The road to total war

The concentration of all economic power in the hands of the state would not have been necessary, nor could it have been justified, if its overriding purpose had not been to impose order on the one hand and fight its neighbors on the other.

As has been noted in a previous section, the establishment of the state was very soon followed by the development commonly known as the military revolution.^[276] Until then no European ruler had had more than a few tens of thousands of men under his command: the Battle of Rocroi, e.g., which in 1643 led to the replacement of Spain by France as the greatest power of the time, was fought by 48,000 men all told. Three decades later, the forces raised by Louis XIV and his opponents already numbered in the low hundreds of thousands. This kind of growth could not go on for ever and during the eighteenth century the size of warfare on land tended to stagnate. With a total of about 200,000 French, Imperial, British, and Dutch combatants involved on both sides, the Battle of Malplaquet (1709) proved the largest in European history until Napoleon, whereas the armies with which Louis XV waged the Seven Years War were scarcely, if at all, larger than those of his great-grand­father Louis XIV.^[277]

If the scale of warfare on land did not increase by much, the eighteenth century did see an explosion in military operations at sea. The principal seventeenth-century naval powers had been Spain (which, until 1660, had been united with Portugal) and the Netherlands; now, however, their fleets were completely overshadowed by those of Britain and France.

Meanwhile, both the scale of war on land and its intensity remained comparatively limited. In part this may have been due to humanitarian sentiment, arising out of a reaction to the excesses of the Thirty Years War: as Montesquieu, representing all that was best in Enlightenment thought, wrote in his Spirit of the Laws, in peace nations ought to do each other as much good as they could and in war as little injury as possible. In the main, though, the limitations that governed eighteenth-century war were the result of the political structure of each of the principal war­making states. Having been imposed on their peoples, often by main force, governments (except for the British one, and then within certain limits) knew themselves to be unrepresentative of the latter. Being so, they did not care to impose intolerable economic burdens, introduce universal conscription, or distribute arms: there was always the danger that the troops thus raised and armed would fight against their rulers rather than on their behalf.

Consisting of men who felt no commitment to the state that they served - ‘‘the filth of the nation,” as France's minister of war, the Comte Saint-Germain, once put it^[279] - eighteenth-century armies could be kept in existence only by means of a ferocious discipline under the open eye of their aristocratic officers. The requirement for discipline, plus some of the technical characteristics of the weapons in use, made it imperative that they move and fight in comparatively tight formations advancing shoul­der to shoulder in serried, orderly ranks. The need for such formations in turn dictated that they could not easily be used as skirmishers, on the pursuit, in terrain that was hilly or wooded, or at night. In addition certain logistic constraints applied. The dependence of eighteenth-century ar­mies on their ‘‘umbilical cords of supply” has often been exaggerated; however, it is true that most troops could not be trusted to forage on their own but had to be very carefully supervised by a cordon of NCOs that used to be thrown out around them. Even if they could be trusted, many regions did not have a sufficiently dense population to permit large-scale warfare to take place in them.¹¹⁴

Eighteenth-century battles could be as ferocious as any. There was, as a rule, no attempt at taking cover or adopting camouflage; dressed in long, straight lines, approaching each other to the sound of drums at exactly seventy-five paces in the minute, the troops would halt at a range where they could see the whites of each other's eyes and start blasting away. As a result, it was common for as many as a third of them to become casualties within a period, say, of between six and eight hours.¹¹⁵ On the other hand, soldiers were expensive and battles risky. Accordingly, comman­ders such as Turenne and the marechal de Saxe spent entire campaigning seasons maneuvering against their opponents with only the occasional minor clash to relieve the boredom of marching and countermarching; the latter even wrote that a good general might spend his entire career without being brought to battle.

Service: The Training of the British Army, 1715-1798 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), p. 268.

¹¹⁴ On the logistics of eighteenth-century armies, see M. van Creveld, Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton (London: Cambridge University Press, 1978), ch. 1; and G. Perjes, ‘‘Army Provisioning, Logistics and Strategy During the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century,” Acta Historica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 16 (Budapest: Academy of Sciences, 1965).

