Editing Total war (section)

=====United Kingdom=====
{{main|United Kingdom home front during World War II}}
Before the onset of the Second World War, Great Britain drew on its First World War experience to prepare legislation that would allow immediate mobilisation of the economy for war, should future hostilities break out. Rationing of most goods and services was introduced, not only for consumers but also for manufacturers. This meant that factories manufacturing products that were irrelevant to the war effort had more appropriate tasks imposed. All artificial light was subject to legal [[Blackout (wartime)|blackouts]].<ref>Angus Calder, ''The People's War: Britain 1939–45'' (1969) [https://archive.org/details/peopleswarbritai00cald online]</ref>
{{Blockquote|..There is another more obvious difference from 1914. The whole of the warring nations are engaged, not only soldiers, but the entire population, men, women and children. The fronts are everywhere to be seen. The trenches are dug in the towns and streets. Every village is fortified. Every road is barred. The front line runs through the factories. The workmen are soldiers with different weapons but the same courage."
|source=[[Winston Churchill]] on the radio, June 18; and [[British House of Commons|House of Commons]] 20 August 1940:<ref>Winston Churchill ''[http://www.winstonchurchill.org/learn/speeches/speeches-of-winston-churchill/1940-finest-hour/113-the-few The Few] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140923061951/http://www.winstonchurchill.org/learn/speeches/speeches-of-winston-churchill/1940-finest-hour/113-the-few |date=23 September 2014 }}'' The Churchill Centre</ref>}}

Not only were men conscripted into the armed forces from the beginning of the war (something which had not happened until the middle of World War I), but women were also conscripted as [[Women's Land Army (World War II)|Land Girls]] to aid farmers and the [[Bevin Boys]] were conscripted to work down the coal mines.

Enormous casualties were expected in bombing raids, so [[Evacuations of civilians in Britain during the Second World War|children were evacuated from London and other cities en masse to the countryside]] for compulsory [[billet]]ing in households. In the long term this was one of the most profound and longer-lasting social consequences of the whole war for Britain.<ref name=bix>Brown, p. ix</ref> This is because it mixed up children with adults of other classes. Not only did the middle and upper classes become familiar with the urban squalor suffered by working class children from the [[slum]]s, but the children got a chance to see animals and the countryside, often for the first time, and experience rural life.<ref name=bix/>

The use of statistical analysis, by a branch of science which has become known as [[Operational Research]] to influence military tactics, was a departure from anything previously attempted. It was a very powerful tool but it further dehumanised war particularly when it suggested strategies that were counter-intuitive. Examples, where statistical analysis directly influenced tactics include the work done by [[Patrick Blackett]]'s team on the optimum size and speed of convoys and the introduction of [[bomber stream]]s, by the [[Royal Air Force]] to counter the night fighter defences of the [[Kammhuber Line]].