitzkrieg The Economic History Review New Series Vol 16 No 3 pp 499 518 Leaders mourn Soviet wartime dead BBC co uk 2005 05 09 Retrieved 5 August 2015 German losses according to Rudiger Overmans Deutsche militarische Verluste im Zweiten Weltkrieg Oldenbourg 2000 ISBN 978 3 486 56531 7 p 265 272 James MacGregor Burns Roosevelt The soldier of freedom 1940 1945 Vol 2 1970 pp 3 63 online John Phillips Resch and D Ann Campbell eds Americans at War Society Culture and the Homefront vol 3 2004 Arthur Herman Freedom s Forge How American Business Produced Victory in World War II Random House 2012 McWilliams Wayne 1990 The world since 1945 a history of international relations Lynne Rienner Publishers Longmate Norman The Bombers Hutchins amp Co 1983 ISBN 978 0 09 151580 5 p 346 The Casablanca Conference 1943 Office of the Historian United States Department of State Retrieved 19 January 2017 Ruth Wedgwood Judicial Overreach PDF Archived from the original PDF on March 8 2008 Retrieved 2008 05 29 Wall Street Journal November 16 2004 World War II 1939 1945 The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project George Washington University Retrieved 19 January 2017 Baylis Wirtz amp Gray 2012 p 55 sfn error no target CITEREFBaylisWirtzGray2012 help Castella Tom de 15 February 2012 How did we forget about mutually assured destruction BBC News Retrieved 19 January 2017 1257 Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev 1894 1971 Respectfully Quoted A Dictionary of Quotations 1989 Retrieved 5 August 2015 Gordon Michael 1999 05 04 CRISIS IN THE BALKANS THE OVERVIEW NATO AIR ATTACKS ON POWER PLANTS PASS A THRESHOLD The New York Times Retrieved 6 December 2017 Bibliography Edit Barnhart Michael A Japan prepares for total war The search for economic security 1919 1941 Cornell UP 2013 Baylis John Wirtz James J and Gray Colin S eds 2012 Strategy in the Contemporary World 4 illustrated ed Oxford University Press p 55 ISBN 978 0 19 969478 5 Barrett John G Sherman and Total War in the Carolinas North Carolina Historical Review 37 3 1960 367 381 online Bell David A 2007 The First Total War Napoleon s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It Black Jeremy The age of total war 1860 1945 Rowman amp Littlefield Publishers 2010 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 Eriksson Fredrik 2013 Coping with a New Security Situation Swedish Military Attaches in the Baltic 1919 1939 PDF Baltic Security amp Defence Review 15 2 33 69 Fisher Noel C Prepare Them For My Coming General William T Sherman Total War and Pacification in West Tennessee Tennessee Historical Quarterly 51 2 1992 75 86 Forster 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 Hoffman Christopher S Major General William T Sherman s total war in the Savannah and Carolina campaigns US Army Command and General Staff College School for Advanced Military Studies Fort Leavenworth 2018 online Hsieh Wayne Wei Siang Total War and the American Civil War Reconsidered The End of an Outdated Master Narrative Journal of the Civil War Era 1 3 2011 394 408 onlineMarkusen Eric Kopf David 1995 The Holocaust and Strategic Bombing Genocide and Total War in the Twentieth Century Marwick Arthur Clive Emsley and Wendy Simpson Total war and historical change Europe 1914 1955 Open University Press 2001 Neely Mark E Jr Was the Civil War a Total War Civil War History 50 2004 Royster Charles The Destructive War William Tecumseh Sherman Stonewall Jackson and the Americans 1993 Sutherland Daniel E McWhiney Grady 1998 The Emergence of Total War US Civil War Campaigns and Commanders Series Walters John Bennett General William T Sherman and total war journal of Southern history 14 4 1948 447 480 online Walters John Bennett Merchant of terror General Sherman and total war 1973 adds nothing new says John F Marszalek Journal of American History Dec 1974 pp 784 785 External links EditIsrael s 1948 War of Independence as a Total War A collection of papers relating to the Sullivan Expedition Daniel Marc Segesser Controversy Total War in 1914 1918 online International Encyclopedia of the First World War Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Total war amp oldid 1134012815, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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