1. -TOTAL WAR THROUGH THE ADVANCEMENT OF MILITARY TECHNOLOGY-
Zach Wilson
History 352: History of Total War
March 21, 2016

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There is no singular definition for total war, nor are there set parameters for what truly
defines total war. As Jeremy Black states, “Total war is a continuous phenomenon across time,
the forms of which change in particular environments”.1 With this in mind, the most agreed
upon aspects of total war include the blurring of distinction between combatants and non-
combatants, the mass mobilization of troops, and the range and degree of conflict. Some of
these aspects are straight-forward, others need more explaining. The blurring of combatants
and non-combatants can be viewed in two regards; the first being that states involved in total
war view both civilians and soldiers as viable targets in conflict. The second angle is the
elimination of the professional soldier and the advent of citizen soldier, which also gives way to
the mass mobilization of troops. During total war, anyone and everyone is absorbed into the
mechanism of war, be it soldier or support personnel. The range and degree of conflict is the
sheer area the war consumes along with the absolution of the war objectives. The conflicts
that will be used to analyze these aspects are the French Revolutionary Wars and the American
Civil War.
There are many different perspectives that can be used to view total war: political,
cultural, economic, social, religious, gender, legal and military. Total war needs to be analyzed
through all of these perspectives, although the most influential aspect is the advancement of
military technology which allows for the blurring of distinction between combatants and non-
combatants, the mass mobilization of troops, and the range and degree of conflicts. Total wars
1 Jeremy Black, The Age of Total War 1860-1945 (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger Publishers, 2006), 3.

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would not be possible without the development of weapons that emerged in the late 1700’s
and onward.
The Battle of Valmy during the French Revolutionary Wars provides one of the earliest
examples of citizen-soldiers defeating a professional army in battle due to the advancement of
military technology. In September 1792 the Prussian forces lead by the Duke of Brunswick
(October 9, 1735 – November 10, 1806) marched through the Argonne forest on their way to
Paris. Under orders from Charles Dumouriez (25 January 1739 – 14 March 1823), Francois
Kellermann (28 May 1735 – 23 September 1820) seized the high ground near a windmill in the
small village of Valmy and placed his army there to meet the advancing Prussians. Kellermann
was taking an extreme risk because “half [of] the infantry were new volunteers, and half of the
others had enlisted since the start of the Revolution”.2 The armies that met at Valmy on
September 20th, 1792 were extremely close in numbers: 32,000 troops for the French and
34,000 for the Prussians, although “the French could not compare with the Prussians for
discipline, but their very indiscipline could give them a degree of bravura”.3 Given the situation
at hand, the novice French army was able to force the well trained Prussians to retreat, leading
to the first victory for France in the Revolutionary Wars. “French artillerymen had ample
opportunity to demonstrate recent technological improvements in their art—especially the
development of light, maneuverable, easily reloadable guns”.4 These new developments were
the use of bronze cannon over wrought and cast iron cannon, which greatly reduced the weight
2 David Bell, The First Total War (New York, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007), 133.
3 David Bell, The First Total War (New York, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007), 135.
4 David Bell, The First Total War (New York, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007), 134.

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of the artillery pieces. The victory for the French citizen-soldiers would not have been possible
had it not been for the new advantages in military technology that the Prussians did not
possess at the Battle of Valmy.
The French Revolutionary Wars shed light on the mass mobilization of troops by taking
place during the Industrial Revolution; not only did advances in weaponry allow citizen-soldiers
to be a reality, but the improvement of manufacturing techniques allowed these masses to be
armed effectively. In September of 1793, the main French armory was producing 9,000
muskets a year.5 One year later, by “setting up a workshop to improve the precision of
machine tools, which increasingly allowed for interchangeable parts—a crucial innovation given
the tendency of musket parts to fail under battlefield conditions... By October 1794, five
thousand munitions workers were making guns at the rate of 145,000 per year”5 Not only did
technological advances allow for citizen-soldiers to be a successful fighting force, but the
innovations in the way firearms were produced allowed more and more combatants to enter
the battlefield. Producing 24 muskets a day versus 397 is a 1500% increase in productivity per
day; this mass mobilization had never been seen before in warfare, and is an important
distinction in the definition of total war.
Improvements in field artillery during the American Civil War allowed combatants and
non-combatants alike to become targets at ranges over four thousand yards. In early 1865,
General WilliamT. Sherman (February 8, 1820 – February 14, 1891) marched his army to cut off
Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s (January 19, 1807 – October 12, 1870) supply lines and
capture the symbolic city of Columbia, South Carolina. Sherman’s army reached the shores of
5 David Bell, The First Total War (New York, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007), 149.

