The period between the two world wars of the twentieth century was one of the most challenging 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 mobilisation of civilian populations and the targets 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 inter-war period. They explore the consequences of World War I, the intellectual efforts to analyse 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.
Contributors; Introduction Roger Chickering and Stig Forster; Part I. Reflections on the Inter-war Period: 1. The politics of war and peace in the 1920s and 1930s Gerhard L. Weinberg; 2. War and society in the 1920s and 1930s Hew Strachan; 3. Plans, weapons, doctrines: the strategic cultures of interwar Europe Dennis E. Showalter; Part II. Legacies of the Great War: 4. Religious socialism, peace pacifism: the case of Paul Tillich Hartmut Lehmann; 5. No more peace: the militarisation of politics James M. Diehl; 6. The war's returns: disabled veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914-39 Deborah Cohen; 7. The impact of total war on the practice of British psychiatry Edgar Jones and Simon Wessely; Part III. Visions of the Next War: 8. Sore loser: Ludendorff's total war Roger Chickering; 9. Strangelove, or how Ernst Jünger learned to love total war Thomas Rohkrämer; 10. Shadows of total war in French and British military journals, 1918-39 Timo Baumann and Daniel Marc Segesser; 11. Yesterday's battles and future war: the German official military history, 1918-39 Markus Pöhlmann; 12. 'The study of the distant past is futile': American reflections on new military frontiers Bernd Greiner; Part IV. Projections and Practice: 13. 'Not by law but by sentiment': Great Britain and imperial defense, 1918-39 Benedikt Stuchtey; 14. 'Blitzkrieg' or total war? War preparations in Nazi Germany Wilhelm Deist; 15. The Condor Legion: an instrument of total war? Klaus A. Maier; 16. Stalinism as total social war Hans-Heinrich Nolte; 17. Total colonial warfare: Ethiopia Giulia Brogini Künzi; 18. Japan's wartime empire in China Louise Young; Index.
