HI 233 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Total War
Experiences of War: Images and Realities
People did not foresee that this war would last four years; they were basing the length and
outcome of this war on the war of 1870 between France and Prussia. They imagined it would be
a conventional war with set battles, not one with “total war” with entire societies mobilized as a
part of the war machine and targeted as so.
This was the most mechanized war (to that point in time)...
● Factory production needed to be controlled
● Needed to allocate materials on a new scale
● Aircraft, gas, railways, tanks, new guns, and new technologies were put to the war effort
● Medical treatments and new products were created and distributed as well
Governmental Intervention
● In order to ensure everything went well (ex: railroads could deliver efficiently, steel
would be produced in factories) the government had to intervene
● This new relationship between states and economies constituted a turning point in history
● Governments had to maintain the control over the flow of information
○ How would they get volunteers to fight?
○ How would they get volunteers to donate money?
○ How would they have order/discipline in society?
● Governments had to keep everyone focused on the war effort and a new burst of
propaganda showed everyone as a vital part of the cause
○ This had to look appealing to people
Propaganda: Mobilizing forces
● Examples are online
● The landscape has been totally polluted; before the war, artists were painting about farms
and nature
○ Now there’s trench warfare that was a landscape of smoke, mud, death
● All artists were dealing with the tragic turn of war
○ Example is Wilfred Owen’s “Gas Attack” poem detailing the horrors of a death
by gas bombs
Mutinies
● Stemmed from the reports from soldiers, like Owen, that everything the government said
to their people was a lie, the war was a lie
○ The scale of casualties and the nature of the fighting led to soldiers being so sick
of being thrown into charges against the enemy, that they refused to fight
● France, 1917 mutinies were brought under control by promising not to send their soldiers
into suicide charges anymore
● Russia, 1917 was losing badly to Germany and Austria, so mutinies banded together to be
part of the reason the Russian monarchy was overthrown (start of the Russian
Revolution)
Sense of Loss
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
People did not foresee that this war would last four years; they were basing the length and outcome of this war on the war of 1870 between france and prussia. They imagined it would be a conventional war with set battles, not one with total war with entire societies mobilized as a part of the war machine and targeted as so. This was the most mechanized war (to that point in time) Needed to allocate materials on a new scale. Aircraft, gas, railways, tanks, new guns, and new technologies were put to the war effort. Medical treatments and new products were created and distributed as well. In order to ensure everything went well (ex: railroads could deliver efficiently, steel would be produced in factories) the government had to intervene. This new relationship between states and economies constituted a turning point in history. Governments had to maintain the control over the flow of information.
