When Was the First Total War?

When Was the First Total War?

When was the first total war?

‘Wollt ihr den totalen Krieg?’ screeched the Propaganda Minister for the Third Reich, Joseph Goebbels, to a frenzied audience at the Berlin Sportpalast. ‘Ja!’ was the overly enthusiastic response. It was 18th February 1943 when Goebbels called for total war; yet what exactly is this phenomenon that he was calling for? Total war seemingly has three sides to itself: a political an economic and a social aspect. Political total war involves a significant intensification in the nature of war due to the added political pressures. It involves the objective of achieving total victory and diminishes the boundaries between civilians and soldiers. Military leaders go on to enhance their war effort to an unprecedented level. This brings in the economic side to total war: the total mobilization of fully available resources and population. However, as David A. Bell points out, “not even a massive thermonuclear exchange would involve the mobilization of all of a society’s resources”, so it seems as though the definition is flawed: Roger Chickering has even gone as far as to say that the term should be scrapped altogether. So it becomes clear that rather than attempting to identify the first total war, the objective become to find the first war in which major steps were taken towards totality. Yet, for the late Arthur Marwick, total war also implied the testing and breakdown of existing social and political structures of state and society; and of course, there is the colossal psychological experience that a state waging total war must endure: the social aspect.
Many historians have argued that the Great War of 1914 and the Second World War were total wars, with the former being the first in history. Others, including James McPherson claim that the American Civil War was the first total war; whereas, David A. Bell champions the idea that the French Revolutionary war was the first. I believe that the nature of conflict throughout...

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