¹¹⁵ For some figures, see D. Chandler, The Art of Warfare in the Age of Marlborough (London: Batsford, 1976), pp. 302-7; Duffy, The Military Experience in the Age of Reason, pp. 245ff.

¹¹⁶ See the contemporary military writer Friedrich Wilhelm von Zanthier, quoted in M. Jahns, Geschichte der Kriegswissenschaften vornehmlich in Deutschland (Munich: Vorein, 1889-), vol. III, pp. 296-7; and M. S. Anderson, The Rise of Modern Diplomacy 1450-1919 (London: Longmans, 1993), pp. 163-80. and the creation of new ones. War was a question of occupying a district here and a province there, whether in Europe or, even more frequently, overseas, where some of the most significant exchanges took place.

With the outbreak of the French Revolution, these and other limita­tions on eighteenth-century warfare disappeared. The trinitarian division of labor between the government that directed the war, the armed forces that fought and died, and the people who paid and suffered remained as it had been since 1648; in some ways it became even stricter than before, given that officers ceased to be independent businessmen but came to depend exclusively on the state for advancement and remuneration.

The first to institute the levee en masse was the French National Con­vention in its famous decree of 25 August 1792.^[281] Written by Bertrand Barere, it called for the ‘‘permanent requisitioning” of men, women (who were to ‘‘work at the soldiers’ clothing, make tents, and become nurses’’), old men (who were to ‘‘betake themselves to the public squares and preach the hatred of tyrants’’), and even children, who were to make lint of old linen. So much did the delegates like the rhetoric that they asked for the decree to be read twice over; from this time every citizen was to be a soldier and every soldier a citizen. In practice the infrastructure necessary for implementing the decree was deficient and the results less than perfect - the only persons actually called up were men between eighteen and twenty-five years old, and then only if they were unmarried. Even so, martial enthusiasm did not last for long; staying in France as a prisoner in 1807, Clausewitz was surprised and not a little disgusted to see recruits led to the prefecture in chains.^[282] The size of the French army doubled from 400,000 or so during the Seven Years War to perhaps 800,000 in 1795-6, though not all of them could be trained, armed (the shortage of muskets at one time led to the production of pikes), or even properly clothed.

Having taken over from Carnot as ‘‘the organizer of victory,” Napo­leon used the full power of the police to break such opposition to con­scription as still existed.^[283] Not only was the imbalance between men and arms soon corrected, but the result was to provide the French state with forces larger than any since Herodotus had Xerxes lead a million and a half men into Greece in 480 BC; however, there was nothing mythical about the Grande armee. Instead of marching in a single block, as had been standard practice from the day of the Greek phalanx to that of Frederick the Great, willy-nilly the French troops had to be spread out over a much wider front in order to live and move. The construction of such fronts both demanded and was made possible by the organization of the forces into corps d'armee. First proposed by the National Convention in 1796, each corps or ‘‘body’’ possessed a permanent commander in the person of a marechal de France, a title which Napoleon did not invent but to which he gave a new, more precise significance. Each had its own staff and its own proper combination of the three arms (infantry, cavalry, and artillery), as well as its own intelligence, engineering, and logistic services. Each one constituted a miniature army in its own right, one which, as common wisdom went, was capable of performing its mission indepen­dently of the rest and of holding out for two or three days even in the face of a superior force attacking it.

With the reorganization of the forces, the entire nature of strategy changed.^[284] Previously armies had maneuvered against each other in fronts that were seldom more than four or five miles wide; but Napoleon’s corps were capable of moving 25-50 miles from each other while at the same time operating in accordance with a coherent, centrally dictated plan. Whereas eighteenth-century armies had merely tried to conquer provinces, now they sought to subjugate entire countries in rapid succes­sion. Whereas previously they had been forced to besiege each fortress on their way, now the great majority of fortified places could simply be bypassed (whereas Vauban at the beginning of the eighteenth century had reckoned that there were three sieges for each battle, the number of sieges that Napoleon conducted may be counted on the fingers of one hand). Living off the country and aiming straight for the jugular, French armies marched for the enemy's capital. If they found their way blocked, they used their superior command-and-control system to focus overwhelming numbers at the decisive point and defeat the enemy in one of those tremendous batailles rangees of which Napoleon boasted to have comman­ded no fewer than sixty. The results of this system were as rapid as they were spectacular. Starting in 1799, the time of Napoleon's second Italian campaign and the first one in which he was in command of all of the country's military resources, it took the French fewer than ten years to overrun the whole of Europe from the Pyrenees to the Vistula.

