Cry Havoc ebook

While the book has a number of small errors, such as the maximum bore for naval guns on capital ships under the Washington Treaty of 1922 and the London Treaty of 1930 was 16" and under the London Treaty of 1936 it was 14", with an "escalator" clause back to 16". The maximum bore was never 15", the main issue is that it proves exactly the opposite of its premise. The arms race was a direct outcome of political decisions, a symptom, not the cause of WW2. Without the German/Nazi decision to "junk" the Versailles Treaty and their political decisions to rearm on the path toward a political end-state of a Germany that at the minimum, dominated Central and Eastern Europe and stretched from the Rhine River to the Ural Mountains, there would have been no response on the part of the British and French to re-arm to support their desired political end-state of maintaining the status quo. Every step the author takes in his narrative is linked to a political decision that impacts the arms race, not on events in the arms race that impact political decisions. If you compare the desired political end-states of the nation-states involved in the escalation to WW2, the conflict between the world views involved almost guarantee conflict, with or without an accompanying arms race. The same can be said of WW1, in that political decisions made by the primary actors drove responses from other actors that fed the expansion in armed forces driven by competing desired political end-states. Weapons don't cause wars, decision-making by human leadership informed by greed, ignorance, arrogance and even incompetence and sometimes all of the above is what causes wars.

What the title of this book should have been would be something like "The dynamics of rearmament and their effect on the policies and actions of the Great Powers 1931-1941". Given that is what we have, it is quite a good study indeed. Maiolo does an excellent job of describing the effects of large scale rearmament on a world just starting to recover from an economic disaster of the first magnitude. He describes how Germany, Italy, and Japan unsuccessfully strove for autarky in a world that could not work that way and makes clear they chose this path because of the aggressive acquisitive goals of their leadership. He considers the varying efforts of the democratic states for rearmament without becoming totalitarian and he finally provides unusually good insight into the both realistic and paranoid mind set of the Soviet leadership. The organization of the book, country by country in several phases, works well enough and Maiolo's command of primary and secondary references is considerable, though perhaps even stronger for the period before 1939.

The overall lesson to be drawn by the work done here is that arms race dynamics, particularly in their self fulfillment, create traps for those who launch them. Maiolo does not seriously argue the arms competitions of the thirties caused World War 2 but he shows how that competition affected every decision each of the national leaderships took, usually in the direction of limiting choices and options. It is therefore a wisely cautionary tale of history.

Maiolo does not hesitate nor equivocate about the personal characteristics of those involved in decision making for their countries. He is most sympathetic to Neville Chamberlin who he, in line with recent revision, depicts as principled, able, disciplined, energetic and thoughtful. He seems to appreciate FDR's essentially conservative nature and his genuinely intended attempts to make the world better - attempts that always seemed to need more warships and warplanes. He manages to depict Daladier and Gamelin in a positive light, at least in their pre-war actions. While he covers German rearmament before 1933, Maiolo makes clear that the relentless, ruthless, racially driven desire and actions for lebensraum of Hitler set off the cycle of armament and war that led to the culmination of 1941. The author does a good job of exploring Soviet attitudes and actions about armament under the leadership of Stalin, showing how these armament plans and actions affected the other Powers. He explains how Japanese militarism overcame the democratic form of its government and led to the Japanese decision for war. Finally he looks at the actions of Mussolini with a rational critical eye and explains how any practical Italian armament was never going to satisfy his ambition. These brief comments only scratch the surface of the material Maiolo covers, especially as an overall history of the march toward conflict.

The only reason I don't give this book five stars is that I think the publisher and author attached a relatively misleading title to the book to create more controversy and therefore more interest and sales. I would have appreciated a more direct and descriptive title.

Excellent

A part of WW2 that has never been covered in any book I've read! Amazing ,that none of these nations could really afford to go to war and the reasons are clearly shown why. A very interesting book indeed!

Interesting discussion for ppl working in the defense sector or foreign policy world, esp newcomers to grand strategy and great power politics