A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II

One Big History of the World WarI have been reading books about the World War for nearly 50 years. This book is one of a kind. But it's not written for everyone. First I will point out some limitations of this book. Then I will list some of the strengths that make this book unique.Limitations.Weinberg is a clear writer, but not flashy. The material is carefully organized but it moves at a deliberate pace. Put simply, this is not exciting reading, especially at 900 pages!If you loved Ambrose, McCullough, or D'Este, you may dislike Weinberg.Weinberg believes in a form of historical writing that downplays the role of individuals. Roosevelt, Hitler, Stalin, Rommel, Churchill, Mussolini, Chang Kai Shek, Hirohito are all in attendance, but their personalities, their quirks, and theirhabits , hardly enter into the story. Instead, these men represent movements, states, ideologies, etc. Weinberg never uses direct, pithy quotes. That takes something out, compared to other popular history.Weinberg doesn't say anything he can't back up. Many chapters contain 200 footnotes or more. Those footnotescould drive you crazy.Weinberg does not present the War as simply a clash of Good versus Evil. He sees a much more complex picture of motives and actions at play. Few parties to the conflict emerge with their honor wholly intact.Weinberg does not write much about leaders, battles, etc.Don't get me wrong. The leaders and battles are there, butW is only interested in the big picture aspects of battles, notin leaders, heroes, clever tactics, etc.I don't see these limitations as very important. A reader canget all that exciting stuff from popular books. Instead, Weinberg has produced a book that mainly appeals to World War addicts and scholars. I'm not sure I would recommend this book to readers who don't already have a good general grasp of the War.Now the strengths:Weinberg organized his material in such a way as to show the War in an integrated whole. He covers the whole World, Asia,Europe, Mediterranean, even Africa and South America. In doing so he shows many interconnections that I had never previously considered. For instance, the book shows the close relationship between Japan and Germany.His writing is very tight. He discusses his topics systematically, thoroughly, and logically. He likes to set out lists of considerations, or reasons that I find illuminating. For example, why did Hitler consistently reject offers of additional collaboration from Vichy France?Weinberg is realistic in his judgments. Although his overall viewpoint about the morality of the War is rather conventional, he's unafraid of making harsh judgments. For instance, W shows how the neutrals; Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland, Portugal, Spain, Turkey, etc acted in greedy and self-interested ways, looking for war profits, wanting territorial gains, desparate to keep their independence.W is not given to moralizing. As I stated, his own views are clear, not hidden. But he does NOT find many instance

Gerhard L. Weinberg has brought forth a thoughtful history of World War II, distinguished by its comprehensive scope and coherent organization. The broad sweep of the war is organized around the foreign policies of the combatants, which clarifies the causes of the war and its development within the strategic rationale of the contestants. This approach also reveals the tensions within each of the alliances. For the Allies, the reader sees the particular controversies that were subsumed to the greater goal of defeating the Axis, but which in some ways presaged the antagonisms of the Cold War. For the Axis, it was not so much the tensions, but rather the mutual disregard for each other's aims that was determinative, exemplified by Japan's blunder of attacking Pearl Harbor and Germany's unwillingness to reach an accord with the USSR as German military power waned. A history such as this is especially useful for reacquainting us with the challenges of multilateralism as the anomalous international system of the Cold War recedes. In this regard, I also favor Dean Acheson's memoirs, "Present at the Creation."Hitler's essential focus on gaining the agricultural and industrial resources of the Ukraine provides rationality to German actions, and explains why the USSR faced such a tremendous burden, with staggering human cost, holding the Eastern Front. Japan's own ambitions are similar in that it hoped to secure natural resources through dominance of the western Pacific. Distinctly irrational for both countries, however, was the systematic savagery that was integral to their operations. In Germany's case, these activities were an extension of its racial purity policies of the 1930s, culminating in the Holocaust, as well as its intent to cleanse ethnically the Soviet territory it occupied in preparation for relocating Germans into these areas. Weinberg starkly describes the utter darkness that fell across the world at the start of the war: Germany's ejection of British forces from Europe and Greece; the capitulation of France; the encirclement of Soviet forces by the hundreds of thousands; Japan's sweep throughout the western Pacific; and the near-total isolationism of the United States. As the war proceeded, strategic misjudgments by the Axis provided an opportunity for the Allies to rally. Britain passed the trial of the Battle of Britain, the United States was drawn in to the war by Pearl Harbor, and the USSR, if not without tragic waste, developed the highly effective force that was to be the bulwark and eventually the bludgeon against the Wehrmacht. At the same time, the Axis passed its high watermarks of the war with strategic defeats at Midway and Stalingrad. Weinberg's history appreciates these events not only with respect to their diplomatic and military ramifications, but also the technological, economic, and demographic forces at work. While key engagements are dealt with in their strategic and operational context, a history like t

