Cry Havoc: How the Arms Race Drove the World to War, 1931-1941

by Joseph A. Maiolo

Did the arms race of the 1930s cause the Second World War?In Cry Havoc, historian Joseph Maiolo shows, in rich and fascinating detail, how the deadly game of the arms race was played out in the decade prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. In this exhaustively researched account, he explores how nations reacted to the moves of their rivals, revealing the thinking of those making the key decisions—Hitler, Mussolini, Chamberlain, Stalin, Roosevelt—and the dilemmas of democratic leaders who seemed to be faced with a choice between defending their nations and preserving their democratic way of life.

An unparalleled account of an era of extreme political tension, Cry Havoc shows how the interwar arms race shaped the outcome of World War II before the shooting even began.

Genres: History, World War II, Nonfiction, European History, War, Military Fiction

504 pages, Paperback

First published March 4, 2010

About the author

Joseph Maiolo is Director of the Sir Michael Howard Centre for the History of War, and Professor of International History at King's College London (KCL).

He holds a Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts in history and philosophy from the University of Toronto, and a PhD from the London School of Economics.

Maiolo is an editor of The Journal of Strategic Studies, co-editor of The Strategy Reader, a member of the editorial board for Intelligence & National Security, and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

His areas of interest include:

- The history of 20th century international relations and warfare
- Intelligence studies
- Deception in peace and war
- Strategic studies
- Arms races and the causes of war
- Naval warfare
- Diplomacy

Reviews

[William · Rating 5 out of 5]

The approach march frames everything that follows in battle. The same applies to wars.

"Cry Havoc" by Joseph Maiolo is the story of how the decade-long arms race preceding WWII helped shape the opening and the scope of the war. For many readers, the 1930s will get a polite chapter in any WWII history, explaining the forces leading up to the first shots. After that, your typical war history is battles, battles, and more battles.

Maiolo does not replace that, so much as complements it. Sticking to a readable writing style, Maiolo explains plainly the strategic choices made by Germany, Britain, France, Russia and other powers, and how those choices sparked strategic reactions. Economics is a big part of the story. In the hands of a lesser writer, it can also be very boring. Maiolo avoids this narrative trap, casting his narrative by in terms of what a nation could do and how it did it. Numbers illustrate. They do not replace words.

IN conventional WWII histories, Germany is 10 feet tall and unstoppable in the war's early years. But it is a hollow giant. Maiolo walks the reader through Nazi Germany's weaknesses, showing how its rearmament strained the nation's economy to its meager limits. By the time Germany invaded France in 1940, it was not a slam-dunk certainty that the "blitzkrieg" would work. France could have made better strategic choices in the years leading up to the war, and placed its forces to better effect to have forced a stalemate, or at least a far more costly delay, on an enemy in a hurry to win.

Again, "Cry Havoc" is additional reading to understand the war. This is a "bridge book," one that a casual reader of battles and campaigns uses to cross into a greater understanding of grand strategy, that practice of turning national means into armed power. The book is brief and to the point, useful in turning a casual reader into a more thoughtful one when looking at WWII.

[Al Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The causes of World War II have been addressed by a number of writers and ascribe to a number of positions. Some focus on the political “big man” school and focus on the national leadership such as Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, etc. Others focus on political , economic, and diplomatic history starting with the end of World War I, and usually center the causes on either economics leading to dictatorial, expansionist regimes, or the failure of democratic nations to take an early interventionist policy.

Lately, however, there have been new approaches seeking to go outside of these traditional boundaries. Nial Fergusson, for example, in his The War of the World, places WWII well outside the the traditional 1930s or even 1919 genesis, and argues for the placement within a 1905-1953 context where WWII becomes one in a series of East vs West conflicts. Other academics focusing on one theater of the war like Gerald Horne for example, examine closely the role of race and clash of cultures in the Asian theater as the foundation for the flash points.

