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Summary: Weinberg authors a historical masterpiece
Review: "A World At Arms: A Global History of World War II," is a historical masterpiece. Hats off to Author Gerjard L. Weinberg for maintaining a high degree of objectivity and not waving any partisan flags. All serious students of World War II "must" study this comprehensive work. To this end, the preface, body, conclusion, notes, maps and index are outstanding. This heavy-weight Cambridge Univeristy Press book (1,178 pages) belongs in every library. Moreover, the author must be commended for starting this book when his wife (who urged him to continue) was already fighting cancer. A battle she eventually lost. Weinberg brings a compelling focus to World War II that few historians can match (particularly with the German/Soviet Union confrontation)...I for one am grateful for his dedication. I first read this book nearly ten years ago...and now realize just how great this man's vision extends. Weinberg is truly a remarkable historian. Highly recommended for those who want the truth about World War II. Bert Ruiz
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Summary: Want a tour-de-force read on WWII? This is it!!!
Review: "A World At Arms" is quite frankly one of the best books on WWII I have ever read (I've read few). This is one packed book. Weinberg covers the events leading up to the war, as well as the events themselves. Although 1300ish pages in length it reads like a 250 page books that fills your soul with facts! You'll get the how's, who's, where's, and why's - even if you already know the when's and what's they're there also. Truly a "world" perspective, Weinberg includes it all. It really is hard to now imagine how much this book covered and how easily it does it. I can't recommend this book highly enough. Yet, block some time, even though it's an easy read it is more than half the length of "War and Peace" so it takes time - but time well spent.
Rating:
Summary: Weinberg authors a historical masterpiece
Review: "A World At Arms: A Global History of World War II," is a historical masterpiece. Hats off to Author Gerjard L. Weinberg for maintaining a high degree of objectivity and not waving any partisan flags. All serious students of World War II "must" study this comprehensive work. To this end, the preface, body, conclusion, notes, maps and index are outstanding. This heavy-weight Cambridge Univeristy Press book (1,178 pages) belongs in every library. Moreover, the author must be commended for starting this book when his wife (who urged him to continue) was already fighting cancer. A battle she eventually lost. Weinberg brings a compelling focus to World War II that few historians can match (particularly with the German/Soviet Union confrontation)...I for one am grateful for his dedication. I first read this book nearly ten years ago...and now realize just how great this man's vision extends. Weinberg is truly a remarkable historian. Highly recommended for those who want the truth about World War II. Bert Ruiz
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Summary: Global is right!
Review: (by E.M. Singer, author of "Mother Flies Hurricanes") Global is right, in both content and size (1178 page thick!). The main thrust of Weinberg's book is to tie the various theaters of WWII into an interrelated whole, so that you can see that what happened here, caused this to happen there, and that in turn caused that and that and that, and etcetera and so forth. Pretty deep for the novice reader; more for the serious researcher. If you haven't read anything about WWII yet, it would be better to start with an easier book (check out recommedations at the motherflieshurricanes.com website), then go on to this one.
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Summary: Excellent Single Volume History of WWII
Review: Because of his years in Columbia University's War Documentation Project and his work microfilming captured German documents for the American Historical Association, Gerhard Weinberg has an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of World War II. This massive book is the apex of Weinberg's work on the war, and it summarizes the entire war in a single volume. At a recent lecture i was impressed by the author's derision at Nazi strategy, which he considers highly overrated. Weinberg writes simply and with great clarity, and while this book will seldom be read cover-to-cover, it will be memorable for the WWII enthusiast or the general reader.
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Summary: The foremost scholarly single-volume history of WWII
Review: 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 this will probably not be of tremendous interest to students of particular battles, or of anecdotal combat experiences. Also, despite the current focus on combating terrorism, Weinberg's description of the reordering of global relations in the aftermath of the war remains relevant today. This book draws on historical source material that became available in the early 1990s. Graduate students in history take note: Weinberg offers numerous ideas for thesis research. Another contemporary history, "A War to be Won" by Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millett, would probably also be worth reading in conjunction with Weinberg. As much as I favor this book, I have to admit that it was a cumbersome read. Not that it was poorly written, but the scope of the subject demands much from the reader. Still, determination yields an edifying read, and this authoritative history, with its absence of axe-grinding and hobby-horsing, is worthy of one's serious attention. Afterwards, one major impression I was left with is that although the international system failed to thwart the ambitions of fascist nations, contributing to the causation of the war, during the war a combination of diverse forces permitted the Allies to rally from profound defeat and eventually renew the international system in victory. The maps, which are hidden between the bibliographic notes and index, are minimally useful, and I highly recommend "The Times Atlas of the Second World War" (out of print, unfortunately and inexplicably) in order to appreciate Weinberg's descriptions of the campaigns as they unfold.
