The concept of total war transformed military thinking after 1918. The idea of national mobilization, of a blurred distinction between the soldier at the front and the workers and engineers at home, turned whole communities into objects of war. During the Great War the Allied blockade of Germany was directed primarily at the civilian population who felt its privations; the onset of long-range bombing of cities in 1917 and 1918 established the inglorious precedent that civilian installations and civilian morale could be regarded as legitimate targets for attack. The vital role of the economy in providing the sinews of mass, industrialized warfare hastened the development of a clear concept of economic warfare, directed against the trade and production of the enemy state. One lesson stood out above all others from the recent war. It was manifestly imperative to prepare well in advance for the prospect of another total war, or be caught on the hop. When the German defence minister, Wilhelm Groener, outlined the future course of German military policy in i926 his basic premiss was the need ‘to organize the entire strength of the people for fighting and working’.
No development better exemplified the new view of warfare than the development of military air power. From humble beginnings in i9i4, the air weapon by the end of the Great War had advanced beyond recognition. In 1918 the Allies established an Independent Air Force whose object was to fly deep into Germany to attack its industrial cities and undermine the morale of the German population, the direct forerunner of the vast Combined Bomber Offensive in the Second World War. During the 1920s the bombing threat assumed fantastic proportions. In 1921 the Italian General, Giulio Douhet, published The Command of the Air in which he outlined the probable course of the next war. He argued that aircraft would be the deciding factor because they could not be effectively stopped, and could inflict in a matter of days a ‘knock-out blow’ against the terrified population centres of the enemy. Though professional soldiers remained sceptical of the claim, the fear of a sudden annihilating assault from the sky dominated popular strategic debate from the 1920s down to the city-busting fears of the 1960s.
Douhet’s thesis posed a direct threat to Europe’s armies and navies, for if air power really could deliver the coup de grace, the old services were redundant. To prevent this reality the army and navy kept close control over the development of air power, tying it as firmly as possible to the strategic role of assisting surface forces. Even here redundancy threatened. Aircraft proved a more effective way of obtaining reconnaissance than the cavalry scouting party, while the application of air power to naval warfare (which made only slow headway in Europe) made the naval vessel an easy and expensive target. In practice, navies everywhere resisted this encroachment. Even by 1939 Germany and Italy had no aircraft carriers, France only one, and Britain had carriers, but no developed doctrine for their use.
Aircraft made most strides with army co-operation. The weapons developed during the Great War—fighter aircraft, tanks, machine-guns, and radio —transformed the traditional European army. Though horse soldiers accepted the fact with an ill grace, the days of cavalry were numbered. Nor could infantry continue to hold the battleground unprotected by aircraft and unassisted by tanks and armoured vehicles. The issue that the Great War had not resolved was how the new battle forces should be organized. There emerged two major schools of thought. On the one hand, the Great War appeared to confirm the superiority of defence over offence, and encouraged the view that fixed fortifications and a carefully prepared battlefield could blunt any attack, even by tanks. Massed artillery, machine-guns, and anti-tank weapons, supported where necessary by small mobile formations, parcelled out to the defending infantry, was thought sufficient to hold any enemy at bay and wear down his resistance. The most famous expression of this view was the broad line of fortifications built along the French eastern border, which bore the name of the French war minister, Andre Mag-inot, who set up the project in 1929. But the practice was repeated in Czechoslovakia, Italy, Belgium, and, later, in rearmed Germany. It was generally held in the 1920s that tanks in their existing technical form were too vulnerable to be used in concentrated attacks. Almost all armies used tanks simply as mobile artillery to support the infantry.
The contrary view was regarded by most military men after i9i8 as dangerously radical. Drawing on the lessons of limited tank warfare in the last year of the Great War, some military thinkers began to argue that the only way to free warfare from the trench stalemate was to restore both mobility and offensive power to the land army; and this could be done only by concentrating tanks and armoured vehicles in a powerful mailed fist, designed to pierce and destroy the enemy front. In Britain these ideas were vigorously promoted by, among others, Captain Basil Liddell Hart and Major-General J. F. C. Fuller, but little came of it. In France the conservative elements in the army leadership distrusted mechanization as they disliked other elements of encroaching modernity. Only in Germany did the idea of concentrated armoured warfare make much headway. Forced by disarmament to think of ways of maximizing the striking power of limited armed forces, and anxious to avoid another trench-based war, German military leaders explored in the 1920s the possibility of using tanks in mass. Since the use of tanks was outlawed, they shared their views with Red Army officers at secret training sites set up in the Soviet Union. Both sides were impressed by the results. In the Soviet Union the energetic young Chief of Army Staff, Mikhail Tukhachevsky, set about transforming Soviet forces by creating a powerful core of tanks, motor vehicles, and aircraft designed to inflict an annihilating blow on the enemy, but both Tukhachevsky and the plans for tank/air attack fell foul of Stalin, and were purged in 1937. Only in Germany, with the development of fast tanks and dive-bombing battlefield aircraft in the mid-i930s, did the concept of the armoured punch survive.
There was more at stake in these arguments than honest differences over strategy. The revolution in military technology and the management of mass armies required more professional, highly trained armed forces. Soldiers and sailors with scientific education or technical experience were needed to cope with the new weaponry. Skilled workers and mechanics were needed to service and maintain vehicles and aircraft in the field. Though traditional soldiers might deplore what one of them called the ‘Garage Army’, there was no disguising the change in the social composition and outlook of Europe’s armed forces. In the Soviet Union the change was dramatic; the old Imperial Army was broken up and replaced by the Red Army, run in the main by men who had been NCOs or junior officers in the war. Soviet leaders stressed the need for military modernization to match the more general process of modernizing Russian life. In the 1920s Soviet soldiers paraded on May Day on bicycles; ten years later Stalin watched a stream of tanks, lorries, and motor-cycles pass in front of him, certainly the largest, and among the most modern armed forces in the world. Elsewhere the transformation was slower and patchy. In Germany the engineering officers in the navy won parity with the combat officers, but remained the butt of sneers and disdain. In the German airforce, created in defiance of the Versailles settlement in 1935, ex-cavalry officers rubbed shoulders with professional airmen and technocrats in an uneasy alliance. In France the foremost champion of professionalization was the young Charles de Gaulle, whose book Vers I’armee de metier, published in 1933, was excoriated by military traditionalists, who feared that a merely functional view of military life would destroy the social prestige and political conservatism of French forces. The tension that existed in every military establishment between gentlemen and players, amateurs and professionals, reflected the wider resistance in European society against the impact of the industrial, managerial age.
World History