Enter Joseph Maiolo and his Cry Havoc: How the Arms Race Drove the World to War 1931-1941. Maiolo sets the clock in 1931, at the beginning of the Soviet 5 year economic plan that ramped up Soviet military might. Maiolo posits that this initial domino fall would not only make it feasible to put militarism front and center to support similar competing military industrial production all leading nations, but in the process, subvert political freedoms and rights of the populations.

Overview
“We can do without butter, but not without guns, because butter could not help us if we were attacked one day.” - Joseph Goebells as quoted on page 159.

Maiolo argues that the choice of “butter or guns” seems to have been the main theme of all powers in the 1930s, and one that eventually led to war . His 473 page work narrates the effects of competing arms races had on the societies and neighbors for the next decade, leading to the conflict of WWII, or at least facilitating it’s initiation and character in Europe.

Like most authors in the English language, Maiolo does his best in a WWII study when dealing with the European and American powers. The information formerly unknown from the Soviet Union sheds light on what otherwise would have been a dark spot in WWII studies, and argues for the inter-relationship of nations in the war in some causes and effects that have otherwise gone unexamined. It broadens the study of WWII to Russia in the 1930s, and when combined with other pioneering works dealing with Soviet prewar involvement such as Michael Walkers The 1929 Sino Soviet War, David Glantz Stumbling Colossus The Red Army on the Eve of World War, or Catherine Merridale’s Ivan’s War, presents a far more detailed picture and how the Soviet Union was far from a passive observer in the years leading up to the global conflict.

Cry Havoc starts with the Soviet 5 year plan, but seems to both back off the initial insinuation that it actually began the arms race both by a qualification and then lack of attention. Citing the disagreement between Stalin and his more militaristic generals such as Tukhachevsky, and using doctrine as a means to check unbridled armament production, Miaolo seems to try and soften the Soviet arms build up that he just introduced, yet repeating in other parts of the text the fact that it was the largest in the world for many years.

Positives:

The majority of the book focuses on Italy, Germany, and England, with the US, Japan, and Soviet Union in a kind of supporting case study role. Miolo argues convincingly how accelerated and artificially inflated arms production during the period created great pressures to restrict the rights of the citizens to support the “total war” concept. Italy and Germany, argues Miaolo, succumbed to this pressure (the Soviet Union was already there), and Japan joined in as well, while England was the hardest pressed to fight against such drives (succumbing only partially in 1940 with total mobilization of the state), but was able through herculean effort and focus, to retain the citizens rights (in England only, as Miaolo joins the majority of writers in ignoring the reality of Indian and Malayan colonial occupation where those “citizens” had been mobilized to a fashion to support the metro-pole for years).

The case study comparing and contrasting England and Italy is the real heart of Cry Havoc, as not only the most details presented by Miolo, but through Italy, we can see how a one time ally, gradually was isolated, and then through re-alignment caused not only by geopolitical pressures from the outside, but economic political structural pressures from the inside, shifted into a position where the Axis alignment was seen as favorable by it’s leadership.

Cry Havoc also brings to the fore the economic Wunderkinds of every nation that allowed the massive industrial revolutions in armaments production to be ramped up and implimented in support of the respective nations total war concepts. The marrying of military theory with the national industrial capacity is a lessons learned opportunity for current strategic planners and theorists to take to heart, and Miolo does an excellent job of highlighting the men behind the scenes and the marrying of theory, production, politics, and economics that each nation had to wrestle with.


Negatives:

The two major downfalls of the book, aside from inattention to the Soviet buildup and deployments in Asia prior to the Nomonhon battle in 1939, is the lack of focus on FDRs armaments buildup during the 1930s prior to the war clouds in Europe, and the Asian theater.

It is these that further give an illustration of how Miaolo (and to be fair many other WWII generalists), can excel in European analysis yet falter when dealing with pre war Asia and the US in Asia.

