The invention of total war

When the first campaigns failed and the belligerents steeled themselves to fight a long war of attrition, World War I became total—that is, a war fought without limitations, between entire societies and not just between armies, with total victory the only acceptable outcome. It became such a war because, for the first time, the industrial and bureaucratic resources existed to mobilize an entire nation’s strength, because the stalemate required total mobilization, and because the tremendous cost and suffering of such a war seemed to preclude settling for a negotiated truce. Only victory might redeem the terrible sacrifices already made by both sides; and if final victory were the only acceptable end, then any means could be justified in pursuit of it.

The first violent battles of 1914 nearly expended prewar munitions reserves. By mid-war the artillerymen of the Western Front might fire more shells in a single day than were expended in the entire Franco-German War. Clearly the home front—the war economy—would be the most decisive of all. And yet the governments, expecting a short war, were unprepared for economic mobilization and had to adjust to emergencies and shortages as they arose. In Germany the process began in the first days of war when private manufacturers, especially Walther Rathenau, suggested a state bureau to distribute raw materials to industry. Over the years it became a model for new agencies, boards, and commissions controlling production, labour, rationing, travel, wages and prices. By late 1917, Germany came to dominate the economies of Austria-Hungary and the occupied regions by the same means. In all the belligerent nations, to a greater or lesser degree, civil and economic liberties, the free market, even national sovereignty, gave way to a kind of military socialism in the crucible of war. All the belligerents met their labour needs through employment of old men, children, and women (a fact that ensured the success of the suffragist movement in Europe after the war). The Allies also engaged in economic war through agreements with neutral countries on the Continent not to re-export goods to Germany and through preemptive purchase of everything from Chilean nitrates to Romanian wheat.

An economic problem that could be postponed was the financial one. The belligerents immediately ended controvertibility of their currencies according to the gold standard and liquidated their holdings overseas. By late 1915 the British and French also began to float sizable loans on the American market, even as they themselves underwrote the war efforts of weaker economies like the Italian and Russian. British, Germans, and Americans covered a fraction of the war’s expense through income and other taxes, but World War I was financed primarily through war bonds and secondarily through loans from abroad. This pattern would exacerbate the diplomatic and domestic political climates after the war, when the bills for the four years’ wastage came due.

The weapon of morale

The mass conscripted army and labour force, the employment of women and children, and the mobilization of science, industry, and agriculture meant that virtually every citizen contributed to the war effort. Hence all governments tried to stoke morale on the home front, subvert that of the enemy, and sway the opinions of neutrals. A variety of techniques for manipulating information were used, including particularly censorship and vilification of the enemy. German propaganda depicted Russians as semi-Asiatic barbarians and the French as mere cannon fodder for the bloated, envious British Empire lusting to destroy Germany’s power, prosperity, and Kultur. The French Maison de la Presse and British Ministry of Information took German war guilt for granted and made great play of the atrocities committed by the “Hun” in Belgium and on the high seas, where defenseless passenger ships were treacherously torpedoed. War hatred whipped up by such propaganda made it all the more difficult to justify negotiating a truce.

The Allies proved more adept than the Germans at psychological warfare. Propaganda was distributed across German lines by shells, planes, rockets, balloons, and radio. Such activities were given into the hands of an Inter-Allied Propaganda Commission in 1918. The Allies also, especially after 1917, identified themselves with such universal principles as democracy and national self-determination, while the German war effort had only a narrow national appeal. The most important target of propaganda was the United States. In the first weeks of war the British cut the German transatlantic cables and subsequently controlled the flow of news to America. German attempts to influence U.S. opinion were invariably clumsy, while the British, aided by the common language, reminded Americans of their common values for which German militarism had no respect. In political warfare, German attempts to arouse the Muslim world and incite India to rebellion were stillborn, while their exploitation of the situation in Ireland, culminating in the Easter Rising of 1916, backfired. The aristocratic and continental German officials seemed out of their element when either trying to appeal to the masses or looking beyond Europe. But their one success was nothing less than the Russian Revolution of 1917 (see below The Russian Revolution).