Total War in Relation to World War I and II

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Total War in Relation to World War I and II

[IMAGE]First of all, what is “Total War”? What do we mean by it and

what answer do we expect from this question? Total War is the war that

affects all of society- not just armed forces, and that uses all the

resources available to be able to win it. It’s “the mobilization of

the whole society and its resources for the war effort.”

In most of the countries the first Total War was the First World War.

World War One started a completely new generation of wars. Before 1914

wars only affected the army and had no change on the lives of ordinary

people. At earlier times small professional armies fought the wars,

which means that all the men were especially trained for fighting.

Well, those two wars- World War One and World War Two were different.

Everyone fought them and everyone provided as much help as possible,

it didn’t matter whether the person was skilled or unskilled, old or

young, male or female. In this essay I will also investigate why were

World War One and World War Two called Total Wars. The first thing

that comes to mind is the scale of war. It was tremendous. I am going

to start from speaking about World War One and then later on about

World War Two.

[IMAGE]World War One was a completely new style of wars, the changes

were unbelievable, in fact the historians even see the World War One

as “the dividing line between modern and contemporary history”. The

war didn’t only change the style of fighting, but also the lifestyle

of people and their views on wars. It involved almost the entire

World, and not only the arguing countries were involved, but the

others as well. It involved “the entire population on large scale”. As

I mentioned previously, the scale of war was enormous. There were

about 70 million men fighting from 20 countries. In the beginning

there was no conscription, all the men were volunteers, and in fact

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