Inferno The world at war, 1939-1945

Review by Choice Review

Sir Max Hastings has done it again. After more than 20 admirable books about various campaigns and key personalities of WW II, this latest study is the sweeping culmination of the entire war. In 26 chapters, Hastings dissects the conflict, covering every major battle in theaters of operations across the globe. One chapter, for instance, is devoted to the air war, and another discusses the Mediterranean, followed by Russia, the US, and Japan. An outstanding military historian who learned his trade as a war correspondent in Vietnam and the Falklands, Hastings understands the man in the trenches. Drawing on letters, diaries, reports, and quotes, readers experience horrors from Stalingrad to Guadalcanal through the eyes of the participants. Augmenting the military side of the war, Hastings includes the unity of the home front and the changing status of women, as well as the shame of the political dithering and diplomatic perfidy as Britain and France considered coming to Poland's aid. Of particular importance is a reassessment of Russia's huge value to the war effort. Yet another chapter examines the Holocaust and the fate of the war's other victims. A wonderfully written, if lengthy, history of WW II. Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries. A. P. Krammer Texas A&M University

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

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Review by New York Times Review

DO we really need another history of World War II? The book market is overflowing with them, and new ones seem to appear at almost weekly intervals. Vast though the conflict was, we probably know more about it than any other war in history. Sir Max Hastings, author of this latest survey, has already written no fewer than eight books about key campaigns and personalities of the war. Has he got anything new to say? The answer is, emphatically, yes. "Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945" sums up and surpasses all his previous publications: a new, original and necessary history, in many ways the crowning of a life's work. A professional war correspondent who has personally witnessed armed conflicts in Vietnam, the Falkland Islands and other danger zones, Hastings has a sober, unromantic and realistic view of battle that puts him into a different category from the armchair generals whose gungho, schoolboy attitude to war fills the pages of a great majority of military histories. He writes with grace, fluency and authority. "Inferno" offers an account of the war that concentrates on the lived experience of the men and women who took part in it. On almost every page there is memorable and arresting material from interviews, diaries, letters, memoirs and personal documents of many kinds. The huge cast of characters and witnesses gives the book an almost Tolstoyan sweep, as it ranges across the world, from Dunkirk to Iwo Jima, Stalingrad to Guadalcanal. Hastings is at his absolute best when he is describing battle scenes, both on land and at sea. Deftly chosen quotations are effortlessly integrated into the narratives, providing color and making the action come alive. They are supplemented where appropriate with clear and informative maps and easily digestible statistics. This is at its core very much a military history, despite the space devoted to the experiences of civilians. Brisk assessments are delivered on the competence or (mostly) incompetence of leading generals and the performance of their troops; in the book's concluding chapter, Hastings pronounces his verdicts, rather like a senior general handing out medals at the end of a campaign: Montgomery was a highly competent professional who lacked the touch of genius needed for him to be numbered among the great commanders; MacArthur was a brilliant self-publicist, but outclassed as a general by the now-forgotten Lucien Truscott; Rommel was fatally compromised by his disregard for logistics; Georgi Zhukov was a superb commander in 1944, but his storming of Berlin the following spring was brutish and clumsy. Hastings argues that the navies of the United Kingdom and the United States were their best fighting forces; he thinks the armies of the two Allied powers were mostly no match for the ruthless fighting prowess of the Germans and Japanese, whose willingness to sacrifice themselves contrasted with the care taken by Allied generals to minimize casualties among their own men. Red Army troops behaved in a manner not unlike that of the Germans, their reckless disregard for their own safety driven on by the knowledge that the Soviet secret police would shoot them if they hesitated. What shifted the balance in favor of the Allies in the end was America's industrial might, which by 1943 was supplying enormous quantities of munitions and equipment without which the Red Army's victory would have taken far longer to achieve. Germans, Russians and Japanese soldiers and civilians get their say in this book as well as Americans and British. Ninety percent of German troops killed in the war died on the Eastern Front, and Hastings