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Back to Hist. 152 page Total War In many ways, World War I was warfare as it had never been before. Perhaps the most important of those ways was the fact that it was the first "total war." The countries that began the fight during 1914 almost uniformly went to war that August with a kind of "war fever." They were ready, they each felt, and were looking for glory, a quick victory over their adversaries, and a fast return to a peace they could live with. Each promised its citizens or subjects that the war would be over by Christmas. Each was wrong. As the war wore on through December of 1914, it became clear to all the belligerents that this would be a long and difficult conflict. They all dug in, and began the process that they now knew was necessary for national survival, and perhaps for winning the war. That was the process of turning every person in the nation into a combatant, every factory into an arms manufacturer, every dollar, pound, mark or franc into war materiel. To survive 20th century war, it now became clear, the whole nation, its economy, its citizens, its political culture, its morality, had to be directed toward war in totality. There could be nothing else. Thus, total war is a state of war in which every member of society is a combatant, whether on the front lines or not. Every act is an act for or against the war. Every product helps the war effort, or wastes materials necessary for that effort. Every person, place, and thing, is a legitimate target. Thus, the first thing all belligerents had to do after the war showed its staying power was to mobilize every resource it had. This was not a simple proposition. In most cases, it had never been tried before, and that makes its success doubly surprising. Since the 16th century, Europe had, along with industrialism, been developing an international market. By 1914, that international trade was quite well-established, and many European countries had become dependent upon products from other European countries whom they now found to be enemies, or upon products from the colonies of those countries, including rubber, oil, bauxite, and iron ore. With the onset of war, and the eventual establishment of blockades, the most critical act of any belligerent country was to secure supplies of the items it needed to continue to fight the war. In practice, this meant that Russia, Britain and France had to secure supplies of materials from non-belligerent states such as Japan and the United States. Germany, completely surrounded on land except through the Austria-Ottoman Empire axis, and effectively blockaded at sea by the British Royal Navy, had to become almost completely self-sufficient. All of these adjustments required massive changes in the economies of the respective states, and so in the lives of their people. These changes were of such a fundamental nature, and so critical to the survival of the belligerent countries, that their effects are still being felt today. The needs of each country in the fight were several. First, each had to secure adequate supplies of food, raw materials, and manufacturing capacity. Second, each had to be sure that it had labor to replace the men being recruited to fight on the front. Third, each had to be sure that its manufacturing energy was being directed primarily to filling the needs of the war, and last, each had to make certain that its population remained behind the war effort. Concerns about money, while very real, were often set aside, and the war financed with bonds and debt on the assumption that victory would mean the ability to make the loser pay for everything. In order to achieve these goals, Great Britain and Germany went farthest, and were most effective, in creating a centrally planned economy and gaining the cooperation both of factory owners and labor. Each did this in a different way, however. The German system, proposed and created by Walter Rathenau, involved the creation of the //War Raw Materials Board//. Rathenau, a German Jew with business experience, designed a system that the //Board// administered in which every material Germany would need for the war effort, down to and including cow dung for fertilizer, was inventoried and rationed. The //Board// even saw to it that Germany, first among nations, began learning how to manufacture synthetic materials to replace natural items like rubber, plastic, and even auto fuel, that the blockade made impossible to acquire. School garbage brigades were even organized by teachers. These groups of children would go about after school looking through trash for anything that might be useful to the war effort and collecting it for government distribution to manufacturers. Rationing in Germany was strict on nearly all items, and only 20% of industrial production went towards the making of consumer products. Industries were directed on how to retool, and on what items they would be manufacturing. Workers were given identification papers and not allowed to go far from their factory for fear that a labor shortage might suddenly mean their presence on the production line was required. By 1917, the only Germans allowed to drink milk were pregnant women and infants. In England, David Lloyd-George was charged with creating the //Ministry of Munitions,// which had a similar purview to Rathenau’s //Board// in Germany. The difference was