The Shadows of Total War: Europe, East Asia, and the United States, 1919–1939

by Edited by Roger Chickering , Stig Forster

• ISBN13: 9780521812368
• ISBN10: 0521812364
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-01-20
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

The period between the two world wars of the twentieth century was one of the most crucial in the history of war. In anticipation of another conflict, military planners and civilian thinkers struggled after 1918 with the painful implications of World War I. Given its scope, the wholesale mobilization of civilian populations, and the targeting of civilians via blockades and strategic bombing, many observers regarded this titanic conflict as a 'total war'. They also concluded that any future conflict would bear the same hallmarks; and they planned accordingly. The essays in this collection, the fourth in a series on the problem of total war, examine the interwar period. They explore the lingering consequences of World War I, the intellectual efforts to analyze this conflict's military significance, the attempts to plan for another general war, and several episodes in the 1930s that portended the war that erupted in 1939.

Table of Contents

Contributors	ix
Introduction	1	(22)
Roger Chickering
Stig Forster
PART ONE REFLECTIONS ON THE INTERWAR PERIOD
The Politics of War and Peace in the 1920s and 1930s	23	(12)
Gerhard L. Weinberg
War and Society in the 1920s and 1930s	35	(20)
Hew Strachan
Plans, Weapons, Doctrines: The Strategic Cultures of Interwar Europe	55	(30)
Dennis E. Showalter
PART TWO LEGACIES OF THE GREAT WAR
Religious Socialism, Peace, and Pacifism: The Case of Paul Tillich	85	(12)
Hartmut Lehmann
No More Peace: The Militarization of Politics	97	(16)
James M. Diehl
The War's Returns: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914--1939	113	(16)
Deborah Cohen
The Impact of Total War on the Practice of British Psychiatry	129	(22)
Edgar Jones
Simon Wessely
PART THREE VISIONS OF THE NEXT WAR
Sore Loser: Ludendorff's Total War	151	(28)
Roger Chickering
Strangelove, or How Ernst Junger Learned to Love Total War	179	(18)
Thomas Rohkramer
Shadows of Total War in French and British Military Journals, 1918--1939	197	(26)
Timo Baumann
Daniel Marc Segesser
Yesterday's Battles and Future War: The German Official Military History, 1918--1939	223	(16)
Markus Pohlmann
``The Study of the Distant Past Is Futile'': American Reflections on New Military Frontiers	239	(16)
Bernd Greiner
PART FOUR PROJECTIONS AND PRACTICE
``Not by Law but by Sentiment'': Great Britain and Imperial Defense, 1918--1939	255	(16)
Benedikt Stuchtey
``Blitzkrieg'' or Total War? War Preparations in Nazi Germany	271	(14)
Wilhelm Deist
The Condor Legion: An Instrument of Total War?	285	(10)
Klaus A. Maier
Stalinism as Total Social War	295	(18)
Hans-Heinrich Nolte
Total Colonial Warfare: Ethiopia	313	(14)
Giulia Brogini Kunzi
Japan's Wartime Empire in China	327	(20)
Louise Young
Index	347