gives this fact appropriately expansive treatment. He is as hard on the racism, complacency and incompetence of the British in the face of the Japanese invasion of Malaya and Singapore as he is on the cruelty and brutality of the Japanese Army as it tortured, raped and massacred its way across China, Indonesia and Malaya. As the British fled, denying Asians access to evacuation ships to make room for themselves, the young Singaporean politician, Lee Kwan Yew, exclaimed: "That is the end of the British Empire." Millions of people died of hunger, disease and mass murder under German rule in Europe, but millions died too from starvation in India under British rule. Yet Hastings is not always so evenhanded in his coverage. In describing the invasion, conquest and division of Poland by Hitler and Stalin in 1939, for example, he devotes considerable space to the Soviet arrest, deportation and murder of Poles in their zone of occupation, but says little about the mass imprisonment, deportation, enslavement and murder of hundreds of thousands of Poles by the Nazis. His brilliant and evocative account of the "winter war," in which Finland defended itself with surprising effectiveness against Stalin's invasion in 1939-40, outclasses his somewhat perfunctory narrative of the Polish campaign. And his skillful touch can fail him when it comes to dealing with nonmilitary aspects of the war. There are too many sweeping generalizations about national character. The Poles have a "propensity for fantasy," for example, while "Britain's antimilitarist tradition was a source of pride to its people." Neither claim is true; indeed, British national culture in the 1930s was suffused with celebratory memories of national military victories in Europe and across the British Empire, while pacifism was the province of only a tiny minority. On occasion, too, the military historian's propensity to judge everything in terms of military effectiveness can lead Hastings astray. "One of Hitler's greatest mistakes," he writes, "from the viewpoint of his own interests, was that he attempted to reshape the eastern lands that fell under his suzerainty in accordance with Nazi ideology while still fighting the war." Nazi brutality certainly alienated many Ukrainians and others whose resentment at years of murderous Soviet exploitation made them ready to welcome the Germans when they arrived in 1941; but for Hitler, of course, the exploitation and extermination of Slav "subhumans" was one of the major purposes of the war. And the chapter on the Holocaust is among the weaker ones in the book. Hastings sees the annihilation of the Jews as a military mistake, but in fact it did not entail "diverting scarce manpower and transport to a program of mass murder while the outcome of the war still hung in the balance," at least not on any significant scale. The "euthanasia" campaign in which Hitler ordered the murder of 70,000 mentally ill or handicapped Germans was not directed exclusively against "inmates of psychiatric units," but actually began with the forcible removal of thousands of children from their parental homes. These are minor objections, however. As military history in the round, conveying to a 21st-century readership the human experience of this greatest and most savage of human conflicts in history, "Inferno" is superb. Richard J. Evans is the Regius professor of history at the University of Cambridge and the president of Wolfson College, Cambridge. He is the author of "The Third Reich at War."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 20, 2011]

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Review by Booklist Review

Contemplate the human destruction of WWII: an estimated 60 million deaths, including 20 million Soviets, 6 million Jews, and 15 million Chinese. That comes to an average of 27,000 deaths for each day of war. Inevitably, these mind-numbing numbers swamp the countless stories of individual suffering. So this masterful account, which emphasizes the experiences of ordinary people, is both engrossing and necessary. Hastings, a former correspondent and newspaper editor, does not ignore political and military aspects, but the power of his narrative lies in the many recounted stories of soldiers and civilians on all sides and various fronts. Polish soldiers describe their shock and helplessness as they are overwhelmed by the blitzkrieg. A French officer remembers the demoralization and panic as Panzers breached his defenses. A young Chinese peasant conveys the pain and humiliation as she is repeatedly gang-raped by Japanese soldiers. This is a powerful portrait of a broken, burning world.