Mobilization for Total War: The Canadian, American and British Experience, 1914-1918, 1939-1945

Douglas A. Ross was a political scientist living in Burnaby, B.C.

The declared objective of this concise collection of papers is to explore “the mobilization of human and material resources by nations for total war in the twentieth century.” The papers were originally produced for the Seventh Royal Military College Military History Symposium held in March 1980. The countries considered for analysis were limited to Canada, Britain, and the United States. The various papers cover a wide array of subjects. Arthur Marwick addresses the impact of class structure and class solidarity on societal mobilization capability and modes of mobilization organization. Kathleen Burk recapitulates the increasingly desperate history of British borrowing from American financial institutions to help finance the cost of involvement in World War I, and of London’s ultimate need for recourse to direct loans from the United States government within a framework of onerous and odious loan conditions. Michael Bliss provides an overview of Canadian munitions production during World War I with particular emphasis on the role of Joseph Flavelle, the “Methodist perfectionist” and “social imperialist with close ties to Lord Milner’s Kindergarten,” who headed up the Imperial Munitions Board. Robert Bothwell adds a concise review of war production organization under C.D. Howe, a virtual “impresario” of a “thirty-ring circus” spread out over three thousand miles, who coordinated the production of everything from timber, oil, and coal to aluminum, steel, and finished aircraft. Robert Cuff offers an interesting analysis of how centralized bureaucratized war production in the United States during the two World Wars was made ideologically compatible with the possessive individualism and pluralist-democratic ethos of American society at large, the solution lying in the emergence of a “total community” which was in turn the product of a new, intolerant, nativist cultural authoritarianism. Christopher Andrew concludes the book with a humorous and insightful review of real and alleged foreign espionage in Britain prior to World War I, the haphazard and amateurish evolution of governmental response to the problems of intelligence work and cryptographic analysis during the war, the collapse of British intelligence capabilities in the late twenties and early thirties, and finally the “breakneck” renaissance just prior to World War II.

The various contributions are uniformly readable, concise, thoughtful, and occasionally quite provocative. The only weakness of the book — although some may consider it a strength — is the exceedingly disparate subject matter of the papers. Nevertheless, the book should be a very useful addition to the libraries of those interested in national security planning and operations.