2 - Total War: The Conduct of War, 1939-1945

Summary

To call the Second World War a total war is not anachronistic. It is the only war of which that can be said. The phrase “total war” was not current in the First World War, but it was by the 1930s, and it became a commonplace in the rhetoric of both sides in 1939-45. To that extent, the notion that the Second World War was a total war was a self-fulfilling prophecy: extrapolating from the experience of the First World War, commentators expected a future war in Europe to be “total,” and so it became. In reality there was no such inevitability.

The First World War was, after all, more a warning than a model. It was “the war to end wars,” not the war to act as a benchmark for future war. Two of the more influential military theorists of the interwar years, J. F. C. Fuller and Basil Liddell Hart, examined the conduct of war with a view to minimizing - not maximizing - its impact. And a succession of disarmament conferences aimed to buttress, not undermine, cardinal principles like noncombatant immunity. John Mueller has gone so far as to argue that the obsolescence of what he calls “major war” dates from 1918 and that only the ambition and personality of Hitler can explain what followed. He oversimplifies, but the proposition that more people wanted to avoid total war in 1939 than sought it hardly seems controversial.