By 1813, when Napoleon himself conceded that ‘‘ces animaux ont apprenu quel'que chose'' (these animals have learnt a thing or two), the armies of other states were imitating the French methods. The process is perhaps best studied at the hands of Prussia which, following its defeat in 1806, set out to reform its army during the years that followed.^[285] Conscription, which hitherto had followed the old Kantonen system and brought in only the doltish inhabitants of the countryside, was extended and applied to the educated sons of the middle classes. They were given the choice between serving for two years, like everybody else, or for one year at their own expense, a privilege that most of them took since it enabled them to acquire the much-desired rank of Reserveleutenant. The officer corps, which hitherto had been governed by social status on the one hand and by seniority on the other, was reformed in such a way as to put greater emphasis on schooling (including that remarkable finishing school for officers, the Kriesgakademie) and competence. A corps or­ganization modeled on the French one was put in place. To control it, a proper general staff with headquarters in Berlin and branches throughout the army was established; during the years of the Second Reich it was to become the most prestigious institution in the country.^[286] In the persons of Gerhard von Scharnhorst, August von Gneisenau, Carl von Clausewitz, and their comrades, the Prussians were also fortunate to possess officers who, in addition to their practical ability to command in war, displayed an exceptionally deep grasp of its history and theory. This quality enabled them to institutionalize the reforms so that they were passed from one generation to the next.

With all states busily reforming and expanding their armies to resist the French battalions, the scale of warfare changed out of all recognition. In 1812 Napoleon invaded Russia with no fewer than 600,000 men - perhaps three times as many as had been concentrated in a single theater of war since history began. The largest contemporary battle was fought around Leipzig in October 1813; had it not been dubbed the Battle of Nations, it would have deserved the title Mother of All Battles. The total number of combatants present stood at 460,000 of whom 180,000 were French, the rest Prussian, Russian, and Austrian (assisted by a few Swedes). Indeed so large was the scale on which military operations were now conducted that it proved impossible to bring all the troops to bear on each other at the same time and place. Instead of lasting for one day, as had been the case of virtually all battles from prehistory until then, the one at Leipzig lasted for three. It really comprised three separate en­gagements fought simultaneously, with Napoleon himself rushing from one to another and controlling, if any, only one.¹²⁴

During the years 1815-66 no other battles as large as this one took place between modern armies, though those which did take place were, relative to their size, quite as bloody.¹²⁵ This was the period of the Restoration and of the Reaction. Its outstanding characteristic was the fact that, from Moscow through Berlin and Vienna all the way to Paris, the crowned heads who occupied the various thrones feared their own populations more than they did each other. Accordingly there was a tendency to make armies less representative of the nation. France and most other countries did away with conscription, albeit not completely and in ways that usually made considerable reserves available to the standing peacetime forces.¹²⁶ The most important use to which armies were put was not to wage interstate war but to guard against revolution - gegen demokraten hilfen nur Soldaten (soldiers are the only cure for democ­racy), as the saying went. Thus French troops helped the Spanish gover­nment fight the series of civil conflicts known as the Carlist Wars. In 1830-1 a Prussian Army of Observation cooperated with the Russians as they put down the Polish insurrection in Warsaw. In 1848-9 French troops saved the pope by putting an end to Mazzini's Roman Republic, Austrian troops resorted to an artillery bombardment to reconquer their own capital, and Prussian ones were sent to drive the revolutionaries out of the southwestern German state of Baden. The climax came in May

¹²⁴ On the Battle of Leipzig and Napoleon’s loss of control, see Vitzthum von Eckstädt, Die Hauptquartiere im Herbstfeldzug 1813 auf dem deutschen Kriegsschauplätze (Berlin: Mittler, 1910).

