Defining Total War

Total war...assumes the commitment of massive armed forces to battle, the thoroughgoing[1] mobilization of industrial economies in the war effort, and hence the disciplined organization of civilians no less than warriors. Other hallmarks of total war have proved more difficult to measure. Total war erodes not only the limits on the size and scope of the war effort: it also encourages the radicalization of warfare, the abandonment of the last restraints on combat, which were hitherto imposed by law, moral codes, or simple civility. Moreover, in order to sustain popular commitment to the war effort, governments pursue extravagant, uncompromising war aims; and they justify these goals through the systemic demonization of the enemy. Finally...total war is marked by the systemic erasure of basic distinctions between soldiers and civilians. Because civilians, regardless of gender, are no less significant to the war effort than soldiers, they themselves are legitimate if not preferred targets of military violence.

By all of these hallmarks, the evidence speaks powerfully to the “totality” of the Second World War—to the unique degree to which this conflict approximated the ideal type. By a significant margin, this was the most immense and costly war ever fought. If coastal waters are counted, its theaters of combat extend to every continent save Antarctica. It involved most sovereign states on the planet, the bulk of the world’s population, and the largest armed forces ever assembled. Well over seventy million human beings were mobilized for military service...Economies were massively oriented everywhere to war; in most of the belligerent[2] countries, military production accounted for well over half of capital investment and GNP[3], while a majority of the civilian workforce, both male and female, was absorbed with millions of prisoners of war and deportees[4], into producing and delivering the tools of destruction to the warriors.

The Second World War set other standards as well. Once announced at the Casablanca conference in early 1943, the doctrine of “unconditional surrender” symbolized the abandonment of compromise by all sides as they pursued the military defeat of their enemies. The brutal handling of Soviet prisoners of war by the German army and the cruelties Japanese and American forces inflicted on one another signaled a savagery in combat that was...unprecedented[5]. In the European and Pacific theaters alike, it fed on the same dehumanizing popular stereotypes that drove the mobilization of civilians on the home front. These stereotypes also underlay perhaps the most telling statistics of the war, which speak to the ratio of civilian-to-military casualties. [Historians] have estimated a total of fifteen million soldiers killed in all theaters...it pales...in the face of civilian deaths that doubtless exceeded forty-five million. The preponderance [6] of civilians was no accidental or peripheral feature of this war; it reflected the central significance of civilians in the conflict, the indispensible roles that they played in the war’s outcome, as well as the vulnerabilities that they shared, as a direct consequence, with the soldiers.