The period between the two world wars of the twentieth century was one of the most challenging in the history of war. In anticipation of another conflict, military planners and civilian thinkers struggled after 1918 with the painful implications of World War I. Given its scope, the wholesale mobilisation of civilian populations and the targets of civilians via blockades and strategic bombing, many observers regarded this titanic conflict as a 'total war'. They also concluded that any future conflict would bear the same hallmarks; and they planned accordingly. The essays in this collection, the fourth in a series on the problem of total war, examine the inter-war period. They explore the consequences of World War I, the intellectual efforts to analyse this conflict's military significance, the attempts to plan for another general war and several episodes in the 1930s that portended the war that erupted in 1939.

"[An] illuminating essay collection..." German Studies Review

"The Shadows of Total War: Europe, East Asia, and the United States, 1919-1939 makes a significant contribution to historical scholarship and will prove useful to academic readers as well as educated lay readers interested in the subject of total war and the question of whether its time has finally passed." History

"...a very good book, full of new ideas and unusual knowledge, as well as admirable summaries of current historiography..." Military History

"...this volume is a useful and carefully-produced contribution to the contemporary literature on the aftermath of large-scale war... The editors have done a fine job of maintaining a high standard of syntactical, grammatical, and orthographical quality, and both they and the GHI [German Historical Institute] are to be commended for their industry, through which a large community of their colleagues may now profit." H-German (H-Net)