For example, on page 305 Cry Havoc claims that FDR only started arming due to the Japanese rejection of the Naval Limitations treaty. “Japan’s rejection of naval arms control justified upgrading the fleet, especially with job creation money: the New Deal alone helped build two aircraft carriers, four cruisers, nineteen destroyers, and four submarines. In July 1935 he ordered planning to start on new battleships.”

This is a clever slight of hand that obscures the facts that FDR began naval re-armament BEFORE the Japanese rejected the treaty.

Miolo also omits the dates in construction in the above passage and only includes a July 1935 date which tricks the reader into thinking the buildup was after the Japanese rejection in January 1935. However a quick look at the facts shows how Miaolo is either intentionally creating a false narrative, or was uncharacteristically sloppy in his research on American armament timelines.

All of the following occurred BEFORE the January 1935 nullification of Naval limitations by the Japanese.

1. March 4, 1933, from the double motive of aiding national defense and stimulating industry, decided to build up to the top limit. The administration under the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) provided the Navy a $237 million for warship construction. of 20 destroyers, four submarines, four light cruisers, and two aircraft carriers that Miaolo mentioned, but conveniently left out the date and placed it immediately following the Japanese rejection claim.

2. March 27, 1934 the Carl Vinson at the behest of FDR introduces and gets passed the Vinson Trammel Act, which authorized the navy to construct 102 new warships over the next eight years. (1)
65 destroyers, 30 submarines, one aircraft carrier, and 1184 naval airplanes, to be started over the next three years and completed by 1942. The act included the provision that alternate ships be built in navy yards, and it mandated that government arsenals provide the necessary ordnance. The bill also approved building the six cruisers still remaining from the 1929 program: four for 1935 and two for 1936.

By 1934, 15 new cruisers and one aircraft carrier - the USS Ranger - had been commissioned but, under the Five-Year Program, had not been provided aircraft complements. These unsatisfied requirements totaled over 200 aircraft, and the Vinson-Trammell Navy Act authorized the immediate expansion of the aircraft inventory to accommodate these demands.

In addition to the above, Miaolo fails to include details that the Japanese had not rejected limitations per se, only the ratio that Washington promoted (France was also wanting to buck the Naval limitations treaty proposals), and stated that Japan would re enter negotiations but only on equal footing. The US failed to provide any new initiatives with Japan on Naval limitations after that on an equitable basis.

Despite the glaring omission of key information in the timeline within the United States, that would actually re-enforce his overall supposition that arms races led to conflict and totalitarian methods, Cry Havoc remains an excellent insight into a new way to view the road to war, and an excellent intellectual contribution to WW2 Studies and overall global conflict studies in a contemporary context.


(1) Of particular interest are items in the US National Archives surrounding both the Naval armament increase of the Vinson Trammel Act of 1934, as well as the opposition to it from groups in the US believing that it would provoke Japan and lead to an arms race and war. The very theory to which Miolo believes, and yet omission of the positioning of the Vinson Trammel Act sets a bias in his presentation that seems to try and either whitewash or absolve the United States of active participation in the arms race he is presenting until much later when Nazi Germany and Japan become a clear and present danger in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The records indicate FDR was far more involved than Miolo has allowed in his narrative. From the National Archives (House Records: Chapter 4. Records of the Armed Services Committee and It’s Predecissors, Committee on Naval Affairs, 1822-1946, Jurisdiction and History, 4.74 URL: https://www.archives.gov/legislative/...


“Peace groups insisted that Congress observe the limits on naval armaments established by agreements negotiated at various international conferences. Such demands began before World War I, but naval treaties concluded at Washington, DC and London, England, in 1922, and 1930 respectively, and the Geneva Conference of 1932 elicited the bulk of the petitions (63A-H21.12, 67A-H16.2, 71A-H13.1). In 1934, several national religious organizations, particularly the Council of the Churches of Christ, unsuccessfully opposed the passage of the Vinson-Trammel bill that authorized a 5-year building and replacement program of more than 100 ships. In 1935, fleet exercises in the western Pacific prompted protests from church groups in Kentucky, New Jersey, and New York, that considered the maneuvers to be threats to world peace since they might provoke Japan (74A-H12.2).”