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Summary: As fine a one-volume history as we could hope to have
Review: Gerhard L. Weinberg's single-volume history of WW II is truly remarkable in that it presents not merely an account of the battles and major events of the war, but the politics and diplomacy that were truly as important and as essential as what happened on the battlefield. Too many histories of wars are written by historians who are fixated on battles, and the development of wartime technology, and bombing campaigns, and tactics on the field. Weinberg does not neglect these expects of the war, but he knows that these other aspects are in large part an outgrowth of other factors: industrial output, the cooperation between allies in sharing ideas, goals, and materials as well as coordinating battle plans, and the personalities driving each country. In short, this is a comprehensive history of World War Two, and not merely an account of its military campaigns. Not only this, but Weinberg successfully addresses the greatest fault of most Anglo-European histories of the war: to focus too much on the European Western front and the Pacific campaign, ignoring the fact that by far the greatest amount of fighting--both in terms of men deployed and in casualties suffered and inflicted--came on the long and decision Russian front. Although the Germans deployed far more of their military along their Eastern front, in the West we constantly tend to forgot this. Unquestionably, this is in part a function of the natural myopia all human beings are subject, as we tend to focus more closely on those aspects of an affair that more directly involve us. But in the West it is also a lingering offshoot of the Cold War, during which time Americans and Europeans unquestionably minimized and even ignored the massive Soviet contributions to the war. No nation gave more of its lifeblood in the winning of World War Two, and Weinberg is to be praised for writing accurately about it. Despite being only one volume, this is truly a massive book. Weinberg deals with every imaginable aspect of the war, some that I have already noted. It is a weighty, thick book, replete with extensive bibliography and footnotes. There are no illustrations, a decision that was probably made because there are thousands of other books that visualize the war in every imaginable fashion. My complaint concerns the paucity of maps. There are a group of maps contained at the end of the volume, but I think the text would have been far more useful with a series of additional and smaller maps that would have more precisely located geographically where major events were taking place. But this is a minor point. A more substantial criticism is that the book leaves out almost entirely the social aspect of the war and does not deal as extensively with what was happening on the homefront, on how the war was changing and altering the nations participating. For instance, the war exerted massive influence on the United States, having dramatic effects on politics, race, gender, and economic matters. These topics are almost completely left alone. In a one-volume history, one must make decisions about what to leave in and out, and Weinberg focuses on the fighting and the geopolitical aspects. There is a wealth of other one-volume histories of World War Two available, but this is, I believe, clearly the one for anyone wanting to learn more about the war in depth to read. I would, however, argue that any event the magnitude of WW II requires the serious student to approach it from several points of view. No single volume could ever do the trick.
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Summary: Political history 1939-1945 completely documented.
Review: 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!
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Summary: The best one-volume treatment I ever expect to see
Review: My perfect one-volume history of World War II would combine Weinberg's lucid organization of the strategic concerns of the war and his unsurpassed breadth of scholarship (it's daunting even to read all the *titles* in his bibliography - let alone the books themselves!), John Keegan's vivid recreation of the operational and tactical levels of the fighting as well as his general narrative liveliness, and (since more died out of uniform than in) Martin Gilbert's much-needed attention to the horrifying scale of civilian suffering. Since that book doesn't exist (and would be as thick as an unabridged dictionary if it did), I would - by a narrow margin - pick Weingerg as my one book on the subject if I could have only one. There simply aren't two covers anywhere with as much of the whole vast story between them. Although Weinberg is more interested in the drag on Germany's industrial capacity from the cessation of Turkish exports of chromium than on a Leningrad mother hauling the frozen corpse of her starved child behind her on a sled (less a scholar's tunnel vision than a reasoned decision to do one thing well rather than many things poorly), no one I know of has given a fuller and clearer account of why everything happened the way it did. To address some of the criticisms of the book I've read here: I agree that the few maps provided are ludicrously inadequate - a shoddy afterthought that can only have raised the book's already considerable price. (At least they're tucked away in the back of the book where you can comfortably ignore them.) However, the prose - while not as spry as Keegan's admirable standard - should be perfectly intelligible to anyone intelligent enough to be tackling a book of this scope in the first place. Here's what I consider to be a representative sample: "Until access to the Soviet archives enables scholars to see more clearly into these murky episodes, this author will remain convinced that it was the shock of German military revival so soon after the great Soviet victory at Stalingrad which reinforced Stalin's inclinations during 1943 to contemplate the possibility of either a separate peace with Hitler's Germany or with some alternative German government." Not Clancy, but not Clausewitz either.
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Summary: Informative and easy to digest
Review: Nothing has probably been written about more than the Second World War. The titanic nature of the global conflict is daunting just to think about, but Mr. Weinberg has managed to lay out the fundamental structure of the war in an easy to follow and global review. The global perspective of this book is what sets it apart from almost all other histories of the second Great War. By tying together both the Pacific and European theaters of WWII, Mr. Weinberg, gives you a clearer, if not so detailed, view of how events in the Pacific and Europe could affect each other. As the author explains in the introduction to his book this is not a review of the methods and mechanics of waging war, but it is a review of the socio-political causes and consequences of waging a world war. Some information about the equipment and practices of the combatants are put into this book where they are necessary to explain the policies of the belligerents, but overall this is not a book for someone looking for technical details about mid-1900's warfare. However, if you are looking for a comprehensive study of how and why a second global conflagration occurred then you have found what you are looking for. The extensive research evident in Mr. Weinberg's work is so complete anyone looking for information about WWII could easily find everything they need either in the text or in the works sited. This is a book for everyone looking for a truly global perspective of the Second World War, and it is a treasure trove of information for anyone researching or studying this period in history.
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