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Home fronts : the mobilization of resources for total war
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Purseigle, Pierre (2012) Home fronts : the mobilization of resources for total war. In: The Cambridge history of war. Cambridge Histories online, 4, War and the Modern World . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 257-284. ISBN 9781139021203
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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHO9781139021203.014
Abstract
Scholars customarily mock the naïve assumption that World War I would be over by Christmas 1914. 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. Still, the extent to which the current conflict would transform life on the home front was poorly understood.
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. Two examples might be cited. 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. 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. Yet both stressed the centrality of the state in the process of mobilization. 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.
| Item Type: | Book Item | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Divisions: | Faculty of Arts > History | ||||
| Series Name: | Cambridge Histories online | ||||
| Publisher: | Cambridge University Press | ||||
| Place of Publication: | Cambridge | ||||
| ISBN: | 9781139021203 | ||||
| Book Title: | The Cambridge history of war | ||||
| Official Date: | December 2012 | ||||
| Dates: |
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| Volume: | 4, War and the Modern World | ||||
| Page Range: | pp. 257-284 | ||||
| Status: | Not Peer Reviewed | ||||
| Publication Status: | Published | ||||
| Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access | ||||
| Related URLs: |
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