[Barron · Rating 3 out of 5]

On November 5, 1937, Adolf Hitler assembled his foreign policy staff to deliver a flamboyant rant about Germany’s strategic predicament. The Third Reich, he said, was currently ahead in the arms race against France, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union—but if it didn’t begin invading other countries soon, the country’s massive defense expenditures would trigger an economic meltdown. “If we do not act by 1943-1945,” he told them, “any year could, in consequence of a lack of reserves, produce the food crisis, to cope with which the necessary foreign exchange was not available, and this must be regarded as ‘the waning point of the regime.’” At that point his enemies, who were straining to match Germany’s arms buildup, would either amass the strength to crush him preemptively, or force the Reich into a multi-decade cold war which his country would ultimately lose. (The Nazi state, with limited resources and an economy almost completely devoted to armament, would probably follow a trajectory similar to those later taken by the Soviet Union and North Korea: long-term stagnation and decline, only mediated by desperate threats aimed at solidifying, legitimizing, and prolonging the life of the regime.) Rather than risk this, Hitler chose to invade Poland. The idea that Hitler was captive to his fear of Western and Soviet arms buildups, and vice versa, sits at the core of Cry Havoc: How the Arms Race Drove the World to War, 1931-1941, a new study of the run-up to the global conflagration. It’s a provocative concept, or at least it sounds like one, and historian Joseph Maiolo’s book has been hailed as a revisionist work for its claim that the arms race was “an independent, self-perpetuating and often overriding impersonal force that shaped events” and that national leaders “struggled to cope in vain with the arms race as an underlying dynamic, the supreme wrecker of all master plans.” But here’s the rub: upon closer examination, Maiolo actually appears unwilling to pin the blame for World War II on the arms race, at least as the term is conventionally understood—he gets gun-shy, or perhaps he is just too smart for that—and as a result, Cry Havoc is not nearly as revisionist as it seems.

Maiolo’s book sets out to provide us with a vivid, panoramic account of the steps that each great power took to prepare for World War II—a historian-wonk’s buffet of emergency laws, defense budgets, five-year plans, grim threat assessments, and ideological character studies worthy of Rise of the Vulcans. (“For one group of officers, Japan’s future capacity to wage total war started as a seminar topic, became an obsession and finally a mission.”) He pulls this off handily, giving us a broadly encompassing record of the very real arms competition that occurred between the Soviets, the West, and the countries of the Axis. Yet despite implying that he will do so, Maiolo ultimately declines to boil the confrontation down to an amoral action-reaction cycle, in which—for example—Stalin began building tanks, causing Hitler to build tanks, causing Chamberlain and Churchill to build airplanes, causing a worried Hitler to build more airplanes, and so on until the guns of August were blazing. “The tidal-like effects of arms racing,” he writes, “did not force anyone to choose war.”

Instead, throughout, Maiolo often identifies the culprit as something he calls “the logic of total war,” or sometimes “the arms race and the logic of total war.” This he describes as a worldview and a set of ideas. They will be familiar to students of the twentieth century: That, given the experience of World War I, future wars would be total wars, won by the countries with the most manpower; the largest and most mobilized economies; and the most access to steel, oil, and raw materials. That, to succeed in such a competition, the state would have to take over nearly all sectors of private life, so citizens would become like cells in the body of a larger organism fighting for its own survival. That the coming era would see the world divided into autarkic economic blocs, with strong countries absorbing weak, resource-rich regions like Manchuria and Eastern Europe. And that war was probably inevitable, so nations needed to act boldly to produce enough tanks, rifles, and bombers to ensure an advantage over their enemies when the final battle commenced.

