Imagining Future Wars 1870-1914, by Antulio Echevarria II “

Imagining Future War, 1871-19141

By Antulio J. Echevarria II

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If imagination is the ability to conjure images and formulate ideas, then the period before the Great War was one of Western society’s most imaginative. More images and notions about «things to come» appeared in this era than in any earlier one. Indeed, this «futurism», or anticipation of what may come, emerged as a profitable enterprise in the years following 1871. Its popularity was due in part to the so-called Second Industrial Revolution (or Technological Revolution), which made all sorts of marvelous inventions possible.2 Each wave of innovations and curiosities served to fuel the imagination of a society that was growing more literate by the decade. New literary genres emerged and combined with inexpensive modes of publishing, from picture books to penny pamphlets, to bring the future to the present. As a result, the future became both a dystopia and a utopia, a source of anxiety as well as a refuge.

This dual sense of anticipation was especially evident with respect to the future of war. Pundits, scholars, businessmen, and military practitioners all attempted to understand what inventions such as the machine gun, the submarine, the dreadnought, the airplane, rapid-firing artillery, the wireless, the motorcar, and chemical munitions might mean for the conduct of war. In this way, the «future of war» and the «war of the future»

1 This chapter is drawn from Antulio J. Echevarria II, imagining Future War: the West’s technological revolution and Visions of Wars to Come, 1880-1914 (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2007). 2 Melvin Kranzberg and Carroll W. Pursell, Jr., eds, technology in Western Civilization: technology in the twentieth Century, vol. 2, (New York: Oxford University, 1967).

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became distinct yet intertwined in both the optimism and pessimism of the day. Had the influx of new technologies occurred in a straightforward and predictable manner, with necessity driving invention as is so often claimed, the West’s military leaders might have had more opportunities to accommodate themselves to it. However, things did not happen that way.

War and the Future

The centennial anniversary of 1914 inspired a rash of new literature on the First World War. Perhaps the most popular interpretation to emerge from the hundreds of books written about the outbreak of war in August of 1914 is simply that heads of state and diplomats «sleepwalked» their way into it.3 In other words, they failed to take full account of the consequences of their decisions; and so, a costly conflict that could have been avoided, or that should have remained local, instead spiraled out of control. However satisfying that interpretation may be to twenty-first century readers, it obscures the degree to which «war scares» and «war literature» had informed the popular imagination in the decades before the Great War. However vague the idea of war might have been at the time, it was central to into the «vitalist» philosophies of the era, which yearned for a violent catharsis to purify society. It was also integrated into the doctrines of Social Darwinism, which saw armed conflict as a test of national spirit. It was also

3 Christopher Clark, the Sleepwalkers: How europe Went to War in 1914 (London: Allen

Lane, 2012).

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part and parcel to diplomacy itself, which routinely resorted to the threat of war as an instrument of policy.

In this environment, war was both expected and dreaded. The question was not whether it would come, but rather when and how. To be sure, pacifists such as Norman Angell tried to argue war was not an inevitable part of human existence; humanity could choose its future.4 Nonetheless, such arguments are remarkable for the cultural changes they did not inspire. The pacifist movement grew rapidly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as did the antimilitarism of the socialists. Yet, attitudes embracing militarism grew stronger too. For instance, Germany’s outspoken general and writer Colmar von der Goltz repeatedly portrayed pacifism and socialism as the problem, not the cure. In his most popular work, the Nation in arms, he argued the next great war would require the militarization of all of society, and he was not alone.5

While some called for catharsis, others clamored for revolution. A growing number of voices in the middle, among them Eduard Bernstein and Bertrand Russell, argued instead for a better future through gradual reforms. Unfortunately, in the end, the extremes would have their way. Nevertheless, afterward, few futurists in the West could claim the world they faced after the war was better than the one they knew beforehand.

Wars on land

The Great War would go down in history as one of the West’s most catastrophic in terms of loss of human life. The overwhelming majority of those casualties occurred on land—though not from aerial bombing or naval bombardments. Instead, they were the result of the clash of opposing armies. That such bloodletting could occur was not lost on the military thinkers who pondered the future of armed conflict before the First World War. In fact, they expected it to happen. Offensive maneuver faced a crisis. As one British officer described it, modern firepower created three «belts» of destructive fire: the outer belt, from 8,000 to 12,000 meters,

4 Norman Angell, the Great illusion: a Study of the relation of Military Power in Nations to their economic and Social advantage (London: W. Heinemann, 1910). 5 C. von der Goltz, Das Volk im Waffen (Berlin: R. v. Decker, 1883).

