The Concept Of Total War

It is not an overstatement to define World War I as one of the turning point in history. In 1914, Austria-Hungary, back by its German ally, used the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Serbian nationalist, to crush Serbia in a short war. The powder keg of Europe, the Balkan, exploded and a system of entangled alliances subsequently brought all major European powers into war. On one side the Triple Entente powers consisted of the British Empire, the Third French Republic and the Russian Empire and as its counterpart the Triple Alliance of the German Empire, Austria-Hungary and Italy. Beside of the alliance system, nationalism, military timetables, glorification of war and new technologies let to war of unprecedented scale. During

The famous military theorist von Clausewitz rejects in his book On War (Vom Kriege) the idea of limited wars and stated that military conflicts tend to escalate in violence towards an “absolute war”. Erich von Ludendorff argues in his work Total War (Total Krieg) that all forces of a nation have to be mobilized to prevail and succeed in a war. He blames civilian leadership and the weakness of the civilian masses for the German Empire’s defeat in World War I because they were not entirely committed to his understanding of total war. Chickering points to the difficulties in defining the concept of total war in the book Anticipating Total War. He however outlines a few general characteristics of total war to which must scholars in the field agree: Total war is distinguished by the global span of battles, unprecedented intensity and extent, mobilization of civilian populations for war efforts, which make the legitimate targets and practically no limits in the way of conducting the war. I my essay I will define as more of an idea rather than a literate interpretation of the term. Total war, therefore means that larger parts of society were affect by the war, civilian targets were attack and fighting took place at almost every continent on the planet. This definition however does not meant that literally every single person was directly affected by war and that all countries were at a constant state of war on every single place on the