Maiolo spends much of Cry Havoc emphasizing the ways in which these assumptions—widely shared among policymakers during the interwar years—shaped strategic planning and national policy in nearly every major capital, especially in the Soviet Union and the countries of the Axis, rendering the arms race essentially inevitable. Center-stage in his account are the “total-war systematizers” who were most zealous about putting these concepts into practice. But the problem here is that this set of ideas, which Maiolo tends to conflate with the tit-for-tat logic of an arms race, is incredibly broad: He is not simply discussing strategic thought, but also social theory and political economy. By another name, the worldview he identifies would simply be called totalitarianism or fascism. And at times it seems as if he is simply saying that totalitarianism and the breakdown of the global economic order drove the world to war—which, far from being revisionist, is precisely the conventional understanding.

Indeed, when it comes down to the crucial question of why Hitler went to war, Maiolo is content to admit that, although considerations about the military balance weighed heavily on Hitler’s mind and affected his decisions about timing and strategy, “[w]hat made a European conflict inevitable was Hitler’s determination to wage one.” (It’s hard to imagine any real scenario in which Hitler would have been content to accept detente rather than go down in flames. Indeed, Maiolo finds it “astonishing” that Germany, Italy, and Japan ventured into a war that even at the time was demonstrably “unwinnable.” This tells us a bit about total-war thinking, but what does it tell us about the arms race?) And some of the most evocative portions of Cry Havoc show the ways that the leaders of democratic countries—from FDR to the French Socialist Leon Blum to even Neville Chamberlain—strove mightily to modulate the impact and mode of defense mobilization, fearing that the liberal character of their societies would be threatened by a full-blown centralization effort to match the Axis. By contrast, Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo, and Stalin embraced the total-war production state because that was how they believed the world should be. Their ideologies and fears about other nations’ arms buildups were mutually reinforcing—enabling them to create empires governed by a sense of permanent terror and crisis, or at least go out in a world-historical blaze of glory.

Despite its drawbacks, some of this conceptual confusion is actually to Maiolo’s credit. As a historian, he has tried to give us the most expansive look at the pre-war military buildup as possible, explaining that “[t]o tell the story in all its complexity, I have tried to combine the political, diplomatic, military and economic elements of arming into one international history.” In the process, he ends up pursuing the fact that ideas were quite consequential to the arms competition of this period—and conversely his account reminds us how arms races are deeply emotion, ideology, and value-laden affairs. And given that warfare did in fact require such vast levies during the world wars, his account also keeps us mindful of the ways in which the “total-war” ethic may have simply been an acknowledgement of technological reality at the time. (Maiolo’s battles over defense budgeting are fascinatingly familiar, in some ways, and yet also quite alien for Pentagon-watchers in an era where nuclear weapons and remotely piloted drones—not total, all-encompassing mobilization, keep the peace.) But one does not walk away from Cry Havoc with the feeling that World War II was a tragic accident, as arms races are often described, or even much of a misunderstanding.

[Dropbear123 · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.25/5

The book starts with the First Five Year Plan in the Soviet Union in 1928 and ends with the USA's entry into WWII. Covers a wide range of topics including economics, political divides (left vs right in the 1930s France for example), factional disputes and arguements between different military services (the Japanese army vs navy but also things the British navy and airforce competing for funding etc), the logic of the various political leaders and the reasons for their decisions etc. There is also a lot on how business leaders responded to rearmament (a mix of positivity due to the extra business with fears over the level of state intervention and control) and how democratic leaders tried to rearm without causing their countries to fall into being totalitarian states. The book is more positive about the prewar democracies than in the traditional 'appeasement' viewpoint, with a lot of focus on how they effectively rearmed. For example when the book comes to the fall of France the author blames that more on French military leadership and intelligence mistakes than any particular prewar economic or political failures of the Third Republic. There are some chapters on the USSR, Japan and the USA but the bulk of the book is about Britain, France, Germany and Italy. While the book does have lots of statistics (steel production, workforces, aircraft production etc) it doesn't feel like constant non-stop numbers. In terms of the different military areas I'd say the book priotises aviation the most, then naval and finally the land forces (artillery, tanks etc) the least.