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was dominated by the long-range fires of heavy artillery; the second one, from 3,600 to 8,000 meters, was covered by lighter, quick-firing guns; the final belt, the «deadly zone» proper, extended from the edge of an enemy’s defensive positions to 3,600 meters, and was virtually a «tornado of fire… poured in by magazine rifles and machine guns.»6 The problem was, simply put, if an attacker could not cross the deadly zone, no attack could ever be driven home, no ground could ever be gained, and no enemy could ever be made to surrender. Would war, then, cease to occur? After all, if one’s foe could not be made to submit, war would have no purpose.

That was essentially the argument of the Polish banker and railroad financier, Ivan Bloch, who published a massive, multi-volume work in 1898, entitled the Future of War in its technical, economic, and Political aspects. Bloch maintained heads of state must abandon war, less on humanitarian grounds, than for the reason that it was no longer a rational extension of policy by any means. Unfortunately, Bloch’s tables of data and interviews failed to persuade military leaders or diplomats. Instead, military and civilian futurists searched for ways to overcome the crisis.

For their part, military writers sought ways to combine firepower and movement, either by concentrating the former at weak points in the enemy’s lines or by going around those lines with flanking maneuvers. If firepower created the crisis, they reasoned, firepower could also solve it by creating holes or weak links in an enemy’s lines, and advancing by using folds in the terrain and the cover of one’s artillery. Troops, properly trained and disciplined, could take advantage of those vulnerabilities and carry through with an attack, though losses might be high. The movement of troops, the firing of guns, all would have to be tightly coordinated and synchronized. The key questions for military writers, then, were whether modern human stock had the proper moral strength to function under such conditions, and how military movement could be synchronized to the extent necessary.

By contrast, civilian futurists, such as H. G. Wells, sought solutions through new mechanical means. Wells’ short story, «The Land Ironclads,» which appeared in the Strand Magazine in 1903, took explicit and direct

6 Maj. Gerald Gilbert, the evolution of tactics (London: Hugh Rees, 1907).

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issue with Bloch’s argument.7 The land ironclads were, of course, the forerunners of modern tanks, and in Wells’ story they penetrated the enemy’s trench-works and won the day. The tale is an example of how Wells envisioned a new class of soldier, a scientific class, capable of solving military problems through objective scientific reasoning, shorn of prejudice and habit, to find technological solutions. For Wells, science was not just important to the future: it was the future.

As events were to show, virtually every technological and human solution possible was tried, by both sides, to break the tactical stalemate of the First World War. Unfortunately, it took time to make the real land ironclads, or «tanks» as per their codename, mechanically robust enough to operate effectively on the modern battlefield. It is not clear how much faster results could have been achieved had the process started in earnest before the war.

7 H.G. Wells, «The Land Ironclads», the Strand Magazine 26 (December 1903): 501-13.

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Wars at Sea

Three basic principles had served naval commanders well for centuries: (1) avoid concentrating too many ships in too narrow a space, as it would likely lead to accidents and fratricide; (2) maneuver so as to achieve the greatest concentration of friendly combat power against the enemy; and (3) avoid being outmaneuvered in a similar way by the enemy. In the modern era, one sure approach to following these principles was to possess faster and better armed ships, and ideally more of them, than one’s opponent.

By 1892, however, doing so was more complicated. The range of naval gunfire, for instance, had quadrupled. Plus, the speed and maneuverability of surface vessels had increased greatly, requiring movements to be planned with more lead time. Also, most of the Great Powers had begun building submarine fleets, which added an undersea dimension to the problem. Unlike land combat, naval theorists did not face a crisis in offensive capability; physics at sea was a different matter than it was on land. Ships of vast tonnages could seemingly defy the laws of gravity, as long as they could stay afloat. By the end of the nineteenth century, technological innovations had made smaller, less expensive vessels, such as torpedo boats, nearly as lethal. How would an established sea power, such as Great Britain, deal with such a threat? Even without an operational crisis, in other words, visions of wars at sea rarely wanted for an imaginative touch.

