The Home Front: Fighting a Total War

Life for the soldiers fighting on the Western Front in World War I was a terrible ordeal. Pinned down in muddy trenches for days on end, bombarded with exploding shells from a nearby enemy, and subject to violent and painful death at any moment, soldiers were plunged into what seemed like an endless struggle for survival. Civilians rarely faced the possibility of violent death, but these people back home did suffer severe disruptions in their lives as a result of war. During World War I, while soldiers fought on battlefronts, all civilians were said to be fighting on a front of their own—the "home front."

The idea of a home front was created by the complete mobilization of both soldiers and civilians in the major combatant nations that fought in World War I. In previous conflicts, armies met on battlefields that were removed from civilian population centers and noncombatants were rarely touched by the war unless a member of their family was killed. Wars were short and armies were comparatively small and manned by professional soldiers. World War I changed all this. Armies fought in and around population centers, disrupting daily life in battle areas. Huge numbers of men were conscripted into (forced to join) the armies. The governments of Great Britain, France, and Germany reordered their economies to serve the war effort. Civilians were asked to perform new jobs and give up many of their conveniences in order to help the war effort; every member of society was mobilized in the single goal of defeating the enemy. In short, World War I brought "total war" to Great Britain, France, and Germany. This chapter assesses the effects of total war on the home front.

Creating a Wartime Economy

When the German army marched across the Belgian border on August 4, 1914, it triggered the military mobilization plans of both Germany and France. Trains, trucks, horse-drawn wagons, and soldiers all moved into place in accord with war plans that had been developed years earlier. But the movement of soldiers to the growing battlefronts of World War I represented only one portion of the mobilization efforts of the major combatant nations. All across Germany and France a chain of actions began that brought not only the soldiers but nearly every person in each nation into the war effort. Soon Great Britain would be involved in a similar effort.

Because Germany was already heavily industrialized and the government enjoyed a very direct control over civil life, Germany was the quickest to make the transition to a wartime economy. The German government established a War Raw Materials Division of the Ministry of War, under the charge of prominent businessman Walther Rathenau. Rathenau quickly organized and coordinated the efforts of German companies to produce all the materials necessary to supply German forces. Britain and France had far fewer factories and little heavy industry, and thus they were less prepared to produce the guns, shells, and heavy machinery vital to the war effort. Their governments also exercised less direct control over the people, making the coordination of production less efficient than in Germany. The Allied countries, however, had free access to the seas and were able to import many of their war materials from overseas, especially from the United States.

As the war progressed, Germany, Great Britain, and France all succeeded at reshaping their economies to produce goods for the war. Factories making luxury goods or nonessentials

were either converted to war production or shut down; workers were shifted to new jobs; and whole industries—wine making in France and chocolate production in Germany—went into decline. But this did not mean that economic reorganization was easy. With so many men being called away to fight in the war—especially in France and Germany, where conscription was universal—labor was scarce. Workers in factories were forced to work long hours at jobs they had not chosen. Pay was often low, and as the war continued, food grew scarce. Under these difficult conditions, workers in many industries began to go on strike.

France faced its greatest labor unrest during 1917. During that difficult year, heavy losses at Verdun had brought military operations to a near standstill as troops refused to fight. The war-weariness extended to French civilian workers, many of whom were socialists (people who believe workers should own and control industry). According to John Williams, author of The Other Battleground, France saw a total of 689

strikes—affecting 293,000 workers— in 1917. The strikes and other labor unrest ended only when the popular Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau threatened to use force to send laborers back to work.

Germany, too, was plagued with unrest from its workers, who lived in conditions even worse than those endured by French workers. As the war ground on and the British blockade around Germany tightened, food grew increasingly scarce. Workers in Germany demanded higher pay and shorter hours, just like the French, but they also complained that they simply could not work without adequate food. In coal mines and steel factories, workers left their jobs. On April 16, 1917, some 220,000 workers staged nonviolent demonstrations in Berlin. They wanted more food, but they also called for an end to the war. Only the presence of army troops and the threat of imprisonment drove these workers back to their jobs. As if labor troubles weren't enough, the German economy was also increasingly challenged by the country's deteriorating system of roads and railways. Germany lacked the supplies and men to maintain the roads and railways, and it became more and more difficult to move goods and people throughout the country.