The book is 400 pages of (in the edition I read) rather small writing so it took me longer than I thought I would, but I still enjoyed it. I'd recommend it if you are interested in the politics and leadup to WWII but I would say you would benefit from going in with a basic knowledge of the big events and names. Not a first book on the time period. While it is a complex topic I'd say for comparison this book is a well easier read, in terms of writing and terminology, than The Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze.

[King Wenclas · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a well-written, absorbing book. More important, its theme is very relevant for us today. Maiolo thoroughly builds his case that the most important need for a nation's military defense is a strong economy underpinning it. The conclusion I draw is that the U.S. had better first get its economy moving and its financial house in order. Without that, there won't be any money to spend on armaments! In other words, cutting military expenditures NOW, while we still have a significant lead in military technology and arms, as part of alleviating the debt problem, makes sense.

It's hard to ask more of an author, even a historian, than to be relevant to his time.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books I've read in a while about World War II. Most history books look at the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and the later Marco Polo Bridge incident before moving to the German invasion of Poland. This book explores what was going on diplomatically and economically in the world powers from the late 1920's to 1941. The best compliment I can give a book is that I feel like I learned a lot and with this book I did.

[John Albers · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are only 66 reviews of this book, which is a shame. Cry Havoc is a better written, more detailed book that those that are seemingly turned out every three to four days covering the Second World War. Joseph Maiolo's book is a careful examination of the origins of the arms race that led to the second world war, and the problems involved when governments take control over economic production. It is worth looking for a library or on line.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit technocratic but informative and interesting look at the interwar period from a "war ministry" kind of perspective. Coming out of the industrialized slaughterhouse of WWI, many countries/leaders drew the conclusion that it wasn't going to be country with the best weapons per se that won the next war, but probably the country with the best economy. More precisely, whomever could achieve economic autarky and best mobilize the full resources of their nation, would likely triumph over less self-sufficient or less committed nations. It's easy how this total war philosphy, combined with a natural "keep up with the Joneses" mentality in type/quality of armaments led to a spiraling arms race that reached a climax in the 2nd World War. Obviously, WWII was not fought because statesmen couldn't control their own nascent military-industrial complexes -- it was fought because Adolph Hitler absolutely wanted a war. Having said that, the color and timing of that decision (even by a mind as elliptical as Hitler's) was driven in no small measure by the dynamics of this arms race. It is a revelation to see those details further filled in.

The political decisions in all countries (Russia, Italy, France, Germany, & the UK) intertwine with the technocratic and military ones; the former are explained if not over emphasized. Having said that, Professor Maiolo does us a great favor indeed by reminding that even in the totalitarian states, there *were* political and economics tradeoffs during the rearmaments process that couldn't be ignored. A worldwide depression was still raging, and countries everywhere were sloughing off the last of the specie-backed monetary standards. It is fascinating to see the tradeoffs, bargains, and political deals that are made and broken within each country as time goes on, and how those dynamics fed the process in other countries - friend and foe alike.

I'd be lying if I said this was a breezy read - it's not. If you are looking for a broad history of the interwar years, or the decisions that lead to WWII, you'd best look elsewhere. But if you are interested in the economics and logistics or war, or want to know about "the military-industrial complex" and the dynamics of arms races, then I highly recommend this book.

On a final superficial note, I really like the book cover. :-)

[Nathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A solid account of the basic lines of economic/industrial strategy leading up to the outbreak of the second world war and the first couple of years of fighting.

No huge surprises or insights in here, but it would serve as a decent primer to the topic.

Was interesting to note, though, the author's belief that France was actually in better socio-political shape in 39-40 than many other established texts suggest (pace Howard). So there are a couple of nuggets to be mined here.

Rated G 3/5

[Ron · Rating 2 out of 5]

Book on an interesting topic that ultimately was a rehash of previously encounterd scholarship written in a hum-drum academic fashion without flash of inspiration..