A short book entitled, the Next Naval War, published in 1894 by Captain S. Eardley-Wilmot of the Royal Navy, reflected some of the fears and anxieties of the era’s naval thinkers.8 Eardley-Wilmot painted a clash between Britain’s heavy battleships and France’s lighter torpedo boats. The speed and maneuverability of the latter ultimately tipped the scales in France’s favor. The clash at sea essentially reflected the differences between two schools of thought regarding the future of naval warfare. The first, represented by the Royal Navy, centered on achieving mastery of the seas by means of ever heavier cruisers and battleships. The second, held by the French jeune ecole (Young School) and other continental powers, adopted the philosophy of using large numbers of less expensive vessels (mainly torpedo boats), along with underwater mine fields and coastal batteries, to

8 Capt. S. Eardley-Wilmot, the Next Naval War (London: Edward Stanford, 1894).

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outmaneuver cruisers and battleships. Until the late 1890s, when rapid-firing guns and better tracking systems were developed, the Young School’s approach was a viable one.

By the mid-1900’s, the chief worry of naval prognosticators shifted to the submarine and the threat of undersea warfare. This shift occurs despite the fact that notable civilian futurists, such as H.G. Wells, were quite explicit in their skepticism of the potential of such undersea weapons. In 1902, Wells saw «the submarine as doing little more than foundering at sea and drowning her crew.»9 An exception to that was the view of Wells’ literary rival, George Griffith, who’s «The Raid of the le Vengeur» (1901) portrayed the submarine as a special weapon requiring special counter-weapons. For decades, the submarine would remain as perilous to its crews as it was to its targets; on that score Wells had a point. However, its success in the Second World War as a means of sinking cargo ships and enforcing a form of economic blockade were simply not anticipated by Wells.

9 H. G. Wells, Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human life and thought (Edinburgh: Morrison & Gibb, 1901/02).

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At first, however, writers tended to depict the submarine as an underhanded and ‘dishonest’ weapon, a bias that comes across clearly in a number of short stories, such as Griffith’s «The Raid of the le Vengeur» (1901) and «Submarined» (1905), both of which appeared in Pearson’s Magazine. 10 The theme of the submarine menace returns again and again in popular literature, particularly in Britain with the intensification of the naval arms race with Germany, but especially as 1914 drew nearer. Warnings appeared repeatedly about Britain’s unpreparedness for the tactics of blockading and commerce raiding that characterized this form of warfare; this is a curious fact since, according to Jane’s Fighting Ships, the Royal Navy had the largest modern submarine fleet in existence by 1913.11

The submarine was not the only naval innovation to pique the interest of futurists. Authors such as Erskine Childers explored the idea of combat in the littorals, that is, coastal inlets and waterways. His classic fiction work, riddle in the Sands (1903), which among other things described the need for such a capability, may well have drawn its inspiration from some of the ideas of the Young School.12 It may also have drawn heavily from his military experience in the second Boer War (1898-1902), where he observed the guerrilla tactics of the Boers at work. Childers proposed transferring those tactics, namely ambush and raiding, from the land to the water. The narrow inlets and waterways along Britain’s coast would provide natural protection for small vessels and intrepid sailors eager to strike harassing blows against any enemy incursions.

Visions of wars at sea thus explored two underappreciated dimensions, one might say frontiers, underwater and the littoral. The longstanding naval theories of the American Alfred Thayer Mahan and the Briton Julian Corbett were both established during this period. They differed in concept, the former emphasized the centrality of capital ships and the latter stressed the ability to project power ashore, but they represented traditional naval interests, each in their own ways. The concerns with littoral warfare and un-

10 George Griffith, «The Raid of the le Vengeur», Pearson’s Magazine (February 1901): 158-68; Walter Wood, «Submarined», ibidem (February 1905): 232-38. 11 Fred T. Jane, Jane’s Fighting Ships (New York, 1912-13). 12 Erskine Childers, the riddle of the Sands: a record of Secret Service (London: Nelson, 1903).

