Imagine a country's sufferings after four years of blockade. The stock of pigs slashed 77 percent; that of cattle, 32 percent. The weekly per capita consumption of meat reduced from 1,050 grams to 135, the amount of available milk cut by half. Women's mortality up 51 percent, that of children under five, 50 percent. Tuberculosis-related deaths up 72 percent, the birth rate down by half. Rickets, influenza, dysentery, scurvy, ulceration of the eyes, and hunger edema a common occurrence. Smuggling, black marketing, and hoarding widespread. Finally, 730,000 deaths attributed by the country's Health Office to the wartime blockade. This country is not “perfidious Albion” but rather Imperial Germany. The suffering caused was not by unrestricted submarine warfare but rather by a surface blockade that, in the eyes of Jay M. Winter, did not fall short of being a war crime. Thus, we may well ask how total was Germany's unrestricted submarine warfare?

THE DEFINITION

The concept of total war is a vexing one and continues to defy precise definition. Does it infer the total application of all available armed force? Does it require total political aims, that is, the total annihilation of the adversary? Does it translate into what John F. V. Keiger describes as the pursuit of total victory? Reference guides offer little assistance. In The Official Dictionary of Military Terms published by the American Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, DC, the entry for “total war” reads: “Not to be used.” In a private civilian reference guide, The Dictionary of Modern War, the reader is warned that “The term is propagandistic and literary.”