in the geopolitical and economic position of England versus Germany. England’s economy was governed by a much more liberal system than that of Germany, and that meant that capitalism was much harder to bring under control. One of Lloyd-George’s most difficult tasks was to convince British consumer goods producers to re-tool for war production. The benefits of such a change were not immediately obvious to them, and many were at first opposed. Lloyd-George’s success here was important, and hard earned. But it was not just factory owners who needed to be convinced of the importance of their participation in the adventure of war. Labor saw the critical need for workers and industrial products as an opportunity to improve the position of the working class. Here Lloyd-George had to find common ground with factory workers so that labor shortages and strikes would not interrupt war production. To do this, Lloyd-George recognized the existence of Labor Unions, and bargained with them officially and legally, giving them status that they had not held previously. This acknowledgment of Labor went far toward bringing the cooperation the British government was looking for. Further, Lloyd-George guaranteed that laborers would be paid a fair living wage, and in return, unions guaranteed that the factories would be fully staffed for the duration of the war. This provided the production needed to fight the war, and dramatically raised the standard of living for the average blue-collar worker in England. The major problem faced by England, Germany, France, Austria, Russia, Italy, Bulgaria – indeed by all the belligerents in the First World War, was an insatiable need for more soldiers at the front. This hunger for soldiers caused every society to draw most young men capable of fighting out of their regular jobs in businesses, factories, hospitals, and schools. With their regular workers gone, these critical economic engines required workers to keep the wheels and gears turning. That meant that factories and labor unions had to dredge up workers from non-traditional sources, including ethnic minorities, disabled persons, and women. All of these groups saw their incomes and social status rise during the war as they became critical members of society without whom the war would be lost. In fact, the position of women changed most drastically. Prior to the war, only a few occupations outside of unskilled factory labor were available to women. Those included teaching, nursing, and home care for children. Once the war drafted most available young men, women took part in increasingly visible professions, including policing, skilled factory labor, acting as doctors, secretaries, and even ocassionally managers and shop foremen. The skills women exhibited in these positions, and their ability to come through for their respective nations in a crisis added greatly to the respect each society gave to women. With the exception of France, most Western European countries and the United States recognized these contributions by giving women the legal right to vote within 4 years after the end of the war. Of course, finding the labor to fill the factories so the factories could fill the orders was only part of the equation. Behind all of this was the question of the ability of governments to pay for all the goods, soldiers, and labor that they had to use to prosecute the war. Since war itself is essentially a wasteful activity, in that it rarely produces any short term profits, and usually is a source of even long term economic and social loss. Since governments could not, then, expect to reap economic benefits from victories, which were in short supply in any case, they had to find means to pay for the efforts they were making, with the knowledge that the only real benefit they might gain was survival. Initially, all governments began with taxes and tarrifs – diverting normal government income from non-war-essential activities to those directly related to armaments and military supply. Germany, with the greatest per-capita tax rates thus began the war with a financial advantage on both a per-capita and societal level. England and the United States had lower levels of taxation, but were able to call upon ultimately larger overall financial resources, and so had better long-term capability. In any event, all of the belligerents eventually had to borrow huge sums of money in order to keep up with the growing costs of fighting and surviving during a total war. This borrowing was done both internationally and at home with war bonds. The primary attitude among the major powers was that borrowing was justified if it helped to win the war, and winning the war would mean that all war debt could be extracted from the loser. Therefore, governments of the major belligerents did not shrink from the huge debts required to remain on the battlefield. Food and material supply was also a major question. For Germany, as we have observed, the answer was, rather early on, self-sufficiency. The British Royal Navy created and extremely effective blockade of German, Austrian, and Turkish ports in the first months of the war. The German Navy, pride of the Kaiser, was very modern, but almost never used for fear that ships might be lost, at great cost to the German Empire, so it stayed in port and did not challenge the English blockade. This, of course, meant that Germany had no access to