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Hastings continues a recent substantial body of general audience writing on WWII (Armageddon; Retribution,) in this equally well-researched and well-presented account focusing on the conflict's human dimension, looking at both soldiers and civilians, members of both Allies and Axis. For millions of ordinary people the war was "hell let loose," imposing, at the least, drastic change and, at worst, incomprehensible horror-60 million died. Participants assembled the "vast jigsaw puzzle" of war with the pieces they had and made sense of it in terms of their own circumstances. Hastings succeeds admirably in synthesizing the results in a globe-girdling context from Guadalcanal to the Dnieper River. He establishes, in some sense, the temporary nature of war-that soldiers seldom lost their identity as civilians in uniform, and civilians counted the days until normality returned. That mind-set determined the war's nature: structured by mass participation and institutional effectiveness. In Russia, for instance, the German invasion led to "a surge of popular enthusiasm" to support Russia, followed rapidly by despair and men trying to evade the draft. As Hastings makes clear, the war's impact also outlasted the conflict: for decades people judged one another by their wartime behavior; for many the psychological impact of the horrors never left them. Illus., maps. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Former UK journalist Hastings (Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45), a popular war historian who has covered World War II from many perspectives, here relates what individuals in the armed forces and the home fronts on all sides experienced. He employs excerpts from mostly contemporary diaries and letters illustrating the shortages, sufferings, destruction, fear, and death that permeated lives violently upended by the all-consuming conflict. There are also passages that bring readers back to the big picture and what various leaders were doing, but it's the stories of what ordinary people experienced at such great cost that make this an engrossing book. VERDICT This well-written history is recommended for all readers and libraries. (Photos, maps, and index not seen.)-D.K.B. (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A World War II history by Hastings (Winston's War: Churchill, 19401945, 2010, etc.) may seem like a tautology, but readers familiar with his previous books will expect an enthralling account of his favorite subject. They will not be disappointed.This time, the author emphasizes personal experiences as well as his often squirm-inducing opinions. Most startlingbut not really controversialhe maintains that the Wehrmacht outclassed all other armies. The Allies, including the Soviets, never won a battle without vast superiority in men and material. However, he writes, the democracies were smarter. American industry operated more efficiently, took better advantage of science and paid more attention to logistics. German and Japanese troops regularly starved and rationed ammunition. In addition, U.S. intelligence services performed superbly, the enemies' dreadfully. Readers will perk up at Hastings' claim that Hitler's second greatest mistake, after invading Russia, was launching the Battle of Britain. If he had allowed Britain to stew for months after its humiliating defeat, Churchill would have had great difficulty sustaining national morale or fending off pressure to make a peace, which would have eliminated not only Britain but America as a threat. Most general histories sprinkle their pages with anecdotes, but Hastings has this down to a science. He employs numerous specialists, delving into Russian and Italian archives and personally tracking down obscure, vivid, often painful stories from the usual combatants as well as Poles, Bengalese, Chinese and Japanese.Excellent general WWII accounts aboundincluding those by historical superstars such as Stephen Ambrose and John Keeganbut Hastings is matchless.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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         On the outbreak of war: ' France, Britain and its dominions were the only major nations to enter World War II as an act of principle, rather than because they sought territorial gains or were themselves attacked.   Their claims upon the moral high ground were injured, however, by the fact that they declared support for embattled Poland without any intention of giving this meaningful military effect'.          On Stalin's 'devil's bargain' with Hitler:  'If Stalin was not Hitler's co-belligerent, Moscow's deal with Berlin made him the co-beneficiary of Nazi aggression.  From 23 August 1939 onwards, the world saw Germany and the Soviet Union acting in concert, twin faces of totalitarianism.  Because of the manner in which the global struggle ended in 1945, with Russia in the allied camp, some historians have accepted the post-war Soviet Union's classification of itself as a neutral power until 1941.  This is mistaken.   Though Stalin feared Hitler and expected eventually to have to fight him, in 1939 he made a historic decision to acquiesce in German aggression, in return for Nazi support for Moscow's own programme of territorial aggrandisement.   Whatever excuses the Soviet leader later offered, and although his armies never fought in partnership with the Wehrmacht, the Nazi-Soviet Pact established a collaboration which persisted until Hitler revealed his true purposes in Operation Barbarossa' .            