Hello askhistorians,
it occured to me recently, that the first and second world war, while unique for a lot of reasons, also were probably THE wars when it comes to conscription. Young people who had never dreamed of becoming soldiers before the war were being drafted in droves, in order to fight for their respective countries.
My impression is that, especially in WWII, the majority of the soldiers fighting on either side were previously untrained amateurs, who had no idea about warfare at all beyond the superficial civilian understanding of that subject. It is also my understanding that before the Great Wars, military service was a lot more "dynastic," with children being brought up specifically in preparation for their later military service, meaning that "Soldier" was a proper profession that one dedicated ones life to. The idea of a necessity-based conscription system appears to have been considered an ancient or at least very old-fashioned/emergency-type system prior to WWI. This leads me to believe that the second World War in particular was a war that was uniquely amateurish.
Is there any substantial truth to this idea? Were there other wars (leaving medieval times aside) that were primarily thought by young amateurs who had received only remedial/essential military training? Or is this entire idea nonsense? What literature might be helpful on this topic?
I'm excited to hear your comments and, as always, thank you a ton!
Edit: I'm mostly talking about and interested in Europe.
Right I'm kind of going outside of my realm of study here but I feel the need to because you're making some sweeping generalizations here, so I'll try to keep my pre-Napoleonic Era stuff as generalized as possible.
WWI was, by no means, the first time conscription based warfare was used I should start out with. Medieval Warfare comes to mind almost immediately where a lot of Europe was thoroughly accustomed to raising thousands of regular, "amateur" peasantry whose primary duty was not warfare but field work. You may recognize this as its more commonly called instead of 'conscription' but 'levy' or in the plural 'levies."
It varied but levies would be obligated to fight for sometimes a few weeks to 3 months but rarely more as they were still responsible for their harvests/profits which had to be provided to the lord for his income. Hell, even as far back as the Punic Wars with Rome we have regular people being levied to fight. I know from my brief reading into Ancient Greece that tribes would have to give a certain amount of men when called for and they would, many times, rotate amongst themselves every time. Not professional, lifelong soldiers but regular people called up.
The Napoleonic Wars were where we can definitively say that mass conscription became a permanent 'thing' and where it would be used to its greatest extent in history. France, besieged on all sides by Spain, Holland, Austria, Prussia, Britain, and Piedmonte would decree via the National Convention:
"From this moment until such time as its enemies shall have been driven from the soil of the Republic, all Frenchmen are in permanent requisition for the services of the armies. The young men shall fight; the married men shall forge arms and transport provisions; the women shall make tents and clothes and shall serve in the hospitals; the children shall turn old lint into linen; the old men shall betake themselves to the public squares in order to arouse the courage of the warriors and preach hatred of kings and the unity of the Republic.
and all men 18-25 years old who were unmarried were raised, the French Army would be bolstered to a staggering 1,500,000 men, the first time an army over a million men would be raised for a single army in Western history. It would handily defeat the entirety of the Coalition at the same time because of its overwhelming numbers and would force the rest of Europe into adopting a conscripted, standing army to be able to stand up to it.
The idea of a necessity-based conscription system appears to have been considered an ancient or at least very old-fashioned/emergency-type system prior to WWI.
And this is where we reach directly into my wheelhouse. Conscription was by the time it occurred in August 1914 an accepted tradition and further refined down into a precise science. In the first 300 hours of WWI roughly 11,000 trains would shuttle 120,000 officers and 2,100,000 conscripted men with 600,000 horses across hundreds of miles to various marshaling areas. The 1,600,000 men gathered on the Western Front - 950 infantry battalions -- would roll across the Rhine River bridges at the rate of 560 trains, each 54 cars long, per day shuttling troops. This was not some technique being used for the first time or something -- it was tried, tested, and thoroughly adopted into the European system of warfare by this time.
Even before mobilization there would be mass conscripted, standing armies. It was over a hundred years old at this point and well accepted in the European psyche. France, under the terms of the Loi Troisieme of August 1913, increased it's standing "come-as-you-are" (ie: "regular people") army to a whopping 884,000 men compared to Germany's equally imposing 880,000 standing, "regular" men. When mobilization did come there were far less desertions than the 10-13% prediction -- a mere 1.2% of the 1914 conscripts failed to report for duty and most of these were classified as mentally handicaps or itinerants. 350,000 extra volunteers would flood the depots even 3000 peacetime deserters returned to serve.
So in summary, I hope I painted quite a few major points for you:
Conscription/"regular people" fighting wars was by no means new by WWI
More specifically, mass warfare was over a century old at the onset of WWI and was not seen as some antiquated "last resort"
To piggy back on #2, by the time WWI began there were already massive volunteer and conscript armies of "regular people" who were by no means 'dynastic warriors' or trained for any majority of their life in war stocking the national standing armies of Europe.
The Napoleonic Wars would honestly be what I would consider "the most amateurish" as many tens of thousands of men were literally given a rifle, some target and formation practice, and sent against Prussian and Austrian elite soldiers. Many "amateurs" by the time of WWI and WW2 would get a very thorough basic and semi-advanced training which would, for all intents and purposes, make them trained soldiers.
Notes:
Arden Bucholz, "Moltke, Schlieffen, and Prussian War Planning"
Charles de Gaulle, France and Her Army
Adrian Goldsworthy, Roman Warfare
John Elting, Swords around a Throne