Chapter 7 explores the life on the water for Japanese sailors, and their tenuous connections to the Japanese home islands. Japanese society was mobilized for total warfare, which meant letter-writing campaigns for Japanese school children. Japanese society valorized the Imperial Japanese Navy, the pride of the nation, particularly after such Japanese victories at the Battle of Kolombangara.

The concluding chapter examines the impact of the Napoleonic Wars on Europe. Between 1803 and 1815, Europe plunged into an abyss of destruction as thousands died in the blood-soaked fields of Germany and Russia and savage street fighting in ruined Spanish cities. While many in the ruling classes would continue to consider war as a glorious undertaking – even as one that could rejuvenate tired and corrupt societies – no longer did they see it as a normal, ordinary part of human existence that could be engaged in on a regular basis without enormous cost. The Congress of Vienna signaled this change by establishing mechanisms of cooperation (the ‘Concert of Europe’) to maintain the peace among the major powers, rather than assuming that the powers would themselves instinctively act to limit the extent and destructiveness of military conflict.

Through pinpointing how Churchill’s perceptions of aerial bombardment evolved across his political career, this chapter highlights the ambivalence and incongruence that dogged his bombing policy from its earliest days: ultimately arguing that his vacillating approach towards the Allied bombing campaign – and his eventual calculated detachment from it – was not out of character. The chapter begins by establishing his preliminary beliefs about aerial bombardment; next, it traces how his bombing theory converted into destructive reality, from ‘aerially policing’ the British Empire in the 1920s to the Combined Bomber Offensive; finally, it examines how Churchill attempted to reconcile his incriminating role in the German firestorms with a war-scarred Britain after 1945.

Societies are transformed by total wars, which mobilize entire populations, penetrate society as a whole, and involve both civilian and military populations as direct targets of aggression, as well as resources for inflicting harm and destroying the enemy. Total wars bring about enormous (forced) movement of populations, as well as changes in gender roles and social class relations. Because most men are directly involved on the front lines of the war effort, new opportunities are created for women to become active in areas from which they were previously excluded. Also, because of the enormous sacrifices made by the general population and the real possibility of national defeat at the hands of the enemy, the rich also become more ready to make some sacrifices. During total wars, the rich–poor divide becomes smaller, as the rich make larger contributions toward the war effort. However, as discussed in this chapter, evidence suggests that this increase in political plasticity is only temporary. The rich–poor divide has increased enormously since World War II.

The Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School was a child of total war. In the aftermath of World War I, its founding members sought to understand the new phenomenon of total mobilization, the integration of all aspects of state, society, and economy into a war effort that effectively erased traditional distinctions between war and peace. Their conception of Marxism, and the development of their critiques of mass culture and fascism, were shaped by the outcome of this effort at understanding total warfare. This chapter reconstructs the trajectory of the critical responses to total warfare in the Weimar period by the founders of Critical Theory and their counterparts on the German Right. It reviews core texts by Horkheimer and Adorno to see how their critique of mass culture in the United States and fascist mobilization in Germany are informed by their encounter with total mobilization. In its concluding section, the chapter argues that the power of this critical project came at a steep price: convinced of totalizing nature of modern warfare, critical theorists had few resources to respond to new, lower-intensity armed conflicts characteristic of decolonization struggles.

This chapter examines the wartime population policy, the balanced distribution of population that became deliberated in the process of creating policies for “national land planning.” It analyzes the debates relating to population distribution policies as well as policy-oriented research activities mobilized for national land planning, the wartime government’s “sacred mission” to construct the new order in East Asia by establishing the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. By focusing on the population technocrat Tachi Minoru, the chapter describes how Tachi’s research reflected the political agenda of the wartime government, which primarily viewed the population as an invaluable resource to be deployed for the nation at war. It details how the research carried out with this understanding came to create the knowledge about gendered and racialized demographic subjects that were categorized around the notion of economic production and biological reproduction. The chapter also analyzes the technocrat’s research to illustrate the fragile nature of demographic knowledge produced for policymaking and concludes that the role of policy-oriented scientific investigation in wartime statecraft was by no means as stable as has been claimed.