On the Battle of Britain: ' The latter months of 1940 were decisive in determining the course of the war: the Nazis, stunned by the scale of their triumphs, allowed themselves to suffer a loss of momentum.  By launching an air assault on Britain, Hitler adopted the worst possible strategic compromise.   As master of the continent, he believed a modest further display of force would suffice to precipitate its surrender.  Yet if, instead, he had left Churchill's people to stew in their island, the prime minister would have faced great difficulties in sustaining national morale and a charade of strategic purpose.  A small German contingent dispatched to support the Italian attack on Egypt that autumn would probably have sufficed to expel Britain from the Middle East; Malta could easily have been taken.  Such humiliations would have dealt heavy blows to the credibility of Churchill's policy of fighting on.       As it was, however, the Luftwaffe's clumsy offensive posed the one challenge which Britain was well-placed to repel.  The British army and people were not obliged to confront the Wehrmacht on their beaches and in their fields- a clash which would probably have ended ignomiously.   The prime minister merely required their acquiescence, while the country was defended by a few hundred RAF pilots and- more importantly though less conspicuously- by the formidable might of the Royal Navy's ships at sea.   The prime minister's exalting leadership secured public support for his defiance of the logic of Hitlerian triumph, even when cities began to burn and civilians to die'.       On France's role in the war: ' Even allowing for the significant role of French troops in the final campaigns in north-west Europe, the statistical fact remains that Vichy's armies and domestic security forces made a more numerous contribution to Axis interests than those Frenchmen who later joined the Gaullists, other Resistance groups or Eisenhower's armies provided to the allied cause.   Most French people persuaded themselves in 1940 that the Petain regime constituted a lawful government; however uncomfortably, they indulged its rule until the eve of liberation.  Once defeat in 1940 had denied the French a heroic role in the struggle against Nazism, many remained confused for the remainder of the war about the least ignoble part their nation might play'.       On Britain's war with Rommel in the desert: ' the war in North African engaged only a handful of British and imperial divisions, while most of Churchill's army stayed at home.  This was partly to provide security against invasion, partly for lack of weapons and equipment, partly owing to shortage of shipping to move and supply troops overseas.  The clashes between desert armies were little more significant in determining the outcome of the global conflict than the tournaments between bands of French and English knights which provided entre'actes during the Hundred Years' War.    But the North African contest caught the imagination of the western world, and achieved immense symbolic significance in the minds of the British people.  It became what will surely prove to have been history's last campaign fought overseas between European powers attempting to advance European objectives'.        On the 1941 invasion of Russia : 'It did not occur to Hitler, after his victories in the West, that it might be more difficult to overcome a brutalized society, inured to suffering, than democracies such as France and Britain, in which moderation and respect for human life were deemed virtues'.          On the allied relationship: ' The Grand Alliance, the phrase with which Churchill ennobled the wartime relationship of Britain, the United States and Soviet Union, was always a grand charade; it was a necessary fiction to pretend that the three powers fought the war as a shared enterprise directed towards common purposes.           'In Britain and America, confidence that our parents and grandparents were fighting 'the good war' is so deeply ingrained that we often forget that people in many countries adopted more equivocal attitudes;  colonial subjects, and above all India's four hundred millions, saw little merit in the defeat of the Axis if they continued to endure British suzerainty.   Many Frenchmen fought vigorously against the allies.  In Yugoslavia, rival factions were far more strongly committed to waging civil war against each other than to advancing the interests of either the allies or the Axis.    Large numbers of Stalin's subjects embraced the opportunity offered by German occupation to take up arms against a hated Moscow regime.  None of this implies doubt that the allied cause deserved to triumph, but should emphasise the fact that Churchill and Roosevelt did not have all the best tunes'.                On the Soviet war effort:   'It was probably true that only Russians could have borne and achieved what they did in the face of the 1941 catastrophe; it was less plausible to attribute this to the nobility of communist society.  Until Barbarossa , Stalin sought to make common cause with Hitler, albeit to attain different objectives.   