Harry Williams’s Lincoln and His Generals (1952), and Raymond Aron’s The Century of Total War (1955). For example, a wave of books on total war rolled out during and after World War II: Fletcher Pratt’s America and Total War (1941), T. People have turned to these questions of modernity and totality after new wars have further demonstrated the destructive capabilities of humankind. Conflicts of vision may have driven people to bloodlust before, but scholarship suggests that the coincidence of technical capability and doctrinal warfare distinguished the Civil War. Historians have described the Civil War as both a modern and a total war – modern for its use of technology, administrative efficiency, and public relations as tools of war, and total in its character as an all-consuming ideological crusade. In The Destructive War, Charles Royster touched on the gloomy anticipation that pervades these histories with a 1934 quotation by James Truslow Adams: “What the horrors of the next war are to be, no one dares envisage.” Royster added, “It went without saying that the next war would be more modern than its predecessor.” Indeed, scholarship presumes that what is modern in war consumes ever more of society in the working out of conflict, and many have seen the Civil War as, at least, a prelude to the brutal progress seen in World War II, Vietnam and other struggles. Works on the topic are suffused with a sense of regret and dread, often coming on the heels of deadly conflicts. Few have become more closely associated with the notion of “total war,” and thanks to the horrors of twentieth century battle he has become an icon of modernity. While the Carl Berg Company attempted to become supplier for frame parts again, it failed to develop an alloy that could match the characteristics of its competitor.“War is simply power unrestrained by constitution or compact.” With words like these General William Tecumseh Sherman helped secure himself and the American Civil War a place in the pantheon of modern conflicts. In the end, Duralumin became the main construction material for airship frames. This situation led to massive conflicts between the Carl Berg Company, the Dürener Metallwerke (the firm that fabricated Duralumin), the Zeppelin Company and military and scientific bodies responsible for armament production. alloys for the “Zeppelins.” Shortly before the war, however, Duralumin, a superior alloys, appeared on the scene.

A pioneer of aluminium processing in Germany, Carl Berg started towards the end of the 1890s to support the airship project of Count Zeppelin, and until the First World War his company remained the main supplier of aluminium. This article deals with the cooperation between Zeppelin and Carl Berg and their contribution to the development and improvement of aluminium alloys for German aviation. That is the theme of this chapter, which will address ways in which the dynamic of social mobilization in both world wars revealed the changing character of warfare itself. Yet both stressed the centrality of the state in the process of mobilization. A year later, the French scholar Elie Halévy observed that the “Era of Tyrannies” dates from August 1914, that is, from the time when the belligerent nations turned to a system which can be defined as follows: Halévy’s and Ludendorff’s political frames of reference could hardly have been more different.

In Der totale Krieg, which was published in 1935, Erich Ludendorff, Germany’s First Quatermaster-General during World War I, argued that only a military dictatorship could ensure the necessary mobilization of the nation’s resources in another war. After the guns fell silent in 1918, politicians, soldiers, and scholars attempted to make sense of an experience that had challenged conventional understandings of the relationship between war and civil society. Still, the extent to which the current conflict would transform life on the home front was poorly understood. However, a close examination of opinion in the belligerent states reveals a general understanding that wars, even those projected to be short, now required the comprehensive mobilization of societies. Scholars customarily mock the naïve assumption that World War I would be over by Christmas 1914.

Total war definition