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the Congaree River on February 16th, 1865, much sooner than the Confederates had
anticipated.6 While Sherman’s army attempted to bridge the Congaree River into Columbia,
Union artillery terrorized the streets, soldiers and civilians alike. Captain Francis DeGress
(February 10, 1840 — 1883), a well-known artillery commander, “could not resist the target
that the city offered to a marksman. He unlimbered a section of his guns and began to drop
shells expertly along Main Street, among the cavalrymen and others loaded with loot”.7 The
Union army had a bitter resentment against the city of Columbia and they viewed it as the core
of the Confederacy, as it was in this city the decision to secede from the Union was made. The
battle-hardened Union soldiers wanted to burn it to the ground, and military technology
allowed them to begin their destruction from over two miles away. DeGress’s artillery rained
hell in the streets, unable to distinguish soldier or civilian; in this case the blurring of
combatants and non-combatants was a literal one due to the physical distance away. This also
leads to the degree of conflict due to dehumanizing effects of advanced weaponry and pushed
towards absolute destruction. According to Faust, “Physical distance between enemies
facilitates emotional distance from destructive acts”.8 The act of firing a cannon from
thousands of yards away is a lot less psychologically taxing than driving a sword through
another’s gut. After the bombardment in the streets had gone on for quite some time,
Sherman ordered DeGress to cease fire, although “the captain [DeGress] had just started to
6 Charles Royster, The Destructive War: William Tecumseh, Stonewall Jackson and the Americans (New York,
New York: VintageBooks, 1993), 10-11.
7 Charles Royster, The Destructive War: William Tecumseh, Stonewall Jackson and the Americans (New York,
New York: VintageBooks, 1993), 12.
8 Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York, New York:
Vintage Books, 2009), 12.

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enjoy himself”.7 The separation allowed an experienced officer the ability to begin enjoying
bombarding civilians, a desensitizing aspect of total war that is brought on by improved
artillery.
The American Civil War also saw significant improvements in the handheld firearm that
allowed for increased separation between armies and lead to a greater range of conflict.
Muskets were awfully inaccurate at ranges over fifty yards because they typically shot round
lead balls down a smooth barrel. In 1849, French army officer Claude-Etienne Minié created his
minie bullet, a conical bullet that would expand to fit the newly added spiral grooves inside the
barrel, greatly improving the range and accuracy of the firearm. “Instead of the smoothbore
musket, almost all Civil War infantry North and South, were, by the middle of the war, equipped
with rifles with an effective range of three hundred yards”.9 The rifle’s first major testing
ground was the American Civil War, where it changed the battlefield forever by further
expanding the emotional void between violence. As one Yankee soldier explained, “when men
can kill one another at six hundred yards they generally would prefer to do it at that
distance”.10 The increased range and accuracy of cannon and rifles caused a shift in strategy
and tactics leading to larger battlefield, and thus a larger range of conflict. These shifts would
eventually lead to trench warfare towards the end of the Civil War that would return during the
First World War.
9 Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York, New York:
Vintage Books, 2009), 39.
10 Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York, New York:
Vintage Books, 2009), 41.

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The improved effectiveness of the rifle allowed the citizen-soldier in the Civil War to be
extremely successful on the battlefield with relatively zero military understanding. Faust
explains the effects of the new technology:
This war generated a mass mobilization of common citizens and forces of
unprecedented size. The approximately three million Americans North and South who
ultimately served in the course of the conflict were not trained professionals, schooled
in drill and maneuver, but overwhelmingly volunteers with little military knowledge or
experience. (39)
The advent of these new technologies makes the average civilian more and more dangerous
while requiring less and less training. For muskets to be effective, extreme discipline and
organization was needed by companies of experienced men; the rifle could be effective as long
as a man could aimand pull the trigger before the enemy did the same. Then the further
development of the repeater allowed citizen-soldiers to fire dozens of rounds per minute
compared to the two or three an experienced rifleman could fire in the same time.
Total war is a concept that cannot be defined easily and must be viewed in a holistic
way, even if some perspectives are more important than others. As the great Prussian general
and military theorist Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz(1 June 1780 – 16 November 1831)
stated, “We must, therefore, be prepared to develop our concept of war as it ought to be
fought, not on the basis of its pure definition, but by leaving room for every sort of extraneous
matter”.11 The extraneous matters of warfare are the political, cultural, economic, social,
11 Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz, On War. ed. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1976), 580.

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religious, gender, and legal ramifications, but the military is the core competency of war. War
does not exist without the military, and total war does not exist without the advancements of
military technology beginning in the 18th century.

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Works Cited
Bell, David. The First Total War. New York, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007.
Black, Jeremy. The Age of Total War 1860-1945. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger Publishers, 2006.
Faust, Drew Gilpin. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. New York, New York:
Vintage Books, 2009.
Gottfried von Clausewitz, Carl Philipp. On War. ed. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1976), 580.
Royster, Charles. The Destructive War: William Tecumseh, Stonewall Jackson and the Americans. New York,
New York: VintageBooks, 1993.