Even when Russia became joined with the democracies to achieve the defeat of Nazism, Stalin pursued his quest for a Soviet empire, domination and oppression of hundreds of millions of people, with absolute single-mindedness and ultimate success.   Whatever the merits of the Russian people's struggle to expel the invaders from their country, Stalin's war aims were as selfish and inimical to human liberty as those of Hitler.  Soviet conduct could be deemed less barbaric than that of the Nazis only because it embraced no single enormity to match the Holocaust.   Nonetheless, the Western allies were obliged to declare their gratitude, because Russia's suffering and sacrifice saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of young British and American soldiers.   Even if no exalted assertion of principle- instead, only a breach between rival monsters- caused Russia to become the principal battleground of the war, it was there that the Third Reich encountered the forces that would contrive its nemesis'.           On the confusion of loyalties around the world: ' The leaders of the Grand Alliance depicted the war as a struggle for freedom against oppression, good against evil.   In the 21st Century, few informed people even in former colonial societies doubt the merit of the allied cause, the advantage that accrued to mankind from defeat of the Axis.  But it seems essential to recognise that in many societies contemporary loyalties were confused and equivocal.   Millions of people around the world who had no love for the regimes of Hitler, Mussolini or Hirohito felt little greater enthusiasm for allied powers whose vision of liberty vanished, it seemed to their colonial subjects, at their own front doors'.        On British wartime rule of India:  'Britain's wartime treatment of its subject races remained humane by German or Japanese standards; there were no arbitrary executions or massacres.  But it was among the ugliest aspects of British conduct of the war, that in order to hold India, it was necessary not merely to repulse external invaders, but also to administer the country under emergency powers, as an occupied nation rather than as a willing co-belligerent.  Some of the repressive measures adopted in India were similar in kind, if not in scale, to those used by the Axis in its own subject societies.          On the revelation that the German economy was too weak to overcome Russia: ' In 1942, the Axis would enjoy spectacular successes.  But it is a critical historical reality, that senior functionaries of the Third Reich realised as early as December 1941 that military victory had become unattainable, because Russia remained undefeated.   Some thereafter sustained hopes that Germany might negotiate an acceptable peace.   But they, and perhaps Hitler also in the innermost recesses of his brain, knew the decisive strategic moment had passed'.   On the war crimes of Britain's Soviet ally: ' Stalin deported eastwards vast numbers of Soviet citizens from minorities whose loyalties he deemed suspect, notably Chechens and Crimean Tatars, some 3.5 million in all.  An unquantified but large proportion of these peoples died in consequence, some from typhus which broke out during their transportation.  Their sufferings, unlike those of Hitler's victims, are scarcely recorded, but it is known that four Heroes of the Soviet Union were among the deportees; Beria's purges spurned discrimination. Among other victims of the Soviets were 1.5 million Poles deported to Siberian exile or the gulag in 1940-41, in furtherance of Stalinist ethnic cleansing policies; at least 350,000 perished of starvation or disease, and a further thirty thousand were executed'.         On The U-Boat war: ' Perhaps the most vivid statistic of the Battle of the Atlantic is that between 1939 and 1943 only eight per cent of slow and four per cent of fast convoys suffered attack.  Much has been written about the inadequacy of allied means to respond to the U-boat threat in the early war years; this was real enough, but German resource problems were much greater.  Hitler never understood the sea.  In the early war period, he dispersed industrial effort and steel allocations among a range of weapons systems.  He did not recognise a strategic opportunity to wage a major campaign against British Atlantic commerce until the fall of France in June 1940; U-boat construction was prioritised only in 1942-43, when allied naval strength was growing fast and the tide of the war had already turned.   Germany never gained the capability to sever Britain's Atlantic lifeline, though amid grievous shipping losses it was hard to recognise this at the time'.          On Guadalcanal : 'the myth of the invincibility of the Japanese Army was shattered on this island just sixty miles by thirty.  The Japanese laid bare their limitations, especially a shortage of competent commanders. Even during Japan's victory season, while Yamashita conducted operations in Malaya with verve and skill, the campaigns in Burma and the Philippines suggested that some of his fellow-officers lacked initiative.   When defending a position, their ethic of absolute conformity to orders had its uses; but in attack, commanders often acted unimaginatively.   