Cry Havoc: How the Arms Race Drove the World to War, 1931-1941 by Joseph Maiolo (review)

This book will not be to every reader's taste. In the British style, it is heavily detailed, abounding with mobilization plans and organizational entities, even as its subtitle so bluntly spells out its argument that a reader might be tempted to go no further. Might a snappy article have served better to make the argument?

Joseph Maiolo indeed argues that "the arms race drove the world to war," and he shows in exacting detail how. Fearful or ambitious governments reacted to one another's advances in weaponry and mobilization by upping the ante in hopes of deterring potential enemies—either from war-making or from arming further—or gaining advantage over them should war break out. For all, World War I was the template of what might be done and the example of what could go wrong. One of Maiolo's themes is how such ideologically diverse parties—the Soviet Union, fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the capitalist democracies like France, Britain, and the United States—reacted so similarly to the World War I experience, as they contributed to the nearly threefold increase in "worldwide arms spending" (p. 141) from 1933 to 1936. In turn, the arms race drove diverse states toward similarly authoritarian systems of state planning and coercion. As "the race sent everyone down the same totalitarian track" (p. 4), all leaders "agreed that war was no longer a contest between rival armies, but a life-and-death struggle between whole peoples and economies" (p. 61). Some leaders eagerly seized the moment—Adolf Hitler obviously, though the result for him was more chaotic and less productive than sometimes recognized by rivals who fearfully saw in Germany "a model of Teutonic efficiency, worthy of emulation" (p. 332). British, French, and U.S. leaders entered the moment reluctantly, uneasy about eroding democracy and accelerating the arms race, though for the most part more successfully. Even the French did better than most people recognize, Maiolo suggests, and Franklin Roosevelt did best of all, while "the United States fascinated the total-war systematizers" (p. 105) elsewhere. Maiolo's astute assessment of Franklin Roosevelt points to one of the book's strengths: he writes convincingly about histories far beyond his British home base. The subject may be old-fashioned—after the Cold War ended, the arms races of the twentieth century fell out of favor as scholarly subjects—but his treatment yields an impressive international history, one buttressed by extensive research, by deft use of older and current scholarship, and by evenhanded judgment (Maiolo takes no cheap shots at the flawed leaders he examines or the rival scholars he challenges).

Like the arms race itself, the book seems like a closed world, walled off from other currents and from recent scholarly trends. Maiolo maintains a laser-like focus on states and the calculations made by their leaders and planners about the arms race. He presents little about ideological, cultural, and political developments beyond those calculations. "War never was just the rational application of violence for some definable political goal; it was also the harnessing of the irrational passions, such as fear and hate, of the masses" (p. 323), Maiolo recognizes, but he rarely dips into those "irrational passions" (held, one might add, not only by "the masses") or explores how they, as much as strategic calculations, drove the world to war. As a result, readers understand the calculations driving the arms race but not the fuel for it. The result, too, is a sense of the inevitability of World War II that burdens most scholarship about its initiation. As Maiolo writes regarding Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, his "diplomacy was doomed to fail, for the great competition was neither in his nor anyone else's power to stop" (p. 239), just as "the vicious system of military competition locked everyone into place" (p. 271). Yet Maiolo earlier insists that "the tidal-like effects of...