In the campaign of 1813, Allied forces in the German theater alone amounted to nearly one million whilst two years later in the Hundred Days a French decree called for the total mobilization of some 2.5 million men (though at most a fifth of this was managed by the time of the French defeat at Waterloo). Napoleon's Grande Armée had lost about half a million men.ĭuring the Russian campaign of 1812 the Russians retreated while destroying infrastructure and agriculture in order to effectively hamper the French and strip them of adequate supplies. The drownings at Savenay during the War in the Vendée, 1793 The young men shall fight the married men shall forge arms and transport provisions the women shall make tents and clothes and shall serve in the hospitals the children shall turn old lint into linen the old men shall betake themselves to the public squares in order to arouse the courage of the warriors and preach hatred of kings and the unity of the Republic. By August 23, 1793, the French front line forces grew to some 800,000 with a total of 1.5 million in all services-the first time an army in excess of a million had been mobilized in Western history:įrom this moment until such time as its enemies shall have been driven from the soil of the Republic all Frenchmen are in permanent requisition for the services of the armies. He claims that the new republic found itself threatened by a powerful coalition of European nations and used the entire nation's resources in an unprecedented war effort that included levée en masse (mass conscription). In his book, The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know it, David A Bell, a French History professor at Princeton University argues that the French Revolutionary Wars introduced to mainland Europe some of the first concepts of total war, such as mass conscription. The expedition devastated "14 towns and most flourishing crops of corn" in New York but, despite the large scale destruction, failed to drive the Native Americans off the land. As Native American and Loyalist forces killed livestock and burned buildings in remote areas (where the devastation was keenly felt) George Washington advised Sullivan to seek "the total destruction and devastation of their settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible". The Sullivan Expedition of 1779 is considered one of the first modern examples of total warfare. it would seem that instances of total war predate the twentieth century." They write:Īs an aggressor nation, the ancient Mongols, no less than the modern Nazis, practiced total war against an enemy by organizing all available resources, including military personnel, non-combatant workers, intelligence, transport, money, and provisions. Written by academics at Eastern Michigan University, the Cengage Advantage Books: World History textbook claims that while total war "is traditionally associated with the two global wars of the twentieth century. In 1949, he first proposed that a total war in the nuclear age would consist of delivering the entire nuclear arsenal in a single overwhelming blow, going as far as "killing a nation". United States Air Force General Curtis LeMay updated the concept for the nuclear age. In his Decemletter to his Chief of Staff during the American Civil War, Union general William Tecumseh Sherman wrote the Union was "not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war, as well as their organized armies," defending Sherman's March to the Sea, the operation that inflicted widespread destruction of infrastructure in Georgia. Total war also describes the French "guerre à outrance" during the Franco-Prussian War. Some authors extend the concept back as far as classic work of Carl von Clausewitz, On War, as "absoluter Krieg" ( absolute war), even-though he did not use the term others interpret Clausewitz differently. The phrase "total war" can be traced back to the 1935 publication of German general Erich Ludendorff's World War I memoir, Der totale Krieg ("The total war").
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