Anticipating Total War: The German and American Experiences, 1871-1914, and: Great War, Total War: Combat and Mobilization on the Western Front, 1914-1918 (review)

Anticipating Total War: The German and American Experiences, 1871-1914. Edited by Manfred F. Boemeke, Roger Chickering, and Stig Förster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. ix+496. $64.95.

Great War, Total War: Combat and Mobilization on the Western Front, 1914-1918. Edited by Roger Chickering and Stig Förster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xii+531. $54.95.

These two volumes, which contain papers presented at conferences held at Augsburg, Germany, in 1994, and Münchenwiler, Switzerland, two years later, address the question of total war. Anticipating Total War asks in particular whether their experience of warfare between 1871 and 1914 led influential American and German observers to understand the type of warfare that emerged in 1914. Great War, Total War asks the somewhat more nebulous question of whether the Great War was "total." The first volume returns a solid consensus (the answer is no). The second comes to less consensus, but its essays are, on the whole, stronger, more provocative, and more useful.

Contributors include such renowned military historians as John Whiteclay Chambers II, Holger Herwig, Dennis Showalter, Hew Strachan, David Trask, Martin van Creveld, and Russell Weigley. Their essays, along with those of the editors themselves, are among the strongest, particularly in their comparative and international approach. Anticipating Total War focuses more narrowly on the United States and Germany, but Great War, Total War includes essays on France, Great Britain, and the Netherlands. Those nations' colonial wars bring the Philippines, China (through Sabine Dabringhaus's essay on German participation in the Boxer Rebellion), South Africa, and East Africa into the picture as well. As a result, the books are in the forefront of a historiography on the Great War that is increasingly global in focus.

It would be quite defensible to argue that the point of the Augsburg conference is moot since no one, no matter how prescient, could have predicted the carnage and totality (understood in these books as a Weberian ideal type) of 1914-18. Nevertheless, some observers, including Helmuth von Moltke the elder, Ivan Bloch, and Frederich Engels, came remarkably close. Moltke's analysis probably best captures the general viewpoint of contemporaries of the prewar years. He argued in 1890 that "the age of the cabinet war is behind us--all we have now is people's war . . . woe to him who sets Europe alight, who first puts the fuse to the powderkeg!"

Moltke's gloomy prediction of the future of warfare was rooted less in technology than in a belief that nation states, supported by modern economic infrastructures, would prove to be far more resilient than the monarchies of the nineteenth century. Those economies would be able to produce weaponry on an unprecedented scale, but Moltke, like most of his contemporaries, was far more preoccupied by the problem of defeating an energized people willing to suffer greatly rather than surrender. The collapse during the war of multiethnic states like Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Russia from domestic chaos may prove the point that an inability to deal with nationalism, not any problems with technology, doomed certain states to defeat.

Technological problems, these two volumes generally contend, were of secondary concern to military thinkers of the prewar period. The great military minds of Europe were expected to find some solution to the new firepower. Often, the answer was defined in moral terms. Political luminaries like Theodore Roosevelt as well as senior military thinkers like Joseph Joffre held to a belief that ordinary men, strongly motivated by nationalism and properly led by trained officers, could negate superior firepower. That men were still dying in an attempt to prove this belief as late as 1918 is a grim testimony to its prewar appeal.

Some optimists hoped that the new, powerful...