Shaping the Mind of a Nation: Propaganda

Wartime leaders realized that they would need the full support of the people to effectively wage war, and they set out to shape popular opinion in a variety of ways. Through propaganda—the spreading of ideas about the war that were favorable to the government—and through censorship—the suppression of war news that was unfavorable to the government—the French, British, and German governments tried to control how people viewed the war and the enemy.

Hate was the core of every propaganda campaign. The Germans, French, and British were all encouraged to hate those people who had once been their neighbors. It was not difficult to convince the French to hate the Germans. Many still remembered their galling defeat by the Germans in the Franco-Prussian War in 1871. The British were less inclined to such feelings, for Germany had long been one of their primary trading partners. In both France and Great Britain, however, stories of German atrocities soon encouraged people to think of the Germans as inhuman brutes. Shocking tales of German behavior circulated in newspapers and by word of mouth. One story told of how German soldiers cut the breasts off a Belgian nurse and left her to die; other stories, reports Williams, told of "raping of nuns, impaling of babies on bayonets, [and] mutilation of Belgian girls."

Germany's efforts to stir up hatred of the enemy were far more pervasive and systematic. Hatred of both France and Great Britain was encouraged by officials and preached in churches, but special emphasis was placed on hating Great Britain, which had blockaded German ports and was seen as the biggest obstacle to German victory. People were banned from speaking English; businesses and streets bearing English names received quick name changes to German. People throughout the country sang a "Hymn of Hate" against England, which concluded "We love as one, we hate as one, we have one foe and one alone—ENGLAND," according to Williams.

Official censorship was also a powerful tool for shaping public opinion. In both France and Germany the newspapers were under the direct control of the military. War departments submitted their version of how the war was going, and newspaper editors were expected to print that news exactly as it was given to them. Even British newspapers, which had prided themselves on their independence, were forced to get most of their news from the government press bureau. They were reluctant

to publish news that was unfavorable to the government for fear that they would be prosecuted under the Defense of the Realm Act (DORA), which gave the government broad powers to limit free expression. The result of this direct and indirect control of the news was that people within the combatant countries rarely received accurate reports about the war. Victories were exaggerated, and defeats were downplayed. When French soldiers mutinied in the summer of 1917, news of the trouble never even reached French civilians. In the end, the lack of accurate news may have been the only thing that kept citizens in both France and Germany from rising up in revolt.

The ultimate collapse of German popular support for the war was caused in part by successful British propaganda of another sort. Under the guidance of the Director of Propaganda in Enemy Countries, British writers prepared leaflets in German that offered news of Allied victories and boasted of the huge numbers of American troops entering the war. These leaflets were attached to balloons and floated eastward into Germany. "By October," writes Williams, "167,000 a day were being released over the enemy lines." When the balloons popped, the leaflets floated downward, reaching retreating German troops and war-weary civilians. One German general complained that this "paper war" was ruining the morale of his soldiers. Even General Paul von Hindenburg, the supreme commander of the German army, lamented that "the enemy has taken up arms against German morale, seeking to poison it," according to Williams.

Hardships: The Battle for Food and Warmth

Of all the battles being waged on the home front, the battle to obtain adequate food and heating fuel (coal and wood) was by far the most important to civilians. The food and fuel situation in each country was quite different, but in every country it had a great influence on the people's will to work and bear the difficulties of war. France fared the best of any nation: Its agricultural system was well developed before the war, and France was capable of growing and producing much of its own food.

Through 1916 the British had not experienced many shortages of food, and they were cheered by reports that their naval blockade was pushing the German people close to starvation. Prices were rising, to be sure, but meat and bread were still widely available. All this was to change with the intensification of German submarine warfare in the spring of 1917. Germany intended to use stepped-up submarine attacks—on Allied merchant ships carrying food and other supplies— to show the British what it was like to go hungry. By the middle of 1917 the British government began calling for voluntary rationing of food. The government established guidelines for meat, potato, and bread consumption, and limited the availability of sugar. In addition, the government began the "allotment system," which set aside unused land of all sorts for small gardens. Across the country, people began planting vegetables to supplement their diets; even the king and queen tended a small garden near their palace. By 1918, however, these voluntary measures were no longer enough to ensure adequate food, and the government demanded mandatory rationing of most foods. Citizens were given a card that allowed them to purchase certain amounts of key items; once the card was punched, no more food could be purchased until the next card was issued. Rationing conserved limited food supplies, but it was disastrous for morale. Luckily for the British, the war was almost over.