¹²⁵ Compare figures on the Battles of Leipzig (460,000 combatants, 90,000 casualties), Solferino (240,000 combatants, 40,000 casualties), and Gettysburg (160,000 com­batants, 50,000 casualties), from Harbottle's Dictionary of Battles (New York: van Nostrand, 1981, 3rd edn.).

¹²⁶ For these developments, see G. Best, War and Society in Revolutionary Europe, 1789-1870 (London: Fontana, 1982), pp. 191-309; and J. Gooch, Armies in Europe (London: Routledge, 1980), pp. 50-80.

1849 when Russian forces, acting on the invitation of the government in Vienna, invaded Hungary to extinguish the revolution there, an operation which they had to repeat in Warsaw fifteen years later.

While the scale of warfare was limited by its being put into a pressure cooker, so to speak, military technology flourished as never before. This is not the place to delve into the nature of the scientific revolution or the industrial revolution that followed it after a comparatively brief interval. Suffice it to say that, before the rise of the state around the middle of the seventeenth century, no weapon was capable of firing to a distance of more than perhaps half a mile or of moving faster than the pace of a galloping horse, while at sea the largest ships were still made of wood and possessed no more than 500-600 tons of deadweight. Given that military technological progress - including, above all, the invention of gunpowder - began to accelerate several centuries before the state ap­peared upon the scene, to blame the latter for the former would be less than fair, the more so since it is not at all clear whether military technol­ogy ‘‘pulled” technology (as Trotsky and others have suggested) or whether, on the contrary, weapons and weapons systems were merely one offshoot of technological progress as a whole.^[287]

Even when all this is taken into account, however, the fact remains that modern means of death and destruction would never have been possible without the state, its ministry of defense (which, until 1945, was called simply the ministry of war), and its regular, uniformed, bureaucratically managed armed forces.^[288] The forces of most previous political entities had been too disorganized and too temporary to offer scope for sustained military-technological progress. This was particularly true of feudal levies and mercenaries, both in Europe and in other parts of the world. The former were part-time warriors who, if not engaged in hunting and similar aristocratic pursuits, spent most of their time looking after their estates. The latter either led a nomadic life, moving from one employer to the next, or else simply went home each time a war was over. However, it was almost equally true of the standing armies built by some of the empires discussed in chapter 1 of this volume. Few of those really amounted to professional forces in the modern sense of the term, given that their officers were often selected less for their military ability than for their loyalty.

Once the modern state started introducing regular, standing armies and navies, the situation changed. To a greater extent than any of their predecessors, such forces provided a permanent market for weapons and weapons systems. Already toward the end of the seventeenth century the navy was the largest employer (as well as the largest buyer of goods and services) in the entire British economy;^[289] such was the demand for uniforms created by the forces of Louis XIV that it led to the invention of the first primitive machines used for sewing buttons on cloth.^[290] Almost for the first time in history, there now existed forces that received their entire income directly from the state and which, however much they might detest the ruler of the moment, were seldom engaged in conspiring against the institution itself. Increasingly excluded from participation in political life, gradually deprived of other functions such as police work, and deliberately isolated from civilian society, they possessed unprece­dented freedom to devote their full attention to discovering new and better ways of killing and destroying others of the same kind.

When developing professionalism was joined to the industrial revol­ution spreading outwards from Britain, the results could not be anything but explosive. Armed with cannon manufactured according to the new Gribeauval system, Napoleon’s forces would have made short shrift of Frederick’s army a mere thirty or forty years earlier; but whatever prog­ress took place during the years from 1760 to 1815 was dwarfed by the changes that started following each other from 1830 on. First came percussion caps, which finally did away with the need for flints to generate sparks and set off the powder. Next the muzzle-loading musket, which except for the replacement of wooden ramrods by iron ones had remained almost unchanged from Blenheim to Waterloo, was replaced by rifles capable of firing three to six times as often for a greater distance and, after some early experimentation, with greater accuracy - to say nothing of the fact that, being loaded from the breach rather than through the muzzle, for the first time in history they enabled men to fight while taking cover and without necessarily standing on their feet. Developments in artillery proceeded in parallel. Beginning in the 1850s, smoothbore bronze and iron muzzle-loaders were progressively replaced by rifled steel breech­loaders. By 1870 the best cannon were the Prussian ones. Manufactured by the firm of Krupp, they were capable of firing three times as far as their Napoleonic predecessors and possessed a rate of fire four or five times as large. For the first time since the sixteenth century, too, ammunition began to show some progress, with solid iron balls replaced by shrapnel and high explosive shells which were provided with clockwork fuses.¹³¹

