The Second World War was global, intense, and frightfully devastating. It ranged from conventional warfare to the dropping of the first atomic bomb, from terror bombing to genocide. Many scholars have assumed, like the historian Gordon Wright, that the “ordeal of total war” from 1939 to 1945 hardly requires definition. Still, as the essays collected in this volume demonstrate, scholars continue to debate whether the Second World War was, in fact, a “total” war.

It seems to me most profitable to regard what Carl von Clausewitz called “absolute” war as a logical abstraction, as a mental construct against which all “real” wars can be measured. In chapter two of Book Eight of On War, Clausewitz laid this out clearly and cogently. “Theory. . . has the duty to give priority to the absolute form of war and to make that form a general point of reference, so that he who wants to learn from theory becomes accustomed to. . .measuring all his hopes and fears by it, and to approximating when he can or when he must.“