Warfare in the Twentieth Century

Theory and Practice

Colin McInnes, G. D. Sheffield, Colin McInnes, G. D. Sheffield

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367635756
• eBook ISBN: 9781000339253
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

The twentieth century was dominated by war and by preparations for war in a way that is unparalleled in history. Originally published in 1988, this textbook highlights key themes of warfare throughout the world and emphasizes the gulf between the theory of war and its practice.

The contributors are professional historians and strategists who consider the impact of war upon society, theories of insurgency and counter-insurgency and nuclear strategy, as well as more 'traditional topics' such as tactics and strategy on land, the role of sea power, the evolution of strategic bombing, colonial and revolutionary warfare. Each chapter discusses recent research on the topic and provides guides to further reading. Together they give a clear up-to-date overview of the conflicts which dominated the twentieth century.

This textbook is useful reading for all students and teachers of strategic and war studies, military history and international relations and for all those concerned with the study of major conflicts in the twentieth century.

1

Total War

Ian F. W. Beckett

The historiography of total war

In the last twenty years, historians have come increasingly to recognize the often pivotal role played by war and conflict in historical developments. In the process, the interpretation and understanding of the impact of war upon states, societies and individuals have been transformed. In particular, the concept of ‘total war’, as applied to the two world wars of the twentieth century, has become a familiar one and a matter for modern historiographical debate. Generally, the term ‘total war’ is used by historians not only to describe the nature of the world wars but also to differentiate such wars from other conflicts. The study of total war within the context of war studies or studies of war and society is largely a product of the 1960s, but the term itself is older. Ludendorff appears to have used the term first in his memoirs, published in 1919, but it was also employed in a ritualistic fashion during the Second World War. Josef Goebbels, for example, threatened the Western Allies with ‘total war’ in a celebrated speech in February 1943 and was himself appointed Reich Plenipotentiary for the Mobilization of Total War in July 1944; Winston Churchill also used the phrase in an address to the United States Congress in May 1943. Now, the term has become almost synonymous with the concept of war as a catalyst of far-reaching social change, and it is in precisely that sense that total war is a subject of continuing historical debate.

The American scholar, J. U. Nef, whose War and Human Progress was published in 1950,¹ may stand perhaps as representative of an earlier period of historiography, when war was regarded as having a purely negative impact, in so far as it was at all relevant to historical development. However, there were other scholars in the 1950s whose work was suggestive of the future approach to the question of war and social change. Richard Titmuss made a connection in 1950 between the two in his volume, Problems of Social Policy, for the British official history of the Second World War² while Stanislas Andrzejewski offered the ‘military participation ratio’ in 1954,³ which postulated a firm correlation between the extent of wartime participation by society in the war effort and the amount of subsequent levelling of social inequalities. The English historian, G. N. Clark, also produced during the 1950s a pioneering study of war and society in the seventeenth century,⁴ but the real broadening of historical perspectives with regard to what became known as war studies came in the following decade. A comparison of Michael Howard’s classic military history of the Franco-Prussian War, published in 1961,⁵ with his War in European History⁶ fifteen years later may serve to indicate the profound historiographical change that occurred.

In the forefront of that change was Arthur Marwick, whose study of British society in the First World War, The Deluge,⁷ published in 1965, was followed by Britain in the Century of Total War in 1968 and War and Social Change in the Twentieth Century in 1974.⁸ Marwick was not the only historian in the field and the titles of Gordon Wright’s The Ordeal of Total War in 1968 and Peter Calvocoressi’s and Guy Wint’s Total War in 1972 were also indicative of the new approach.⁹ However, it was largely Marwick who established the framework for the study of total war. Four ‘modes’ put forward in Britain in the Century of Total War had become a ‘four-tier model’ in War and Social Change in the Twentieth Century, by which the changes effected by total war might be gauged and compared between different states. Thus, for Marwick, total war implied disruption and destruction on a vast and unprecedented scale; the testing of the existing social and political structures of states and societies; the participation, in the context of the total mobilization of a state’s resources, of previously disadvantaged groups in the war effort; and, lastly, a ‘colossal psychological experience’. The cumulative effect would be real and enduring social change. The model became familiar to a wide readership through the ‘War and Society’ course introduced by Marwick and his colleagues at the Open University in the 1970s.¹⁰

To be fair to Marwick, the model was only offered as a ‘rough tool’, but it is undeniable that the idea of war as a determinant of major change has had a profound impact during the past decade. Indeed, this concept has been described recently by Michael Bentley as one of the most common ‘misapprehensions’ in the perception of modern British social history.¹¹ From the beginning, too, some historians were far more cautious than Marwick in their appraisal of the impact of total war upon society. Examples are Angus Calder’s The People’s War¹² – a title itself derived from a British propaganda slogan in the Second World War and echoed in a 1986 television series and accompanying book on Britain at war¹³ – which was published in 1969, and Henry Pelling’s Britain in the Second World War, published two years later.¹⁴ More recently, Brian Bond has described total war as being as great a myth as the idea of total victory or total defeat¹⁵ and, while the debate has continued to be waged within the context of parameters laid down by Marwick, recent and current research has done much to suggest that the social impact of total war in the twentieth century should not be overstated.