While France and Britain experienced occasional food shortages, German citizens suffered a diminished food supply almost from the outset of the war. With a cooler climate and a smaller agricultural system, Germany couldn't produce enough food for itself. With the British blockade of German seaports, Germany's ability to import food was severely limited. The rationing of bread in Germany began in January 1915, just five months after the war began. The government issued a document called the Ten Food Commandments, which offered guidelines for conserving food, but as shortages continued, mere guidelines would not be enough. The War Food

Office, established in 1916, created more than 250 rules for rationing almost all food items. Its leader, a man known as the "Food Dictator," was determined that all Germans should share in the deprivation. However, wealthier Germans were usually able to buy food illegally.

As the British blockade tightened, Germany's food miseries increased. Workers had so little food that they lacked the energy to work long hours; many went on strike not for higher wages, but for bigger food rations. Mothers sacrificed their own limited food supplies so their children could eat. Some people ground nuts and beans to stretch the flour for their bread; others ate horse meat, rats, and hamsters to try to get some protein; and farmers killed their precious milk cows for their meat. The winter of 1916–17 was known as the "turnip winter," because Germans took to eating the root vegetable that had only been used to feed livestock before. And, as elsewhere, matters got even worse in 1918. Throughout the country, people grew thin, haggard, and listless; doctors worried about the health of children. People rioted in the streets for food, and normally lawabiding Germans took to stealing food to avoid starvation. In this situation, Germany's surrender in November 1918 was a relief for the ordinary citizen. The terms of surrender could be no worse than what had already been endured.

Changing Role of Women

One of the biggest social changes of the war involved the expanded role women played in society. Before the war few women worked outside the home, except as domestic servants, and women did not have the right to vote. But during the war the need for laborers in war industries drew huge numbers of women into the workforce. Their great contribution helped prove a point that women had been arguing for years: Women were important contributors to the economy and ought to have the right to vote. In England and in the United States, women achieved the right to vote soon after war's end.

Women's participation in the war effort was at its greatest in Germany. In part this reflected the planning of the German government, which organized women to perform war-related work; it was also a necessity, for a high proportion of Germany's able-bodied men were serving at the front. In Germany, women worked in nearly every kind of job: They labored in factories, drove trams (streetcars), built roads, worked in mines, and performed tasks that have traditionally been assigned to women, such as cooking and making clothes. Without the contributions of Germany's women, the country's economy would have collapsed far sooner than 1918.

In Britain women were not directed into jobs as they were in Germany, nor did they work so openly in jobs that had

traditionally belonged to men. However, British women did volunteer in huge numbers to assist the war effort. When the government called for female volunteers in 1915, 124,000 women immediately came forward and were put to work in government posts, clothing trades, agriculture, and other areas. As many as 400,000 working-class women who had served as domestic servants left those jobs and found jobs that aided in the war effort; many never returned to their previous jobs, for they had tasted the pleasures of a higher wage at a more dignified job. British women had been outspoken in their calls for voting rights before the war, and their important contributions during wartime paid off in 1918 when Parliament granted them the right to vote.

In France women in agricultural areas took over the harvesting as soon as men went off to war in the fall of 1914, and women operated farms for the duration of the war. In the cities French women helped staff the munitions factories and served as nurses. By late 1915 there were some seventy-five

thousand French women working in state-run factories. French women, too, enjoyed the newfound independence of working outside the home. In every country, the entrance of women into the workforce gave women a sense of independence and power that few had ever known. This experience transformed the way that many women saw marriage, and it contributed greatly to the modernization of gender roles that swept the Western world in the 1920s and 1930s.

1918: The Home Front in the Final Year

If the earlier years of World War I were a course in enduring the difficulties of total war, then the year 1918 was the final exam. Every effort the countries had made to rally around the war effort was intensified in the last year of war: Economic organization had to become more efficient, governments struggled to keep their people loyal, and citizens had to endure even greater hardships than they had known before. In this climactic year the French and British people proved capable of rising to the challenge, while the Germans were finally pushed beyond their limit by hunger and sheer exhaustion. When Germany surrendered in the fall of 1918, it was not just its army but also its people who were defeated.

France and Great Britain entered 1918 with two crucial advantages. First, they had not yet stretched their people to their capacity: More women could be brought into war industries if necessary, and food and fuel, while scarce, were still available—no one was starving. Second, the Allies knew that if they could hold out until the summer, they would be joined by fresh troops from the United States. Despite the fact that the German army had dramatic advances in the spring of 1918 and were closer to Paris than they had been since 1914, the Allies never gave up hope.

