Total War

OIB: TOTAL WAR ESSAY PART I

Explain how the state in Britain evolved to ensure that the means of production met the inexorable demands of the military in WWI:

        When war broke out in Europe in 1914, Britain had only a small professional military force. So it needed a much larger one rapidly. The government started a massive recruitment campaign, with posters, leaflets, recruitment offices in every town and stirring speeches by government members.

This campaign was highly effective and after one month already half a million of British men were enrolled to serve their country and in 1916 more than 2 millions citizens had joined the army. The mass propaganda spread mostly through posters was sometimes aggressive and patriotic with slogans ordering to follow the call to war to make proud the country, the King and God. Some of the propaganda was addressed to women so that they would encourage their husband to go and fight. The most effective type of propaganda consisted in demonizing the German enemies by telling atrocities about them like the fact that Germans used boiled-up corpses to produce soap, the demonization of the enemy and the will of revenge worked very well in the recruitment process.  

However, in September 1915, we only counted 75,000 new engaged recruits and this represents a deficit of 400,000 if we compare with the recruitment rate in September 1914. This shows that there was a huge shortage of volunteer in 1915. So on the 25th of January 1916 the government introduced the First Military Service Bill that meant obligatory conscription for all single men aged between 18 and 40 years old and on the 16th of May the same year, the Second Military Service Bill was used to extend conscription to all married men as well. But not all the British agreed with conscription, when it was voted in parliament, fifty MPs including leading liberals voted against it. There was also a group of persons called conscientious objectors or more commonly ‘Conchies’. They were firmly opposed to the idea of fighting on the front for religious or political reasons and when they were caught they were often sent to prison were they were badly treated, some of them were even sentenced to death.

All these men gone to fight on the front are workers that Britain is loosing progressively, so some measures were taken to get back to a balance of the working force especially in war time to provide enough to help the country to continue to prosper and that is what the second paragraph is all about.

        On the 8th August 1914, just 6 days after war declaration on Germany, the British government introduced The Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) to manage the country during war-time. With this act, the government gave itself the power over the industries, the land distribution, and also a very strict control of the information concerning the war. This act was supposedly brought so the government would a sufficient control over the population’s daily life so that it would be easier for it to handle with the war. The main problems encountered in Britain during war-time were the munition crisis, the feeding of the country and control of information.

At the beginning of the year 1915, the country face its first major trouble related to the war. As the war was becoming a stalemate in December 1914, Britain army faced a high ‘munition crisis’ because there was a shortage of skilled workers gone to the front in key industries. To solve this problem a coalition was created within the government and Lloyd Georges was made Minister of Munitions. He tried to make skilled workers stay where the government needed them but most of them preferred going to work in factories supplying the government where they earned higher wages. These workers were supported by trade unions which were regularly protesting against Lloyd Georges orders. The unions encouraged workers to go on strike to protest against the new government’s measures. This caused a loss of 2.5 million days of work in 1916 and 6 million work days were lost in 1918 as well. In most cases, the government had no other option than just agreeing to the workers’ demands. As a result to this shortage of men workers, the Minister of Munitions decided to introduce women to work in factories to replace them but in 1915 only 5,000 jobs were offered to women.  At the same time, Georges opened the government’s own munitions factories that were mainly ran ban women this time. Thanks to these factories, the munition crisis was resolved before the end of 1915 and the army was well supplied until the rest of the war.

The second major issue that Britain had to face was feeding its population. In 1917, Germans U-boats sank many British merchant ships, limiting critically the food supply of the country. Thanks to DORA, lands were used for farm production and the Women’s Land Army was created to recruit women as farm workers. As a consequence the diminution of food supply, the prices for food rose quickly and were almost the double of what they before the war and many British could not afford such prices. Great inequalities were raising because rich people bought a lots of food to hoard it whereas the poorest could not even afford bread. Obviously the government reacted by raising the wages of some workers and also by starting a system of voluntary rationing in May 1917. There was then some laws and advice from the royal family and small propaganda inviting people to be economical on food rations but none of these actions were effective in reducing food shortage. As a result to this, in the beginning of 1918, some drastic measures brought in the rationing system with books of coupons to reduce food access inequalities. And the sanctions for the ones who disrespected this law were very stiff. Actually rationing helped to improve the poorest people’s diet and health which had improved in comparison to pre-war time.

The third biggest aspect of DORA, was the control of the information and propaganda to mobilise home-front morale and that is what the last paragraph is about.

        As part of DORA, Britain’s government had a very precise and strict way of divulging information about the war to the general public. Propaganda and censorship were the main factors of this information control which caused the news to be only good news concerning Britain’s war effort, forced censorship of the opposition’s newspapers, patriotic publications from leading authors and even propaganda for children with comics or toys. Films were also used by the British Topical Committee for War Films which produced especially ‘The Battle of the Somme’ movie in August 1916. This film has been very successful but also very controversial. It was the first movie to expose the reality of the trenches and the battlefield. Some scenes were actually faked by the producers as a manner of propaganda but the public thought that everything was real.

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