The emergence of total war

A preliminary consideration is that the acceptance of the periods between 1914 and 1918 and between 1939 and 1945 as those of total war implies that conflicts prior to the twentieth century were more limited. Traditionally, historians have described the late eighteenth century as a classic era of ‘limited war’, in which armies were relatively small in size and would manoeuvre with the intention of avoiding rather than engaging in battle. Campaigns would be designed to exhaust an opponent’s economy by occupation in search of strictly limited political and dynastic aims. Societies as a whole would hardly be touched by the impact of war and, indeed, a prevailing bourgeois assumption that military activity was not the destiny of mankind ensured that trade flourished between states at war. Examples usually cited of the normality of social intercourse include Laurence Sterne’s visit to Paris during the Seven Years War (1756-63) and the continuance of the Dover to Calais packet service for a year after France in 1778 had joined the United States in the American War of Independence (1774-83). Closer analysis, however, reveals that war between 1648 and 1789 was limited, in the words of John Childs, ‘only when it was compared with the holocaust that had gone before and the new totality of the Napoleonic wars’.¹⁶ As surely as the Thirty Years War (1618-48) had devastated Germany, reducing its urban population by 33 per cent and its rural population by 45 per cent, so incipient warfare during the next 120 years laid waste much of central Europe and the Low Countries at regular intervals. Conventions applied by armies in relation to each other did not extend to civilian populations, as the French army’s ravages in the Palatinate in 1688 and 1689 or both the Russian and Swedish armies’ depredations in the Great Northern War (1700-21) well illustrate. In any case, for all their balletic appearance, battles were murderous affairs, the ‘butcher’s bill’ at Malplaquet in 1709 of an estimated 36,000 casualties not being surpassed until the battle of Borodino in 1812. Borodino itself was then exceeded by the 127,000 casualties at the four day ‘Battle of the Nations’ at Leipzig in 1813. The cumulative effect of such conflict upon areas that were fought over was considerable. Equally, participation in five major wars between 1689 and 1783 was a major stimulus for English industry and trade at a crucial early stage in the world’s first industrial revolution.

None the less, warfare was to become increasingly more total in its impact during the course of the nineteenth century, which can be taken as representing an extended transitional period. During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars (1792-1815), the motive forces of nationalism and democracy combined to create a mass French citizen army through the introduction of universal male conscription. The success of this ‘nation in arms’ or ‘armed horde’ resulted in the example being emulated elsewhere, notably in Prussia. Although the concept of the nation in arms came under sustained attack after 1815 from monarchs and restored monarchs, who distrusted its social and political implications, the actual system of short-service conscription survived in Prussia. The military victories then won by Prussia in the German wars of unification of 1864,1866 and 1870 and the ability of short-service conscription to produce large numbers of trained reserves upon mobilization encouraged European states – with the exception of Britain – to reintroduce Prussian-style conscription. Although the forms of universal service adopted were necessarily selective in practice, states were rapidly accepting the national birthrate as an index of military power. Moreover, the transformation wrought by the technological innovations of the industrial age, particularly the development of the railway, ensured that ever larger armies could be mobilized theoretically more quickly than hitherto and sustained in the field for far longer.

At the same time, industrialization dramatically increased the destructive capacity of armies by providing them with weapons of enhanced range, accuracy and rate of fire. By 1870, a firefight between opposing infantry, which might have been conducted at 60 yards range seventy years before, had now stretched to a possible 1,600 yards and a breechloading rifle such as the Prussian Dreyse now fired seven rounds for every one from a smoothbore musket of the Napoleonic era. By the 1880s and 1890s magazine rifles, quick-firing artillery and machine guns had all entered service with major European armies. Just before the First World War, most armies were also experimenting with aircraft, even if it appeared to require a considerable feat of imagination to conceive that airmen could offer any valuable intelligence while flying over the ground at speeds approaching 30 mph. At sea, too, wood, sail and round shot had given way to iron and steel, steam and screw propellor, and shell, while mines, submarines and torpedoes all threatened the traditional supremacy of the capital ship.

