The Argument That Made a City a Target

A total war is one in which the whole of a society is mobilised: not only its soldiers but its industry, its agriculture, its labour, its science and its attention. Conscription applies to factories as well as regiments. Food is rationed. The press is managed. The state acquires powers over ordinary life that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier.

Once that is true, a particular argument becomes available, and it is the hinge of the whole century. If the shell that kills a soldier was made by a woman in a factory in Birmingham, then the factory is a military target, and then the workers are, and then the housing they live in, and eventually the city.

Everything from the Zeppelin raids through Guernica, Coventry, Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo and Hiroshima follows from accepting that step. It is why twentieth-century wars killed civilians in proportions that earlier wars did not, and the change is not a decline in morals but a change in what the war is understood to be.

Start with why the First World War took the shape it did, because the popular explanation (stupid generals) is comforting and wrong.

By 1914 firepower had comprehensively outrun mobility. Magazine rifles, machine guns and quick-firing artillery made a defended position enormously costly to approach, and nothing had yet arrived to restore movement. The specific problem was not breaking into a trench system, which was achieved repeatedly; it was exploiting the breach. Defenders moved reserves by rail at twenty miles an hour to seal a gap; attackers advanced on foot at one mile an hour across ground their own bombardment had turned to craters. And the moment a soldier left his trench he lost telephone contact with his own guns, so the artillery could not be redirected to support him.

It is a systems problem, and it was solved. By 1918 combined arms (tanks to cross the wire, aircraft for reconnaissance and ground attack, portable wireless, predicted artillery fire that did not need a preliminary bombardment giving the attack away) restored movement, which is why the last hundred days of that war moved further and faster than the preceding three years.

The peace is where the trouble starts, and the most famous critique of it is worth handling carefully.

John Maynard Keynes resigned from the British delegation and published The Economic Consequences of the Peace in 1919, arguing that the reparations demanded of Germany were beyond its capacity, that enforcing them would wreck the German economy, and that a wrecked Germany would destabilise all of Europe because the European economies were a single interdependent system.

The book was enormously influential and its specific claim is now regarded as overstated. Germany paid a fraction of the sums nominally demanded, the schedules were repeatedly revised, and the hyperinflation of 1923 had substantial domestic causes (wartime borrowing, a decision to print rather than tax) alongside the Ruhr occupation.

The deeper argument survives, and it is not really about arithmetic. A settlement that humiliates a large, populous, industrially capable state, without either reconciling it or permanently disabling it, is the worst of the available options: it supplies a grievance and leaves the capacity to act on it. The contrast with 1945, where Germany and Japan were occupied, rebuilt and incorporated, is the clearest natural experiment modern diplomatic history offers.

On the second war, one proportion needs establishing because western memory gets it badly wrong.

The European war was decided in the east. Roughly three quarters of German army casualties were inflicted by Soviet forces. The Soviet Union lost somewhere around 27 million people, military and civilian, which is more than an order of magnitude beyond British and American losses combined. Stalingrad and Kursk were larger battles than anything in the west, and by the time of Normandy the Wehrmacht had already been broken.

None of this diminishes what was done in the west, and it is necessary for understanding both the war and the settlement, because the Red Army's position in 1945 is where the map of the next forty-five years comes from. Armies that liberate territory tend to stay.

Finally, the relationship between total war and the Holocaust, which needs stating precisely because sloppiness here explains nothing.

The genocide was driven by ideology. It was not a military operation, it diverted resources from the war effort, and it would not have happened without the specific antisemitic programme of the regime that carried it out. Total war did not cause it.

What total war supplied were the conditions: conquered territory in the east beyond any external scrutiny, a rail and administrative apparatus already fully mobilised and used to moving people by schedule, a population habituated over years to mass death as a normal fact, and the complete suspension of any constraint on what might be done to a designated enemy. A bureaucracy built to manage a war economy is a bureaucracy that can manage anything.

Causes and conditions are different things. The distinction is worth maintaining, because collapsing them makes the event either inexplicable or inevitable, and it was neither.

One last observation, which applies to every total war and is easy to miss while it is happening. The powers a state takes in an emergency do not all go back. Income tax, national insurance, passports as we know them, state direction of railways and much of the machinery of the welfare state expanded or originated in wartime and stayed. An emergency proves a capability is possible and builds the apparatus to exercise it, and afterwards the argument is no longer whether the state could do this but whether it should.