Even more important to the development of war and conquest at the hand of the state was the improvement that took place in the infrastruc­ture of war. Traditionally military transport had been limited to horse­drawn wagons and military communications to mounted messengers; but now telegraphs and railways began to cover entire countries (later con­tinents) with networks in such a way as to revolutionize the state's control over its territory, population, and armed forces. The first telegraphs - optical, not electrical - were constructed in France during the early years of the Revolution and, as might be expected, were no sooner completed than they were used for the conduct of war.¹³² During the next three decades, Spain (which claimed to have designed a more important system than France itself),¹³³ Britain, Prussia, and Russia all followed, building systems that reached from London to Dover and Portsmouth, from Berlin to Trier, and from Moscow to Warsaw. While each of the systems was slightly different from a technical point of view, from the beginning all of them had as their overriding purpose serving the military needs of the state. After 1830 or so the place of optical telegraphs was taken by the more efficient electric ones. Their construction was paralleled by that of the railways; given that the efficient operation of the latter depended on the correct use of the former, the two tended to run together like siamese twins.¹³⁴

Already during the 1850s the French engaged on the construction of a railway net specifically designed for military purposes, one that served them very well in the war of 1859 against Austria. Had it not been for rails and wires the American Civil War would have been absolutely incon­ceivable. The conflict of 1861-5 does, indeed, deserve to be called the first railway war; given that both sides very often made their moves dependent on the availability of track - as Sherman's invasion of the South was - or else aimed at disrupting that of the enemy (Sherman again, this time in his operations against Atlanta in 1864). Railways alone made it possible for the Federals to call up no fewer than 2 million men during the conflict, an achievement which, against a population basis of only 27 million dispersed over a huge country, was unparalleled until

¹³¹ A short account of the nineteenth-century military-technological revolution is B. Brodie and F. Brodie, From Cross Bow to H Bomb (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1959), pp. 124-71.

¹³² A. S. Field, ‘‘French Optical Telegraphy, 1793-1855: Hardware, Software, Adminis­tration,” Technology and Culture, 35, 2, 1994, pp. 315-47.

¹³³ A. Rumeu de Armas, ‘‘La linea telegrafica Madrid-Cadiz (1800), primera de Espana y segunda de Europa,” Hispania, 42, 152, 1982, pp. 522-63.

¹³⁴ See for this entire story D. Showalter, Railroads and Rifles: The Influence of Technological Developments on German Military Thought and Practice, 1815-1865 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1975). then. Almost equally unparalleled was the number of dead, which in a mere four years amounted to no fewer than 600,000 on both sides.

The real demonstration of what the marriage of the state and tech­nology could do, however, was still to come. Unlike most European states, Prussia had not done away with conscription after 1815. More than most European states, its central position and flat, featureless terrain put it in a position to use the railways once the necessary capital and know-how became available - not a great step for a nation which, as we saw, already possessed the best education system in the world. Beginning in the 1850s, these factors led to the construction of an incomparably efficient railway network. Though the network was not governed ex­clusively by military considerations, Moltke as chief of the general staff was an ex officio member of the commission that governed it; that he was also a shareholder in the railways is interesting but, for our purposes, beside the point. Plans for mobilization were developed and rehearsed time and again with painstaking accuracy. In 1866, when the first great trial came, the world held its breath as the world's smallest great power called up over 300,000 troops and concentrated them on the Austrian border, all with unprecedented order and at unprecedented speed. In­deed, such was the superiority of the Prussian use of their railways in 1866 and 1870 that both wars in question were decided almost before the first shot was fired. Having been thrown off balance, both Austrians and French found themselves on the defensive and never recovered.

