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Home Front

from The Reader's Companion to Military History

The “home front” is a phrase used first during World War I to describe the foundation of food, arms, and other munitions produced behind the lines, necessary for military units to exist and continue to fight. Such fundamental support was also required during mercenary expeditions in earlier periods, though it was less widespread. In the twentieth century, the home front was the democratic form of organizing military manpower and supplies.

Before the nineteenth century, the home front provided cash to pay soldiers and to provide them with arms. When such funds were in short supply, monarchs had to appeal to their subjects, at times with painful results. The downfall of the Stuart monarchy in the 1640s in England and the French monarchy in the 1780s was directly related to the inability of these regimes to finance war without the help of Parliament. Once convened, the “home front” took power.

After the levée en masse of the 1790s in France, the support of noncombatants for armed forces grew in amplitude and duration (see French Revolution, Wars of the). Revolutionary and Napoleonic armies had to be provisioned, whether on home soil or outside of metropolitan France. Here the home front provided a part of the costs of expeditions; the rest came from the unfortunate people whose homes lay in the invaders’ path. Once again, we see the shadow of the past: the armies of Spain, central Europe, and Scandinavia scavenged at will in the Thirty Years’ War of the seventeenth century. Two hundred years later, supply became the partial responsibility of the home population.

Starting in the American Civil War, military leaders recognized the advantages of denying combatants supplies from home and of directly attacking and destroying civilian centers of production. This led to a second meaning of the term home front. It came to mean not only the material base of warfare, but also the locus of enemies who did not wear uniforms yet had to be smashed nonetheless. On September 8, 1870, the American Civil War general Philip Sheridan told the future German chancellor Otto von Bismarck that the “proper strategy” in wartime

consists in the first place in inflicting as telling blows as possible upon the enemy’s army, and then causing the inhabitants so much suffering that they must long for peace, and force their Government to demand it. The people must be left nothing but their eyes to weep with over the war.

The behavior of sharpshooters (or francs tireurs) in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 further opened the definition of the enemy to include “irregular soldiers”—ordinary people indistinguishable from hundreds of other civilians. Once more, the old and the new are mixed here. Atrocities are as old as time, but the expansion of warfare to include as enemies those not in military units inevitably increased the incidence of civilian casualties in wartime.

From the beginning of World War I to the end of World War II, the home front came to define the entire population of combatant nations. There were four reasons for this change in the rules of military engagement, expanding exponentially the list of potential targets in wartime. The first is the scale of military activities, which dwarfed previous conflicts in terms of their magnitude and geographic spread. Roughly seventy million men served in uniform in the 1914–1918 conflict. Second, this was the first major war between industrialized powers, whose capacity to inject vast stores of arms and matériel into the conflict helped sustain it for fifteen hundred days. Third, from the invasion of Serbia, Belgium, and Prussia in 1914 by Austrian, German, and Russian troops, the war was characterized as a conflict of cultures and their values; each was deemed civilized by one side and barbaric by the other. The war was therefore not only a collision of national interests and aspirations, but also a clash of ways of life and beliefs.

This generalization of the terms of war led inevitably to the targeting of civilians, who shared responsibility with their armies for the carnage of war. Those ethnically different from the dominant power in a nation or empire risked extermination—witness the Turkish genocide against their own Armenian subjects, in a totally cynical exploitation of the fact that some Armenians were in the Russian army. And fourth, it was but a short step from the war of “Huns” versus civilized Britons and Frenchmen (from the Allied point of view) or of German “Kultur” against crass British materialism (from the other side) to the post-1917 demonization of the conflict in revolutionary Russia and beyond. The spread of the ideological element in warfare from the time of the Bolshevik revolution of November 1917 meant that enemies lurked everywhere, and everywhere deserved extermination.

These precedents of total war against the home front were evident in the form of military conflict in the interwar years—especially in the Spanish civil war of 1936–1939—and in World War II. The conflict of 1939–1945 followed World War I in each of the four elements listed above: It was the biggest, most heavily industrial war in history. It was perceived as the confrontation of incompatible “civilizations,” and its ideological commitments were extended as far as the Nazi death camps, where six million Jews were killed. The fact that many of them could have aided the Nazi war effort is beside the point; the home front was newly defined as those social formations dedicated to the support of the army, which was now seen as merely the cutting edge of the nation at war. Front and home front became blurred in an irreversible way.

The major change in warfare since 1945 has been the progressive eclipse of wars between nations by wars between insurgent groups and constituted authorities, or between armed factions within a state unable or unwilling to stop the conflict. Once more, the old and the new have been combined. Insurgency was not invented in 1945; witness the terrible conflict in Spain during the Napoleonic Wars, immortally captured in the engravings of Goya. But since 1945, and partly in response to the existence of nuclear weapons, most armed conflicts have not been conducted between states who have declared war against each other and signed a peace treaty when the will to fight of one side was broken; rather, in the second half of the twentieth century, warfare has remained ill defined. In colonial war, it was frequently described as police activity against criminals or terrorists (terms used interchangeably), to deny opponents the dignity of combatant status or the protection of the Geneva Conventions about the treatment of prisoners of war. One example among many is the Palestinian Intifada, or uprising against Israeli occupation of the West Bank of the Jordan River, from 1988 to 1995. In other subnational conflicts, such as the Tamil rebellion in Sri Lanka, the insurgents are so numerous as to place entire populations at risk. Here the distinction between combatants and noncombatants has vanished completely, as it has in the ethnic warfare in the former Yugoslavia from 1992 on. In Bosnia and Croatia, the concept of a home front realized the terrible promise implicit in Philip Sheridan’s charge to Bismarck: since 1950, the people around whom wars of insurgency and counterinsurgency swirl are almost always left with nothing but their eyes to weep with. In dozens of cases, their eyes, and their lives, are forfeit as well.

J. M. Winter