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dersea warfare, if fantasized for centuries, became all too real with the technological innovations made possible by the Second Industrial Revolution. War at sea was expanding, in other words, in a manner that made it more ‘total’ in concept. What remained was to make naval warfare more joint or bi-dimensional in nature by adding the humanity’s last frontier, the air. For visionaries of future war, that “jointness” was not long in coming.

Wars in the air

Aerial warfare was by far the most captivating of all the types of future war imagined by pundits and prognosticators, whether civilian or military. As one US officer put it in 1910, «The conquest of the air by the invention of dirigible balloons and flying machines was the greatest discovery of the century, and a matter of vital importance to the military world.»13 The sky was indeed not only humanity’s last frontier, it was potentially its most powerful one. By dominating the skies, it was thought, one could control what happened on the earth’s surface. In truth, while command of the skies offered enormous advantages, it did not guarantee victory, nor could it afford reliable control over key people and places on the ground.

This was, in fact, the subject of a debate of sorts between several of the leading science fiction writers of the era. On the one hand, the works of

13 Capt. G. J. Townsend, «The Use and Effect of Flying Machines on Military Operations», infantry Journal 7 (1910): 244-58.

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George Griffith, a British author, put forth images of future war in which airpower dominated. In works such as angel of the revolution (1893), olga romanoff (1894), and outlaws of the air (1895), Griffith’s «aerostats» (a term that referred to every form of dirigible and airship or zeppelin) could cruise at great elevations and rain down destruction in the form of dynamite, incendiaries, and poison gas upon helpless military and civilian populations. «The sober truth is,» he warned, «that the invention and employment of these devastating appliances [aerostats] have completely altered the face of the field of battle and the conditions of modern warfare.»14

On the other side of the debate, however, was the work of H.G. Wells, especially his the War in the air which was first serialized and published by Pall Mall Magazine in 1907, and appeared as a book the next year under the imprimatur of George Bell and Sons. Wells depicted a global conflict in which massive airships and Drachenflieger (literally dragon-fliers, or hang-gliders in today’s vocabulary) battled for the skies, sunk navies, and set towns and villages ablaze. Various kinds of fantastic weapons, including lightning guns that shot bolts of electricity into the air, are employed. Nonetheless, the new type of air war, however terrifying and destructive, is indecisive in the end because the monstrous airships cannot deliver enough troops on the ground to control twentieth-century metropolises, such as New York City, whose populations numbered in the millions. Whereas Griffith seemed to think destruction, or the terror it caused, would suffice for conquest, Wells thought otherwise: airpower could kill but not govern in his view. Thus, his vision of a future war waged from the air, with vessels apparently easy to manufacture and deploy, could lead only to endless conflict and the reduction of society to a primitive state.

Wells’ airships, the «lineal descendants» of the aircraft of Count Zeppelin which crossed Lake Constance in 1906, were capable of flying 90 miles per hour, were between 800 and 2000 feet long, could carry between 70 and 200 tons, and could cross the oceans with relative ease. Griffith’s aerostats, imagined some ten years earlier, could manage an impressive 50 miles per hour. Even by 1908, however, Zeppelin’s latest model, the LZ 4, could do no more than 29 miles per hour, and had a range of only 879

14 Echevarria, imagining Future War, 82-3.

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miles. The technology necessary to bring either Griffith’s or Wells’ visions to reality was simply not available; nor would it be thirty years later when the ill-fated Hindenburg crashed at Lakehurst, New Jersey, on May 6, 1937. A state-of-the-art airship, the Hindenburg had a maximum speed of 60 miles per hour, was 612 feet long, and could carry only 60 tons. Wells’ Drachenflieger were likely inspired by the gliders invented by the Russian-born aviation pioneer Wilhelm Kress; Kress’s attempt at a heavier-than-air flight in 1901 failed due to an engine with weight-to-power ratios outside his specifications. By 1907, such problems had largely been solved; but Wells’ Drachenflieger were far more capable than many of the aircraft that took to the skies in 1914.

