The Social Space of Terror: Towards a Civil Interpretation of Total War

In the paper I seek to interpret modern warfare from the perspective of civil society and its geography. I emphasize the predicament of civilians who are subject to direct and deliberate armed assaults. Particular attention is given to enforced uprooting or removals of population, and to annihilation of urban places with weapons of mass destruction. Two case histories are explored, both taken from the last months of the Second World War. They are, the expulsion of German civilians from Eastern Europe, and the firebombing of Japanese cities, especially Tokyo. Damages and casualties are detailed. However, the main concern is to establish the composition, plight, and responses of civilian populations, and this includes their relation to national war efforts. It is concluded that the vast majority, because of gender, age, health, occupation, and class, were essentially marginal to, and little involved in, the war efforts of their respective states. This contrasts sharply with the assumptions or rhetoric of the theory of ‘total war’, and the practice of targetting civilians and nonmilitary areas. It is suggested that the majority of home populations remain civilians in the fullest sense of the term, even in wartime. From this it follows that assaults upon them by military forces are primarily strategies of terror, and that the ‘social space’ attacked is essentially civilian. Such uprootings and mass destruction of human settlements have, however, become an ever larger part of the war strategies, and the history of warfare, of most powers since 1945.