This is truly the most comprehensive monograph written as an overview of the war as an ongoing event in world history. Time and again Weinberg amazes us with his grasp and understanding of the connections and influences within and among the many theaters of war. This, then, is a massively documented and carefully researched one volume comprehensive history of World War Two as a world war quite unlike the one that preceded it. He traces its origins in the events and consequences flowing from the first world war, and then demonstrates quite handily that the political fate and will of one man, Adolph Hitler, literally forced the war into being. He analyzes the events professionally and dispassionately, and ties together the events in all their horror to the nature of the world conflict. While one can certainly argue that most of what he says is not new, it is also the case that he links the observations of others with his own insights in a way that is much more learned, better organized, and comprehensive in its results. Some of the statistics tying the various theaters of conflict together are dizzying, such as the fact that the numbers of divisions (over two hundred) deployed by Hitler on the eastern front, for example, both dwarf and doom the troops (just fifty divisions)available for the defense of the western wall of Europe. He estimates the total number of deaths due directly to the war at over sixty million, and cites the various sources for such a catastrophic figure. Likewise, you see how the Japanese situation of being overextended in Asia fighting defensive struggles against the Chinese, British, Australians, etc from India to Burma has consequences for its sumultaneous defense against assembled naval activities and the island-by-island hopping and isolation strategy of the Allied forces. This book is immensely readable, but is so literally packed with details and connections, so is often difficult to read both because of its subject matter and the details he includes. His overview, for example, of Hitler's criuel and inhumane eugenics activities against his own people, especially the mentally ill, defective, and the infirm even before the war is both nauseating and revealing. Likewise, his argument that the "Final Solution" of total extermination of all European Jews was more the result of desperation, logistics, and the rush of historical circumstance than a long-standing and well-thought out policy decision is quite interesting to read. It was only after the massive displacements of Polish Jews into a single sector that feeding and maintaining this large population clearly became the chief argument for the mass extermination of all Jews. On the other hand, the war against the Russians was always intended to be a war of extermination, one in which the armies and occupants of the areas conquered were to be savagely and brutally used for slave labor and then eliminated. This is truly a masterwork in

Gerhard Weinberg combines massive archival research in three countries with exhaustive use of secondary sources and a steady supply of trenchant observations in order to create what simply has to be acknowledged as the single best one-volume history of World War II.Its flaws should be acknowledged--overemphasis on diplomatic history, underemphasis on the Pacific--but its flaws in no way denigrate from the incredible accomplishment. Even the endnotes are a pleasure to read.Although praise rarely falls so readily from my lips, I simply have to emphasize that this is a must-read for any student of World War II.

Gerhard Weinberg's A World at Arms is a must possession for every World War 2 buff. Even as a reference work never read continuously its beautifully complete index will page you in on every significant event in a conflict that Weinberg sees and treats as a storm that enveloped every country in the world; even Uruguay and Mexico are indexed. After I had begun the book, some confusion that arose from viewing a documentary about the battle of Leyte Gulf was promptly cleared up by reading Weinberg's account with the relevant maps. I have been waiting for this book for a long time and recommend it highly for those readers whose sophistication about these events demands references when they read that Douglas McArthur received a great deal of money from Filipino President Manuel Quezon when they departed for safety on 11 March 1942. This is not a book for those who want a quickly readable survey of American involvement in the conflict. Details is what this book is about--stupendously documented details, mainly to do with shifting alliances within the Axis and Allied responses; there are, for example, eight indexed references to Sir John Dill, the man who more than any other was responsible for smoothing out the prickles in the Anglo-American alliance. Details, however, do not always make for easy reading. An academic historian whose expertise stems from his intimate knowledge of the relevant documentary archives, Weinberg writes academic prose. Few of his sentences would pass the Fleischman criteria for readibility. Even a reader used to this kind of prose will find that one sentence in ten requires re-reading. And sometimes we wish that the author had chosen a different way of putting his point. And the publisher could have seen to it that the maps in the appendix of such an important book were of a quality equal to the thought behind this great work. Nonetheless, any complaints here are mere quibbles; @ 3 cents per page this book is a bargain by any one's accounting. Thank you Dr. Weinberg and Cambridge University Press!