Whereas the American Civil War was all but ignored in Europe - as Moltke himself put it, there was nothing there but two mobs chasing each other across an enormous, half-deserted countryside - the Prussian vic­tories were studied very closely. Beginning in 1873, one country after another did away with its antiquated military system and introduced universal conscription of the male population. By 1914 this even applied to Japan, which had only recently adopted what was known as ‘‘the standard of civilization”; the only remaining exceptions were Britain and the United States, both of which, however, followed the example of the rest during World War I. Conscription and an effective reserve system - itself made possible by the railways - in turn enabled monstrous armed forces to be created; when August 1914 came the most important powers counted their members not in the hundreds of thousands but in the millions.¹³⁵ Nor was this by any means the end of the story. Thus the German Army, which including its various reserves numbered almost 4.5 million men at the beginning of the war, grew to approximately 6.5 million in 1917 - most of the increase being concentrated in the technical

¹³⁵ For the strength of 1914 armies, see H. Kuhl, Der deutsche Generalstab in Vorbereitung und Durchführung der Weltkrieg (Berlin: Mittler, 1920), pp. 16, 63, 87, 103. arms such as the artillery, the air service, and, above all, the signals corps. Between 1914 and 1918 the number of those who wore German uniform exceeded 13 million. Of these, approximately 2 million lost their lives. The total number of dead is estimated at about 10 million, not counting perhaps as many who died of war-related diseases.

By this time the railway and the telegraph had been joined by the motor car, the telephone, and the teleprinter. Making use of those instruments, the war also proved a turning point in terms of the ability of the state to mobilize its economy for military purposes. The result was a conflict fought on a scale inconceivably larger than anything before it. Thus, between 1914 and 1916 alone the average daily consumption of supplies per army division increased by a factor of three from 50 to 150 tons.¹³⁶ Whereas, at the beginning of the conflict, an army was considered very well prepared if it had in stock 1,000 rounds per artillery barrel, four years later there were batteries which fired that quantity of ammunition per day; meanwhile the German army's consumption of small arms ammunition had reached 300 million rounds a month. Other items, some of them traditional - throughout the war horse-fodder remained the single most bulky commodity shipped from Britain to France - and others newly invented were consumed or expended in proportion. Among the in­novations were land and sea mines, produced and sown in the millions by all the belligerent states. Then there were hundreds of thousands of miles of barbed wire - to say nothing of that World War I specialty never before or since used on a similar scale, i.e., poison gas.

During the years 1919-39 much thought and goodwill were spent in attempts to find ways to prevent states from involving humanity in another catastrophe of the same kind.¹³⁷ As the failure of these attempts was to show, even greater efforts were devoted to discovering even more effective ways for states to fight each other. Some of these attempts were specifically designed to avoid a recurrence of the slaughter, as, for example, those of the British military pundit Basil Liddell Hart. Having been born in 1895, Liddell Hart was of exactly the right age to be gassed at the Somme in 1916 and thus knew the horrors of war at first hand. As he watched the names of most of his fellow students in pre-war Cambridge University appear on the memorial tables erected after 1919, he lost his previous faith in the wisdom of the British general staff.¹³⁸ The rest of his life he devoted to finding better (read faster and more economical) ways of

¹³⁶ Pre-war figures are from Oberste Heeresleitung, Taschenbuch fur Offiziere der Verker- hrstruppen (Berlin: Oberste Heeresleitung, 1913), p. 84; 1916 ones are from A. Henniker, Transportation on the Western Front, 1914-1918 (London: HMSO, 1937), p. 103. ¹³⁷ See below, ch. 6, ‘‘The waning of major war,” pp. 337-54.