Griffith and Wells were hardly the only authors who engaged in fanciful thinking about future air wars. Military thinkers, too, were attempting to come to terms with what a potent air arm might mean for the future of war. Far from rejecting airpower, the expectations of military leaders such as the younger Helmuth von Moltke, chief of the German general staff, and Alfred von Tirpitz, head of the German navy, ran a bit too high. Both eagerly considered the possibility that long-range bombing could terrorize the enemy into surrendering—if only German airships could be made more capable and reliable.15 Expectation was indeed more of a problem than skepticism. Time and again, aeronautics had failed to meet military specifications.

15 Echevarria, imagining Future War, 91.

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Conclusion

Many of the images of the future that emerged in decades before the Great War were driven by the need to impress one’s readers or to outdo one’s rivals rather than by a desire to create a realistic picture of what might come. The new genres and modes of mass printing appeared that helped create a market for imagining the future, but also contributed to turning the era’s forecasts and speculations into a competition for an ever larger share of that very market.

When the Great War came in the autumn of 1914, it seemed more a war of the present than of the future. It did not fit the scenarios conjured by imaginaries. Aircraft had not developed enough to carry payloads capable of razing cities or sinking navies. U-boats and submarines were too limited in range to strangle a nation’s sea commerce. The land ironclads, when they finally took the stage later in the war, were not nearly as swift or maneuverable as those imagined by Wells. Communication devices were too few and too unreliable, which meant the ability to coordinate fire and movement on a vast scale was still closer to the age of Napoleon than to the era of «Blitzkrieg.» In all these respects, the war came much too soon. Another decade and a half of technological innovation, and the story would have been quite different.

For the quarter century leading up to the Great War, all things seemed possible. By the winter of 1914-15, almost nothing did. Wars come when they do, whether or not the state of technocracy, and the people who use it, are ready for them. That is the salient and most enduring lesson of the First World War. The stalemate of the trenches was not due to an absence of imagination, but to a want for capability. This was true despite the fact that neither optimists nor pessimists had foreseen the extent of its gruesomeness. Their forecasts of what might come were limited less by their imaginations than by what they wished the present to be, that is, the political change they wanted to inspire. The future was not so much a place in time as it was an argument for political change. Wells, for instance, wanted to see what he referred to as the “scientific approach” receive more precedence in the development of societal structures and political processes. Bloch and Angell wanted to see the use of military force greatly reduced, if not abolished altogether, as an instrument of policy. Military writers like von der Goltz, by comparison, saw the world in terms of a

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perpetual competition for power and influence, and so wanted to ensure their evolving professions enjoyed parity, if not superiority, internationally as well as a privileged status domestically. In every case, visions of the future became invariably intertwined with agendas for the present.

The competition for the future was, thus, also a struggle for the present. In that struggle, military thinkers were much more imaginative than history has appreciated. By and large, military writers did stay closer to the immediate future in an effort to solve particular problems. Yet, in many cases these same thinkers served as consultants for those visionaries who went beyond the immediate future to the world after tomorrow. In other cases, visionaries had served in the military, sometimes for considerable periods, before embarking on other careers. They thus embraced a mixture of civilian and military values; they felt no obligation to tow the official line, but their experiences might have given them some important insights into operational matters. Moreover, writers from one circle sometimes exchanged ideas with (or pinched them from) the other. Copyright laws had not yet matured into what they are today, and can be difficult to enforce in any case. Hence, drawing clear distinctions between civilian and military writers can be dubious and misleading. Civilian visionaries also had their conservative sides, as it tended to concern itself with immediate political and social issues. Still, it could afford to treat the limitations of physics and mechanical engineering with disdain in order to achieve a greater impact in the market. On the whole, therefore, it is fair to say military visions of the future were grounded more by practicalities than were their civilian counterparts.

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Regardless of their respective motives, agendas, or goals, the visionaries who imagined the future at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century clearly demonstrated the importance of thinking both creatively and critically. The debates over the future were undoubtedly the richest in Western society to that point. Whether one agrees or disagrees with the particular visions of the day, they served to stimulate the reading public then, and can still do so today. Ultimately, it is not the biggest ideas that win the day, but rather the most persuasive. Much of that depends on the richness of the soil already present. If education levels and literacy rates had not increased among the general public, the market for marvelous ideas would have been too small to sustain an interest in the future for very long. What remains to be seen is whether literacy and education can combine to mold a public that values analytical thinking to the same degree it prizes creativity and imagination.