Man for man, the Japanese soldier was more aggressive and conditioned to hardship than his allied counterpart: British Gen.Bill Slim characterised the enemy condescendingly as 'the greatest fighting insect in the world'; until 1945, Hirohito's men displayed exceptional night-fighting skills.  Collectively, however, the Japanese Army had nothing like the combat power of the Wehrmacht, the Red Army- or America's ground forces.        On The Holocaust: ' The edifice of Holocaust literature is vast, yet does not satisfactorily explain why the Nazis accepted the economic cost of embarking upon the destruction of the Jewish people, diverting scarce manpower and transport to a programme of mass murder, while the outcome of the war still hung in the balance.   The answer must lie in the deranged centrality of Jewish persecution not merely to National Socialist ideology, but to Germany's policies throughout the global conflict.   The Nazis were always determined to exploit the licence granted to a government waging total war to fulfil objectives that otherwise posed difficulties even for a totalitarian regime.           'Even when Hitler embarked on his rampage of hemispheric conquest, the democracies found it difficult to conceive that the people of a highly-educated and long-civilised European society could fulfil their leaders' extravagant rhetoric and implement a genocide.   Despite mounting evidence of Nazi crimes, this delusion persisted in some degree until 1945 and even for some time afterwards'.         On war crimes trials in 1945: ' Only a tiny fraction of those guilty of war crimes were ever indicted, partly because the allies had no stomach for the scale of executions, numbering several hundreds of thousands, which would have been necessary had strict justice been enforced against every Axis murderer.  Less than a thousand retributive executions took place.  Many convicted mass killers served jail sentences of only a few years, or even escaped by paying a fine of fifty almost worthless Reich marks.  The Germans and Japanese were not entirely mistaken in regarding the international war crimes trials which took place in 1945-46 as 'victors' justice'.   Some British and Americans, and many Russians, were guilty of offences under international law, the killing of prisoners notable among them, yet very few faced even courts martial.   To have been on the winning side sufficed to secure amnesty; few allied war crimes were even acknowledged.  British submarine commander 'Skip' Myer, for instance, who in 1941 distressed even some of his own crew by insisting that German soldiers struggling in the Mediterranean after the sinking of their caiques should be machine-gunned, was awarded a Victoria Cross and eventually became an admiral.  American, Canadian and British troops who routinely shot snipers and Waffen SS prisoners on the battlefield, usually in supposed retaliation for similar enemy actions, went unindicted.  The Nuremburg and Tokyo trials and sentences represented not injustice, but partial justice'.        On casualties:  'An average of 27,000 people perished each day between September 1939 and August 1945 as a consequence of the global conflict. The Soviet Union suffered 65% of all allied military deaths; China 23%; Yugoslavia 3%; the US and UK 2% each; France and Poland 1% each.   About 8% of all Germans died, compared with 2% of Chinese, 3.44% of Dutch people, 6.67% of Yugoslavs, 4% of Greeks, 1.35% of French, 3.78% of Japanese, 0.94% of British and 0.32% of Americans.  '95% of all German soldiers killed in the war perished on the Eastern front or in Soviet captivity'.    My story emphasises bottom-up views and experiences, the voices of little people rather than big ones; I have written extensively elsewhere about the warlords of 1939-45.   On the outcome of the Second World War: 'Within the vast compass of the struggle, some individuals scaled summits of courage and nobility, while others plumbed depths of evil, in a fashion that compels the awe of posterity.   Among citizens of modern democracies to whom serious hardship and collective peril are unknown, the tribulations which hundreds of millions endured between 1939 and 1945 are almost beyond comprehension.   Almost all those who participated, nations and individuals alike, made moral compromises.   It is impossible to dignify the struggle as an unalloyed contest between good and evil, nor rationally to celebrate an experience, and even an outcome, which imposed such misery upon so many.  Allied victory did not bring universal peace, prosperity, justice or freedom; it brought merely a portion of those things to some fraction of those who had taken part.  All that seems certain is that allied victory saved the world from a much worse fate that would have followed the triumph of Germany and Japan.  With this knowledge, seekers after virtue and truth must be content'.        Excerpted from Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945 by Max Hastings All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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