imported raw materials such as rubber, oil, steel, and components of gun powder and explosives. Thus the //War Raw Materials Board// began funding research into producing, and manufacturing, synthetic materials to take the place of those things formerly imported. Even fertilizer was synthesized and used to try and improve the yields of crops that were barely feeding the German people and army, isolated behind the front on every side. England, on the other hand, was able to maintain contact both with its empire, and with other suppliers in the international arena, including the United States and Japan. These areas became providers of finance, food, and raw and manufactured materials for England and France from very early on in the war. This situation led Germany to desperate measures to try to level the playing field. Germany early-on in the war began using advanced versions of the submarines developed in the late 19th century to interdict and sink ships carrying supplies and war materiel to Great Britain and France. By 1916, as the United States began clearly siding with the allies, and supplying money with which they could buy American goods, Germany abandoned all rules of contact and began a campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare. The resultant sinking of passenger vessels, including the Lusitania, on which more than 150 Americans lost their lives, angered the allies, and eventually led to the American entry into the war in 1917. It was also, however, extremely successful for a limited time. At one point during 1916, England had less than 6 weeks of food supplies left in its stockpiles, and the situation looked dire for the island nation. Cooperation with the United States, and use of convoys and anti-submarine tactics began to get ships through, however, and by 1917, Germany’s unrestricted submarine warfare was more of a liability than an asset in the prosecution of the war. Its chief result had been to prompt American entry on the side of the allies. American military, and especially industrial, might would be the final factor in the defeat of the German empire. Of course, well before 1917, all of the belligerents realized the importance of the home front for the survival of the nation, and its criticality if in fact victory was to be achieved. This meant that beyond paying for goods, keeping factories rolling, and providing adequate labor conditions, the people of the nation had to be kept behind the war effort. Should the support of "the people" fail in any one of these states, autocratic or not, the war would be lost. This was the cause of most of the anxiety in Germany in 1918 – labor strikes for better conditions, improved diet, etc. . ., were crippling German industry and sewing dissent in German society, making it difficult to prosecute the war, and maintain adequate supplies, and maintain order within Germany’s borders. The need for the continued support of all of the citizens of a country was thus clear to the Germans. It was just as clear to the English, French, Russians, and Italians. This need to make certain that "the people" were behind the war effort led to the introduction of propaganda on a mass scale during the Great War. It also involved censorship of correspondence and the press, and the making of the first combat films. In a sense, the propaganda efforts of states during the war brought war closer to home than it had ever been before for most non-combatants. This made the war a personal, intense experience even for those not on the front lines. Every state used posters, both for recruitment and to exhort the citizenry to make great efforts and sacrifices for the purpose of winning the war. Many of these posters were racist of nationalist in nature, disparaging the physical appearance, cultural values, or intelligence of the enemy. Songs, poetry, and literature were created, both under commission and as personal means of expression, that supported the war and expressed nationalistic ideals. Great Britain sent a camera crew to the front during the Battle of the Somme in 1917 to make a film to edify the British public. The film showed British lads bravely sacrificing their lives as they went "over the top" in the service of the country. The message was intended to be that if these boys could do this, the least those at home could do was make sure they were at work in the factories, and doing anything else to support the war effort, whatever sacrifice that might entail. Its actual effect, however, was to shock people who had not imagined what the front was like, and to show many who had not yet received information about relatives the moment of death of people from whom they were still awaiting letters and marriage proposals. Women fainted in the theaters. Men yelled out that they knew the boy on the screen. The net effect of the movie was to stir up anti-war sentiment, and so the British government locked it in a vault for many years as failed propaganda. In the end, it was the home front – the efforts of all those who worked in factories, banks, hospitals, and schools – that was most important in the war for every country. Without the food, the equipment, and the finances, any country would soon have had to drop out and be overrun. Thus, as nations geared themselves up for total war, they underwent social changes that remained with them throughout the 20th century. Back to Hist. 152 page