Was World War I Experienced as a Premonition of Apocalypse?

Vision of New York City Bombed in a Future War

In a 1991 American political scientist John Mueller examined attitudes about the Great War—including why it is considered utterly unique—in a long article in the British Journal of Political Science. One section that caught my attention—present herein—raises the interesting question, "Is the war's suggestion of coming apocalypse (world annihilation) what makes is so special in its impart on attitudes towards war?"  I don't agree with what follows below, but I think Professor Mueller raised some interesting points.

Finally, it is possible that the First World War is unique because it raised  the spectre that through some combination of aerial bombardment and gas or bacteriological poisoning the next large war could lead to world annihilation—the destruction of winner and loser alike.

This view was rather widely held between the wars. In 1925 Winston Churchill observed that war was now "the potential destroyer of the human race."  Mankind has never been in this position before. Without having improved  appreciably in virtue or enjoying wiser guidance, it has got into its own hands  for the first time the tools by which it can unfailingly accomplish its own extermination." And Freud concludes his 1930 book, Civilization and Its Discontents,  by declaring, "Men have brought their powers of subduing nature to such a  pitch that by using them they could now very easily exterminate one another  to the last man."

As these statements suggest, it was largely the impressive achievements of science that were inspiring these apocalyptic visions, and it is true, of course, that during the war science had fabricated effective new methods for killing large numbers of people. With the development of long-range artillery and particularly the bomber, it was reasonable to anticipate that these methods of slaughter might well be visited directly upon the civilian population in the next great war.  And in fact, of course, they were—though not to the point of extermination.

There are at least two reasons for discounting this phenomenon as an import ant cause of the shift of opinion on war, however. Firstly, as indicated earlier,  wars of annihilation and wars in which civilians were slaughtered were hardly  new: history is filled with examples. The fact that annihilation could now be  mutual was new perhaps, but this distinction may be a bit delicate. In eras  in which wars of annihilation were common, the fact that winner and loser  were not simultaneously destroyed was more a matter of sequencing than any thing else. Side A might annihilate B, but unless A could then dominate all  others it stood a significant risk that in the next war with side C it would  itself be annihilated. A war syndrome with stakes like that had not led to  substantial efforts to abolish war in the past.

Secondly, it seems likely that this phenomenon was more a result of antiwar  feeling than its cause: that is, people opposed to war in a sense wanted to  believe it would be cataclysmic in the desperate hope that this would make  it less likely to occur. This is suggested by the timing of the apocalyptic literature:  for the most part this came late, in the 1930s, when the danger of another  war was growing, not in the 1920s as a direct result of the First World War.

Among the fiction of the era, a few stories and novels depicting the next  war as a world-wide cataclysm did appear shortly after the First World War.  But, as I. F. Clarke notes in his study of the fiction of the era, "it is noteworthy  that the large-scale production of tales of the future did not begin until 1931."

And his observation that "the authors all described war in order to teach peace"  seems especially apt.  It was less that the anticipated horrors of the next  Great War created the yearning for peace than that the yearning for peace  caused people to anticipate that the next war would be cataclysmic.

 A similar pattern is found in the official discussions in Britain about the future danger of aerial bombardment. As early as 1917 the Cabinet was informed  that 'the day may not be far off when aerial operations with their devastation  of enemy towns and destruction of industrial and populous centers on a vast  scale may become the principal operation of war'.  But this fear seems to  have become general only in the 1930s when another war began to loom as  a distinct possibility (and when, of course, the aeroplane had been developed  much more fully). It was, as one military analyst put it at the time, "a brain  child born in the early years of the century and turned into a Frankenstein  in the early 1930s."

It is also noteworthy in this regard that those few in Europe who still wanted  war—Adolf Hitler in particular—correctly assumed that the doomsday theorists  were wrong.

Source: "Changing Attitudes Towards War: The Impact of the First World War," John Mueller, British Journal of Political Science, January 1991