The Shadows of Total War: Europe, East Asia, and the United States, 1919-1939 (review)

This volume is the fourth in a series of five, publishing the proceedings of conferences held by the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C., to examine the concept of total war, from the American Civil War to the Second World War. It comprises eighteen chapters, of which (despite the subtitle) all but two deal with Europe. The range of subjects is wide, including some whose connection with the concept of total war is not immediately obvious. For example, the essays dealing with Paul Tillich's changing views on pacifism and with the effects of the two World Wars on psychiatry in Britain are fascinating in themselves, but seem isolated from the main theme of the book.

Most of the chapters concentrate on the effort made by historians, serving officers and other military thinkers to look back at the Great War to find its lessons, and to look forward to the next to predict how it might be fought. (Strikingly, and despite the widespread feeling of "Never Again," hardly anyone seems to have thought that there would not be a next war.) As prophets, the contributors to military journals, studied intently by several writers, did rather well, predicting that the next war would be fought by specialised forces of tanks and aircraft, but also by mobilising the whole resources of a country, material and moral. The editors of a journal dealing with military history can draw much reassurance from this book as to the validity and value of their efforts.

The end result is a very good book, full of new ideas and unusual knowledge, as well as admirable summaries of current historiography—for example, anyone in search of a concise analysis of German rearmament in the 1920s and 1930s should turn to Wilhelm Deist's essay. Every chapter contains much of interest and value, but let me pick out a few. Roger Chickering presents an absorbing analysis of Ludendorff's tortured attempts to explain Gemany's defeat without admitting that he himself might have made any mistakes, or that the Allies might have produced armies capable of beating even the Germans. Giulia Künzi writes a fascinating chapter on the Italian invasion of Ethiopia—not total war, but much more than a nineteenth- century colonial campaign waged out of due time. Deborah Cohen writes on the very different treatment of disabled ex-servicemen in Britain and Germany—a remarkable piece of research, illuminated by human insight and sympathy. There is no firm conclusion on the definition and significance of "total war." Dennis Showalter ends his own thoughtful contribution by observing that, for different military thinkers, total war might be long or short, and might be fought by masses or by small forces—which leaves a lot of questions open. So it is the journey offered by this book, rather than any final vantage point, that its readers will appreciate. There remains a fifth volume still to come, dealing with the Second World War—surely a total war, if ever there was one.