¹³⁸ The most recent work on Liddell Hart's intellectual development is A. Gat, ‘‘The Hidden Sources of Liddell Hart's Ideas,'' War in History, 3, 3,July 1996, pp. 293-308. fighting. His first suggestion was the so-called indirect approach, consist­ing of sophisticated operations launched not against the enemy's front, as in 1914-18, but into the spot where they were least expected and would do the greatest harm. Later, influenced by his fellow British military reformer, Colonel (later Major-General) John Frederick Fuller, he sought to carry out the operations in question by means of the new armored forces then being established. By the mid-1930s Liddell Hart had gained an international reputation and could justly claim to have invented the kind of operation that was later to become known as the Blitzkrieg, although in truth there is little to show that his views had any great influence on the practical soldiers of the time.^[291]

Whereas Liddell Hart's attempt to find cheaper - read more effective - ways of waging war at least had the merit of sparing the civilian leg of the trinity, the same cannot be said of his Italian fellow theorist, General Giulio Douhet. Originally an army officer, Douhet had had plenty of opportunity to observe the futility of infantry attacks against a fortified defense - between 1915 and 1917 there were no fewer than eleven offensives on the Isonzo, all of which failed with horrendous casualties. There simply had to be a better way, and by the time the war ended he believed he had discovered it in the form of the aircraft. First used for military purposes during the 1911 Italian-Turkish war and then, on a vastly greater scale, in 1914-18,^[292] the aircraft's outstanding qualities were its speed and flexibility, qualities which enabled it to switch from one target to another regardless of the intervening terrain and regardless (almost) also of the distance between them. Since all points could not be protected at the same time, this made it into an offensive weapon par excellence. Instead of wasting one's airpower to attack the enemy's stron­gest sector, i.e., his armed forces, Douhet wanted to see it used first against the enemy's air bases in order to obtain command of the air (a term he took from naval warfare and defined as the ability to fly while denying that ability to the enemy) and then his civilian population cen- ters.^[293] Basing himself on the German attacks on London during World War I, which had led to a handful of casualties as well as considerable panic, Douhet confidently expected such ‘‘strategic'' bombardment to bring any country to its knees within a matter of days, even to the point where ground combat would be both unnecessary and useless.

In the event these and other visions of future war were destined to be overshadowed by, or perhaps one should say incorporated in, the work of another and, if not greater, at any rate more experienced thinker, the German Erich Ludendorff. As wartime quartermaster-general of the German army and de facto ruler of Germany, Ludendorff had an un­rivaled opportunity to observe war at the top. Having spent two years in charge of the mightiest military establishment ever seen, he did not share the belief that a modern great power could be brought down by a few operations, however indirect, or even by fleets of aircraft bombing what­ever there was to bomb. Both, to be sure, were to be employed for all they were worth; not only was Ludendorff himself unmatched as an oper­ational expert - a quality he had proved by the series of brilliant victories won over the Russians in 1914-16 - but he was anything but squeamish in his resolution to use whatever methods were necessary for achieving victory. Modern war, however, could be won only by the total mobiliz­ation of all the state's demographic, economic, and industrial resources under the rule of a military dictator. Since such ‘‘in-depth'' mobilization took time, it had to be started in peacetime, which in turn meant that the dictatorship, presumably under none other than the Feldherr Ludendorff himself, was to be made permanent.¹⁴²

When World War II broke out in 1939 it at first tended to confirm the visions of Liddell Hart and Fuller in particular. Whether or not the operations that finished off first Poland and then Norway, the Low Countries, France, Yugoslavia, Greece, the British imperial positions in the Middle East, and (almost) Russia were indirect is moot; what is not moot is that they were spearheaded by armored forces made up of tens, later hundreds, of thousands of machines ranging from light reconnais­sance vehicles (jeeps) all the way to personnel carriers, motorized or self-propelled artillery, and tanks. Maneuvering this way and that, those forces were supported by fleets of aircraft, albeit they owed little to Douhet and, initially at any rate, concentrated on military targets rather than civilian ones.¹⁴³

However, the early victories proved misleading. If small and medium powers could be wiped off the map by a handful of Panzer divisions and the air fleets that accompanied them and provided them with cover, continental ones such as the Soviet Union and Germany itself could not. First the Wehrmacht, then the Red Army, and finally the armies of the Western Allies learnt that their reach was limited. Such were the logistic requirements of modern mechanized offensives that, whenever

¹⁴² E. Ludendorff, The Nation at War (London: Hutchinson, 1938), pp. 11-85.