Germany entered 1918 knowing that it had one last chance to win the war. Germany's attacks on British shipping had failed to starve the British out of the war, and the growing presence of American troops in France meant that the Germans would soon have to face a fresh, well-supplied enemy. Worse, German civilians were starving, workers were threatening to walk off their jobs if the war did not end soon, and the civil government was faltering in its support for the war. Thus the Germans staked their chance at winning the war on one last offensive, launched in March of 1918. Across Germany, soldiers and civilians knew that this was their last chance. When the German offensive stalled in Augustand the Allies— now aided by American forces—began pushing back, everyone in Germany knew that the war was over.

Between August and November 1918, the German war effort collapsed. The army fell back in retreat; the German navy, ordered to put to sea to avoid capture by the Allies, rose up in revolt against its officers. By October people in Berlin, Germany's capital, marched and protested for peace. Finally the kaiser (the German emperor) abdicated and fled to Holland; the government collapsed and a new, pro-peace chancellor took office. The people of Germany celebrated their "victory," for one of the first acts of this new government was to surrender and make peace with the Allies. The German surrender, announced on November 11, 1918, brought peace to a people desperate for an end to their suffering.

For More Information

"The First World War: The Home Front." [Online] http://www.sackville.w-sussex.sch.uk/FWWhome.htm. (accessed December 2000.)

"The Great War and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century." [Online] http://www.pbs.org/greatwar. (accessed October 2000.)

"The 1918 Influenza." [Online] http://www.library.utoronto.ca/spanishflu/1918.html. (accessed December 2000.)

"World War I: Trenches on the Web." [Online] http://www.worldwar1.com. (accessed October 2000.)

Sources

Dooly, William G. Jr. Great Weapons of World War I. New York: Bonanza Books, 1969.

Heyman, Neil M. World War I. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997.

Williams, John. The Other Battleground: The Home Fronts: Britain, France, and Germany, 1914–1918. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1972.

Winter, J. M. The Experience of World War I. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Winter, Jay, and Blain Baggett. The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century. New York: Penguin Studio, 1996.

Terror from the Skies: Zeppelin Raids and Long-Range Artillery

As if enduring food shortages and long working hours was not enough, people in Great Britain and France were also subject to Germany's first attacks on civilian populations. One of the true "innovations" of World War I was the aerial bombing of civilian populations by German zeppelins. Zeppelins were giant cylindrical balloons filled with hydrogen. Powered by engines mounted underneath their giant bodies, these aircraft could fly over fifty miles an hour—and they could carry bombs. The Germans sent zeppelins across the English Channel to drop bombs on two coastal towns early in the war. The results were so successful that Germany increased the bombing dramatically in 1916, its zeppelins making 126 flights in all.

As part of the final German offensive in the spring of 1918, German forces unleashed a powerful new weapon that could catapult bombs long distances. From positions in the forests near Laon, about seventy miles from the city of Paris, German gunners fired the most powerful piece of artillery ever used in warfare. In eighteen days of bombing, the Germans lobbed nearly four hundred shells toward the capital city, killing 256 and wounding 625 people. In the worst single incident, a shell landed on a church full of worshippers on Good Friday, killing 88 people. The zeppelins and the long-distance shelling brought to civilians the fear and sudden death that was once experienced only by frontline soldiers.

Spanish Flu: Death Hits the Home Front

In midsummer 1918, just as the Allies were beginning their final offensive that would drive the Germans to surrender, people across Europe began to die of a mysterious disease. Healthy people suddenly took to their beds, and within a short time many of them were dead. In Britain as many as 4,000 died each week; in Paris alone, the disease killed as many as 1,200 people a week. Superstitious people believed that this sudden outbreak of disease was divine revenge on a world embroiled in war, but in fact it was a deadly virus known as the Spanish Flu.

The Spanish Flu, which raged from mid-1918 through early 1919, killed 166,000 in France, 225,339 in Germany, and 228,900 in Great Britain. Overseas the death toll was even higher: In the United States 550,000 died; as many as 7 million died in India; and it is estimated that the flu killed one quarter of the population of the residents of the Pacific Islands. In all, the flu killed 20 million people around the world. No one has ever been able to explain why this strain of flu was so deadly or why it spread so widely. Since that time, scientists have developed vaccines to counter the worst strains of the flu and now feel confident that any future flu outbreaks can be contained more quickly.