The WW1 was the most horrific and bloody war of its time, no war similar to this had ever been fought before and which such huge losses. The “Trenchwar” resulted in more dead and injured then most of its predecessors put toghter. This was the result of the mechanized warfare with more advanced weapons and better defence. The problem to solve for comming wars was how to overcome these obstacles so the next war did not end was WW1.

An Italian general, Giulo Douhet became fascinated with the military possibilities of the internal combustion engine. His work “Il commando del Aero” (The Command of the Air) was published in 1921. to Douhet “the form of any war...depends upon the technical means of war available”. In the past, firearms had revolutionized war, then it was the turn of the small-calibre rapid-fire guns, barbed wire and at sea, the submarine.

As long as war was fought only on the surface on the earth, it was necessary for one side to break through the other’s defences in order to win. Those defences, however tended to become stronger and stronger until in the conflict that had just ended, they had extended over practicallt the entire battlefield and barred all troops passage in either direction. Behind the hard battlelines the populations of the states carried on their civilian lives almost undisturbed. Mobilizing those populations the states in question were able to produce what it took to wage total war and prolong the struggle for years. With the introduction of the aircraft, this situation was brought to an end. The fronts could be overflown and civilian targets could be attacked as well as industries. No effective defence against such attacks could be found.

Under such circumstances invesments in armies and naies should come to an end. The resources made free should be spent on the airarm, regarded as crucial in any future conflict and one which properly used could bring about a quick decision. Given that the character of the new weaopn was very offencive, most of the aircraft ought to be not fighters but bombers. The attacjers should switch from military to civilian ones, industrial plants as well as population centers. The population of the defender would be driven to the point of madness and force the government to surrender.

Another prophet of the mechanized warfare on land was the British general John Frederick Fuller. As a young officer before the WW1 he had been concerned to discover the principles of war. He found six: the objective, mass, the offencive, security, surprise and movement. From the end of 1916 he acted as chief of staff to the Royal Tank Corps. Like so many others he was shocked by the loss of life which had resulted from trenchwarfare. As he gained experience in planning armoured forces and operation them, his contribution was to demand and to suggest ways for the tanks transformation from a siege-engine (its original purpose) into a modern version of the heavy cavalry. To bring about the enemy’s collapse it was necessary to osuh deeper into his territory, attacking important points such as command centres, communications and deposts and bringing about his collapse from the rear of the front. The mroe mobile tanks (which were becomming available towards the end of the war) were to play a vital role in this kind of operation, not only tanks but also mobile artillery and aircraft.

Fullers famous plan 1919 was intedned to realize these but came to late. After the war Fuller continued to write about mechanization. He argued that war like every other field of human life was affected by progress of science. Future warfare on land would centre around the tank and be based almost entirely on tracks as artillery, engineers, signals, supply and maintainance all became mechanized. Once they had mechanized themselves, armies would enjoy almost as much freedom of movement as did ships at sea. Like Douhet, Fuller considered democracy and the mass-armies to which it had given rise from the time of the French Revolution, to be harmfull and degenerate. Also like Douhet, he hoped to replace those mass-armies by a small force of elite, tank-riding professional warriors. Thus war could be conducted more efficiently.

Basil Liddell Hart was not a professional soldier but had studied histoy at Cambridge for one year before enlisting in the war. He rose to the rank of captain, was gassed at the Somme and spent the rest of the war in Britain training recruits. During this time he started t othink and write about armed conflict. When the was ended he became a sports journalist. Like Fuller Liddell Hart arrived at the conclusion that sending men to attack frontally was folly. More than Fuller he took care about tracing this folly to its origin which accoring to him was to be found in Clausewitz. This philosopher had missled generations of officers to believe that war was waged at its best with the maximum concentration of men and weapons launced against the enemy. This had cost thousand of lives in the WW1.

In 1933 he put forward his ideas about Clausewitz in “The Ghost of Napoleon”. At this time he was already the most famous military journalist in Britain. Having once overcome his early admiration for the British performance in the WW1 during the early 1920s, Liddell Hart had also became interested in mechanization. His vision of the mechanized armed forces was set forth in “Paris, or the future of war” (1925) and “The Remaking of Modern Armies” (1927). In these well –written studies he talked about the usual combination of tanks, aircrafts and poisongas as weapons with which the defence could be shipped over or overcome, stalemate broken “withing a few hours, or almost days” and the war brought to a swift and cheap, if violent end.

What prevented Liddell Hart from making a detailed forecast of the Blitzkrieg was his experience with the horrors of the WW1, which he shared with so many others and claimed that they never should be repeated. All three thinkers Douhet, Fuller and Liddell Hart started from the idea that the WW1 has provided an example of how not to do things. All three of them were shocked by the number of casualities which had been brought about the power of defence. To all three, that power was not the natural result of modern technology, on the contrary, of a failure to make use of its most recent possibilities.

Eric Ludendorff (1865-1937), however understood more than any of them what modern war was about, neither did he shrink from its horrors. His vision of the future armed conflict was awesome and more correct than any of the rest. Ludendorff did not believe that a modern state could rapidly and cheaply be brought to its knees by aircraft dropping bombs on its civilian population. Nor could this be achieved by fleets of tanks engaging in mobile operations. In his work “Der totale Krieg” (The Nation at War) (1935) he sought to explain why Germany had lost the WW1.

His main thesis was that the developing technologies of produktion, transportation and communication made modern war into much more than merely a question of armed forces manoeuvring against each other at some battlefield. Instead it was “total” basing itself on all the forces of the nation and requring mobilization to the last person. It was sure, the next war would make use of all available modern weapons including poisongas. Civilians as well as the armed forces would be targeted, and the resulting number of causalities, the destrucion and suffering would be immense.

The next war would not be a gentlemanly fight for limited states to win by the one with the swiftest sword. Instead it would be a life and death struggle won by the one with the greatest resources and the strongest will, which made any childish illusions of small professional forces to dissappear. Anything not serving the purpose of war would be annihilated, and that included politics. Politics would be mixed toghether with war. Clausewitz theories would be put aside since “both war and policy serve the existence of the nation. However, war is the highest expression of the peoples will to live. Therefore politics must be made subordinate to war”. In other words, the leadership of the nation had to be handed over to the armed forces because only they had the thoughness to endure a war (Wars of Europe, 1998, by Alf W. Johansson pg. 259).

With the outbreak of WW2, Ludendorffs vision turned out to be terribly true.