The section, beside a standard recapitulation of the findings, offers several suggestions as to how the existing norms might be interpreted in the future. It proposes a consistent uniform approach to targeting in armed conflict. It points to the risks associated with excessive expansion of the category of lawful targets.

This chapter establishes the core principles of this study and defines its key terms. It problematises and deconstructs the relationship between the German ‘people’s community’, the Volksgemeinschaft, and the concept and practice of Total War in East Prussia. By establishing the mentality of the native population towards the war, this chapter assigns agency to those who would eventually become the main victims of late-war intra-ethnic violence. Subsequently, the chapter addresses the impact of the Party and the Wehrmacht on the behaviour of civilians, using as case-studies the construction of the Ostwall and the establishment of the Volkssturm in the second half of 1944. Finally, it examines how East Prussians viewed their roles within the late-war community of Germany and how they established the potential to break with the ‘traditional’ values of the National Socialist state.

The Introduction defines the main concepts of The Literature of Absolute War (i.e., “absolute war,” “absolute enmity,” “total war,” “traumatic realism,” “catastrophic modernism,” and “spectrum of possibilities”) and comments on some of the extreme challenges posed by absolute war to modern war writing.

This chapter outlines the strengths and background of the major powers before the war, as well as competing political and ideological factors, and the general development of military forces. The largest of the eventual belligerents: Britain, China and Russia, and their different structures. Similar contrasts between medium-sized powers, the United States and Japan. Smaller powers in continental Europe: France, with its empire, Germany, and Italy. Population advantage of Germany within Europe, despite territorial losses after World War I. ‘Satisfied’ and ‘unsatisfied’ powers. Political and ideological factors leading to war. Liberal democracy challenged. Communism as a dynamic force both in Europe and Asia. The radical right, a response partly to Communism and partly to the perceived failings of liberal democracy. Leaders of the radical right, Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany. Nationalist China, Jiang Jieshi, and anti-colonialism. Expectations about the nature of future war. Failure of arms limitation. ‘Total War’ theory and totalitarianism. Developments in armies, including armoured vehicles and mobility. Developments in navies. Independent/strategic and combined-arms use of air-power.

The Great War, as it began to be called as early as 1915, was a traumatic event in the life of everyone who lived through it. Industrial warfare fundamentally changed the experience of combat. In the midst of battle, physical violence fused with moral suffering. Mass death reversed the normal succession of generations. War crimes and genocides were committed against enemy civilians. The First World War was also a war of words and images. The new “cultures of war” served both to stigmatize enemies (external and internal) and to mobilize the home fronts. Yet this cultural mobilization did not remain unchanged throughout the war: the initial mobilization in 1914-1915 was followed by a process of disengagement, and later by a form of remobilization at the end of the conflict. Finally, the First World War did not end without a feeling of profound anxiety over the future of millions of veterans, who had experienced mass death and extreme violence on the battlefields. The question of violence is at the core of a new historiography studying the boundaries between war and peace, the legacies of the Great War in a global context and the “brutalization” of post-war politics.

This chapter gives an account of the relationship between military necessity and humanity, the status of ‘humanity’, and the general rule of limitation which denies the resort to Kriegsraison.

It is critical to understand how to use military force to achieve the political aim sought. This requires conducting a rational assessment of the situation, developing a strategy or plan for getting there, and determining the means required for fulfilling the plan and achieving the political aim. Critically, one of the worst failures of previous limited war is thinking that the forces must be “limited” because the political objective is. This is a fallacy. One can use overwhelming force in a war fought for a limited political aim. One should – at the least –

The first thing we have to do is fix how we think about limited war. To do this we have to repair how we think about all wars. The basis of our approach is to start with the political aim. This is established by the policymakers. The political and military leaders should then develop a grand strategy for fighting the war, meaning using all of the elements of national power in pursuit of the objective. Military strategy is an important part of this and is supported by operations, which then dictate battles and tactical responses. We must also be careful to avoid jargon and unclear terms such as “total war” because these are based upon undefinable concepts, such as the means used. Existing ideas on limited war are also of little use and must be replaced because they are built upon a Cold War situation that no longer exists, based upon poor and inconsistent definitions, and take as their archetypal case study the Korean War, which is misunderstood by those who write about it. The most prominent limited war writers also assume a form of rationality on the part of opponents that logically cannot be expected.