Mind-Munitions

Chapter 20
War and the Communications
Revolution
The twentieth century saw the arrival of a fundamentally different
kind of warfare: ‘Total War’. Although the Napoleonic wars and
the American War of Independence had foreshadowed this
phenomenon by their level of popular involvement, the world wars
of the twentieth century differed markedly from previous conflicts,
not just in their scale but also in the degree to which civilians were
affected by, and contributed directly to, events in the front line.
War now became a matter for every member of the population, a
struggle for national survival in which the entire resources of the
nation – military, economic, industrial, human, and psychological
– had to be mobilized in order to secure victory or avoid defeat.
Failure to mobilize on a maximum scale, as the experience of the
Russian Revolution of 1917 demonstrated, might result not simply
in defeat but in the very destruction of the old order.
The new warfare brought battle closer to the lives of ordinary
citizens than ever before, whether in the form of women being
recruited into factories or in the form of civilian bombing.
Conscription, air raid precautions, and rationing all became vital
factors. Ordinary men and women who had previously been largely
unaffected by the impact of wars fought by professional soldiers in
far-off lands now found themselves directly affected by events at
the front. In fact, the people themselves became the new front line;
men, women, and children formed the new armies and their
morale, their will to fight and resist on a mass scale, accordingly
became a significant military asset. Indeed, such was the nature of
the 1914-18 and 1939-45 conflicts, such was their scale in a
national, global, and psychological sense, and such was their cost
in terms of human destruction and material devastation, that war