Book description
The arms race, on the run up to the Second World War, followed the
faultless logic of paranoia. Before the First World War, the Great
Powers measured the strength of their rivals by comparing the size of
armies and navies, and the money spent on them. Afterwards, having
learned the lessons of 'total war', they looked at the capacity of
nations to mobilise their economies and populations for war. Deep
planning, they realised, was necessary to prepare for potential
conflicts; but with this attitude came a sense that society might need
to be in a state of perpetual readiness for conflict, and a potential
openness to totalitarian levels of state control in ensuring that
readiness. In Cry Havoc Joe Maiolo shows, in rich and fascinating
detail, how the arms race between the Great Powers developed. Where
previous histories have looked at how individual nations responded to
the challenges of the time, Maiolo reveals the full complexity of the
arms race by looking at competition between nations, at how nations
reacted to the moves of their rivals. Maiolo provides a vivid portrait
of the thinking of those making the key decisions - of the thinking of
Hitler, Mussolini, Chamberlain, Stalin, Roosevelt - and reveals the full
extent of the dilemmas confronted by the leaders of the western
democracies, who seemed at times to be faced with a choice between
defending their nations and preserving the essential democratic nature
of the societies they sought to defend. Cry Havoc is an absorbing
account of a time of extreme tensions, showing how the deadly game
of the arms race led, ultimately, to an unleashing of the dogs of war.