¹⁴³ SeeM. van Creveld, Airpower and Maneuver Warfare (Maxwell AFB, AL: Air University Press, 1994), ch. 2.

they passed the 200-mile mark, they tended to collapse under their own weight, even when, as in Russia in the summer of 1941 or France in the autumn of 1944, enemy resistance was weak or absent.^[294] As a result, though operational movements were much bolder and progressed much deeper than in World War I, World War II, like its predecessor, devel­oped into a vast struggle of attrition.

As the belligerents proceeded to mobilize their entire economies for this struggle, they also turned to strategic bombing as a means to disrupt the other side's mobilization - thus demolishing the distinction between government, army, and people that had been built up so laboriously from 1648 on. The first who tried to bring entire countries to their knees by means of aerial bombardment were the Germans in Warsaw and Rotter­dam (though the attack on the latter may have been the result of a communications failure). Next, they launched the so-called Blitz against Britain; but the German air force, having been built with a different style of war in mind, did not really have the aircraft or the staying power necessary for the purpose. In this way the honor of being the first- and, to this day, almost the only - ones to apply ‘‘strategic'' bombing on a really large scale belongs to Britain and the United States. Whether or not their air commanders had read Douhet - and they probably had not - they were not backward in proposing that mighty fleets of aircraft, each propelled by four engines and each carrying perhaps three to five tons of explosive, could win the war against the Axis almost unaided. In the event their claims proved exaggerated; once they had been joined with radar, aircraft proved that they could fight quite as effectively on the defense as on the offense. Whether, given the technological realities of World War II, a better way of overcoming Germany and Japan than bombing their cities could have been found remains in dispute to the present day.^[295] What is not in dispute is that some 2.5 million tons of bombs were dropped by the US Air Force and Royal Air Force together. When Allied troops entered German towns in 1945, they found them abandoned even by the birds.

Meanwhile, in an attempt to discover even more effective ways of demolishing each other, states had started mobilizing science for the purpose; instead of being left to private initiative, as had usually been the case before 1914, the process of scientific-technological invention itself was conscripted and put at the disposal of the state.^[296] During World War II the scale of the effort was expanded, to the point that tens of thousands of scientists were set to work full-time in order to develop better weapons and incidentally, find out what the enemy might have had up his sleeve. Military-technological progress, which until the middle of the nineteenth century could usually be measured in decades, was ac­celerated until it took only a few years or even months to design a new weapons system and bring it into operation. For example, the German Messerschmidt 109 and British Spitfire fighters both made their debut in 1938-9. By 1944-5 the former had gone through nine model changes, the latter through fourteen, at which point both were replaced by new, even more powerful types.^[297] This experience was entirely typical. A 1940- vintage tank did not stand the slightest chance against one produced only two or three years later, while the aircraft carriers with which the US navy, for one, ended the war were about twice as large as the ones with which it entered it.

The state's greatest triumph was, however, yet to come. Between 1939 and 1945 somewhere between 40 and 60 million people were killed with the aid of conventional arms; still not content with this, states continued the search for more powerful weapons. In secret desert locations, protec­ted by miles upon miles of barbed wire, the best minds were concen­trated, provided with unlimited funds, and set to work. In 1938 Otto Hahn in Berlin became the first to split the atom. The significance of the discovery having been explained to him by his former assistant, Lise Meitner, within two years articles on nuclear physics had disappeared from the international scientific literature - a clear sign that the defense establishments of the most powerful states had taken over and that not even the most basic secrets of the universe were any more safe from their clutches.^[298] Such was the magnitude of the task that it could be accom­plished only by the state, and then by the largest and most powerful state of all. On the other hand, the speed with which it was accomplished is astonishing, thus providing yet another proof of what the state could really do once it had made up its mind. Less than three years passed from the appointment of General Leslie Groves, an excellent organizer hither­to known mainly for his mania about secrecy, to head the Manhattan Projectto the detonation of the first bomb at Los Alamos.^[299] On the sixth of August 1945, a fine summer day, a single heavy bomber appeared over Hiroshima and dropped a single bomb. Moments later the sky was torn open. A thousand suns shone, 75,000 or so people lay dead or dying, and total war, which the states of this world had spent three centuries perfect­ing, abolished itself.