Army General Philip Sheridan's stripping of the Shenandoah Valley, beginning on Septemand continuing for two weeks, was considered 'total war'. Roundhouse in Atlanta, Georgia following extensive damage from the Atlanta Campaign of the American Civil War American Civil Warĭuring the American Civil War, U.S. This war truly was total in that civilians on both sides participated to a significant extent in the war effort and in that armies on both sides waged war on the civilian population as well as military forces. Almost every citizen of the Heavenly Kingdom was given military training and conscripted into the army to fight against the Imperial forces.ĭuring this conflict both sides tried to deprive each other of the resources to continue the war and it became standard practice to destroy agricultural areas, butcher the population of cities and in general exact a brutal price from captured enemy lands in order to drastically weaken the opposition's war effort. It followed the secession of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom from the Qing Empire. About 20 million people died, many due to disease and famine. The Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864) was one of the deadliest wars in history, and the first total war in modern China. During the prolonged Peninsular War from 1808–1814 some 300,000 French troops were kept permanently occupied by, in addition to several hundred thousand Spanish, Portuguese and British regulars an enormous and sustained guerrilla insurgency-ultimately French deaths would amount to 300,000 in the Peninsular War alone. In the campaign of 1813 Allied forces in the German theater alone amounted to nearly one million whilst two years later in the Hundred Days a French decree called for the total mobilization of some 2.5 million men (though at most a fifth of this was managed by the time of the French defeat at Waterloo). In the Russian campaign of 1812 the Russians resorted to destroying infrastructure and agriculture in their retreat in order to hamper the French and strip them of adequate supplies. Over the coming two decades of almost constant warfare it is estimated that somewhere in the vicinity of five million died-probably about half of them civilians-and France alone counted nearly a million (by some sources in excess of a million) deaths. The wars merged into the Napoleonic Wars of the First French Empire from c1803. The young men shall fight the married men shall forge arms and transport provisions the women shall make tents and clothes and shall serve in the hospitals the children shall turn linen into lint the old men shall betake themselves to the public squares in order to arouse the courage of the warriors and preach hatred of kings and the unity of the Republic. The following decree of the National Convention on Augclearly demonstrates the immensity of the French war effort, when the French front line forces grew to some 800,000 with a total of 1.5 million in all services-the first time an army in excess of a million had been mobilized in Western history.:įrom this moment until such time as its enemies shall have been driven from the soil of the Republic all Frenchmen are in permanent requisition for the services of the armies.

The only solution, in the eyes of the Jacobin government, was to pour the nation's entire resources into an unprecedented war effort-this was the advent of the levée en masse. The fledgling republic found itself threatened by a powerful coalition of European nations. The French Revolutionary Wars introduced some of the first concepts of total war.

18th and 19th centuries French Revolutionary Wars and Napoleonic Wars In 1949, he was first to propose that a total war in the nuclear age would consist of delivering the entire nuclear arsenal in a single overwhelming blow, going as far as 'killing a nation'. USAF General Curtis LeMay updated the concept for the nuclear age. The concept is extended by some authors back as far as Clausewitz’s classic work On War as 'absoluter Krieg' (however, the relevant passages have been interpreted in diverging ways by different authors ), and to the French 'guerre à outrance' during the Franco-Prussian War.

The phrase can be traced back to the 1936 publication of General Ludendorff’s World War I memoir Der Totale Krieg (' The Total War'). 2.1 French Revolutionary Wars and Napoleonic Wars.

Total war definition