Finished Cry Havoc:: The Arms Race and the Second World War 1931-41 by Joe Maiolo (review copied from Goodreads)

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.

Now reading Confronting Leviathan: A History of Ideas by David Runciman which is basically summing up the works and ideas (mainly around the state and control) of various important thinkers starting with Hobbes then going onwards from that to more recent ones (I'm nearly halfway through the book and it is up to Marx and Engels). It's based on a podcast called Talking Politics which I've never listened to.