Through the innate conservatism of European military and naval officer corps, the significance of much of the change that had taken place during the nineteenth century was misinterpreted. Contrary to popular belief, soldiers did recognize the problems inherent in crossing the so-called ‘empty battlefield’ in the face of modern firepower, but they believed mistakenly that they could solve the difficulty simply by closing with an enemy more rapidly. Moreover, the use of bayonet, lance and sabre implicit in this ‘offensive spirit’ ideally complemented traditional military ideals of honour and glory, which some feared devalued by the unwelcome intrusion of technology and professionalism into an overwhelmingly aristocratic occupation. While soldiers conspired to discount the more uncomfortable evidence of such conflicts as the American Civil War (1861-65), Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) and Russo-Japanese War (1904-5), civilians were equally seduced by the general trend in the later nineteenth century towards popular nationalism, imperialism, militarism and crude social Darwinism into a more ready acceptance of war and conflict as an appropriate test of nationhood and national virility. There were pacifists but, in 1914, it was nationalism and not inter-nationalism that triumphed across Europe. Similarly, a succession of international conferences, such as those at St Petersburg in 1868 or at the Hague in 1899 and 1907, failed to find a universal readiness among nation states to compromise their future freedom of manoeuvre by accepting meaningful limitations on the actual conduct of war.

Wars between 1789 and 1914, while such developments were occurring, were hardly devoid of impact upon those societies that waged them. In the case of Britain, for example, the manpower problems experienced during the Crimean War (1854-56) were very similar to those encountered in the First World War, and losses sustained in the twenty years of almost continuous warfare between 1793 and 1815 were almost certainly proportionately higher in terms of men under arms than in the First World War.¹⁷ Military participation in Britain was also probably greater in proportion to the male population between 1793 and 1815, and it is at least arguable that the resulting social, economic and political upheaval in the immediate postwar period was of more significance for the future pattern of British society and democracy than developments in the aftermath of either of the world wars. Of course, the wars of German and Italian unification were of very limited duration, but they still had profound political consequences for Europe.

There was once a tendency to view the American Civil War largely in terms of its military developments and to focus upon such innovations as armoured trains, the first clash of armoured warships, the first loss of ships to mines and submarine torpedoes, the first extensive use of the telegraph, and so on. In fact, the largely amateur armies fought the war on the battlefield as if it were the last Napoleonic encounter rather than the ‘first modern war’ but it is now recognized widely that the war was truly modern in terms of its impact upon society. Both the northern states of the Union and the southern states of the Confederacy deployed large numbers of men in the field but, for the predominantly agricultural Confederacy, war also demanded efforts to create an industrial economy to challenge the far greater manufacturing potential of the North. It had become essential to outproduce as well as to outfight an opponent. Despite its efforts at industrialization, the mobilization of 75 per cent of its white male population, and unprecedented participation by white women and blacks in industry and agriculture, the Confederacy was doomed to defeat by the superiority of the North’s numbers and resources. The inescapable logic of the attempt to create a war economy was the recognition that a society that sustained a war became as much a legitimate target for military action as an army that waged war on its behalf. Thus, in the autumn of 1864, Sheridan’s Union forces swept down the southern ‘bread basket’ of the Shenandoah valley while Sherman’s armies wrought equal destruction in cutting a swathe from Atlanta to the sea in November and December 1864 and through the Carolinas in the following months in a determination to expose the Confederacy to the ‘hard hand of war’.¹⁸

The world wars

Thus, there are sufficient examples of the way in which the impact of war upon society was increasing through the nineteenth century to suggest that the world wars should be regarded as a natural progression from earlier conflicts rather than as unique. But, of course, this is not to suggest that the impact of world war was not greater than that of earlier wars through the sheer scale of conflict enhancing the effect. Quite obviously, both world wars were global in scope, although both began as European conflicts. In the First World War, the Central Powers comprised Imperial Germany, Austria-Hungary, Ottoman Turkey (from October 1914) and Bulgaria (from October 1915), but the Allies eventually embraced twenty-two states including the major European powers of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Erratum
• Editors’ Introduction
• Contributors
• 1 Total War
• 2 Colonial Warfare 1900-39
• 3 Blitzkrieg and Attrition: Land Operations in Europe 1914-45
• 4 Naval Power
• 5 The Theory and Practice of Strategic Bombing
• 6 Nuclear Strategy
• 7 Limited War
• 8 Guerrilla Warfare: Insurgency and Counter-insurgency Since 1945
• 9 The Battlefield Since 1945
• Further Reading
• Index