Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945 [Versión Kindle]

What is the reason that the Second World War is still a magnet for readers, laymen or professional historians? According to Mr. Hastings, this is so because it was the most
disastrous event in the human history. Did you know, for example, that 27000 people perished daily between September 1939 and August 1945?
This book is mainly about the human experience, in what is called the bottom-up approach to history. Although the military theaters are not neglected at all, they appear here and are described through the lens of the common people or the soldiers who took part in the various scenes of this conflict. The main question posed by Mr. Hastings is: what was the Second World War all about? The answer is grim and, in the words of Arthur Schlesinger, it "concerned mainly stupidity, lies, arrogance and pomposity". Take into consideration the fact that 168000 Russian
Civilians were executed during the war because of cowardice or desertion. Many more thousands suffered the same fate without due process.
Hunger was rampant in many parts of the world, especially throughout the British Empire, where one million were to die in Bengal, and many other famines would break out in Kenya or Egypt. Cannibalism cases which happened in Russia are as well described and it is the author's conclusion that the German army lost because its aims were unrealistic and its forces overstretched. One Russian soldier, Stepan Kuznetsov, wrote that in during the Leningrad siege," all out soldiers on the front look like ghouls-emaciated by hunger and cold. They are in rags, filthy and very, very hungry".
The Wermacht's combat performance remained superior to that of the Red Army until the end of the war, in almost every local action the Germans inflicted more casualties than they received. But their tactical skills no longer sufficed to stem the Russian tide. Stalin was identifying good generals, building vast armires with formidable tank and artillery strength, and at last receiving large deliveries from the Western Allies, including food, vehicles and communications equipment. As Mr. Hastings writes, "the five million tons of American meat that eventually eached Russia amounted to half a pound of rations a day for every Soviet soldier".
There are some myths which are demolished by this book. One of them concerns the so-called exuberant enthusiasm of kamikaze pilots who fought the Americans. Another myth concerns the question-or reason-why the Allies did not bomb the concentration camps during the Holocaust. The guerrilla war against the Axis occupiers, promoted by Allied secret organizations, which has been romanticized in post-war literature, had small strategic impact and resistance groups were seldom homogeneous. Combatants fared better than civilian: around three-quarters of all those who died were unarmed victims rather than active participants in the struggle, and the peoples of western Europe escaped more lightly than those of eastern Europe. Unfortunately, only a fraction of those guilty of war crimes were ever indicted, partly because the victors "had no stomach for the scale of executions, numbering several hundreds of thousands, that would have been necessary had strict justice been enforced against every Axis murderer".
The US Navy found the experience of combating the kamikazes among the bloodiest and most painful of its war and Japanese airmen carried out almost 1700 sorties to Okinawa between 11 March and the end of June 1945. Again, only a limited number of Japanese war criminals were prosecuted.
This is a gem of a book, giving both a macroscopic and panoramic view of the major episodes of the war, and a microscopic examination of many instances of it. To a large extent, this is 'everyman's story'. You will enjoy each page of this long and fascinating book.

Max Hastings has spent the past 35 years studying in depth the horrors of World War II (1939-1945). Among his bestselling volumes are Armageddon and Retribution. In Inferno the author gets personal. All of the major military campaigns are covered but the real strength of the book lies in the comments included in the text by participants in the war. We hear from Russian housewives, Werhmacht troops; American Marines; Japanese, Indian and Chinese persons. We feel as if we were there amid the horrors of the worst event in the history of humanity. Just consider the following horrible statistics:
a. Every day from 1939-45 over 27,000 men, women and children died as a result of the war.
b. Over 60 million persons lost their lives during the war due to battle, starvation, executions and disease.
c.90% of the over 7 million German soldiers who died in the war did so in the fight against Stalin's Soviet Union empire.
d. Japan and Germany were cruel dictatorships which treated their own people as cruelly as they did their enemies.
The chief mistakes made by Hitler leading to his downfall were:
a. The foolish attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941.
b. The failed plan to defeat England in a cross channel invasion which never transpired.
c.The declaration of war against the United States. America had unlimited wealth and might to produce the weapons of war which led to victory over the Axis powers
d. The holocaust killed over 6 million Jews and in addition 3 million Russians were murdered by the Nazi war machine. The slaves of the Nazis could have been better utiilized as workers for the Reich rather than being killed in senseless slaughter.
Germany was defeated by a two front war with the western allies attacking from the West and the Soviet hordes charging into Germany from the east. The Japanese were ill equipped to beat the better armed Americans. They failed to conquer China.
The book is 651 close typed pages which fascinate and shock. We Westerners have no idea how fortunate we are to live in demnocracies rather than in dictatorships ruled by such horrible monsters of evil as Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Hirohito.
Anything written by Max Hastings is worth reading. This book is a sine qua non for anyone wanting a good one volume account of the war. Man's inhumanity to man is manifest in these grim pages of a worlwide tragedy of unprecedented proportions. Dante's inferno pales in horror before the real life inferno ignited by the fires of totalitarianism and racial hatred.
Inferno contains many maps which are included to aid understanding of the absorbing text. Hastings shows his research skills with an extensive bibliography. The author has mined little known sources to strengthen the narrative. Though the book is lengthy I found it to be engrossing. World War II was a horrible tragedy which has never been equalled for its cruelty and terror. May humankind never descend in such an abyss as transpired seventy years ago. Highly recommended for all World War II buffs and general readers seeking a good understanding of the war.

Do we really need another general history of World War II? In recent years we have seen new studies by Evan Mawdsley, Martin Gilbert and in particular Andrew Roberts excellent populist history "The Storm of War" to name but a few. The years 1939 to 1945 are a very crowded field for historians and yet there is always a warm welcome for an historian of the calibre of Sir Max Hastings, recent chronicler of Churchill as a wartime leader and political commentator. Hastings is a conservative historian but what is interesting about "All hell let loose - the World at War 1939-45" is that employs the approach of producing an history from below drawn from eyewitness accounts of events. Accounts which in turn demonstrate and confirm William Tecumseh Sherman's maxim "that war is all hell" since we see an overwhelming view of very brave participants who are nonetheless generally terrified, demoralized and often beaten into a fossilised torpor. One British solider reflected in a letter to his wife that `I am absolutely fed up with everything. The dirt and filth, the flies - I'm having a hideous time and I wonder why I'm alive'. Another British soldier William Chappell "never ceased to ache for the civilian world from which he had been torn. He missed his home and his friends and bemoaned the loss of his career. His feet hurt, he was `sick of khaki, and all the monotonous, slow, fiddle-de-dee of Army life.' The fatalistic will of Russian soldiers is particularly well described not least the experience of Private Ivanov, of the 70th Army, who wrote despairingly to his family. `I shall never see you again because death, terrible, ruthless and merciless, is going to cut short my young life. Where shall I find strength and courage to live through all this?'

Those who have read Hastings previously on World War II will detect the ongoing preoccupations which he has developed over many years that have gradually become historical orthodoxy. He maintains in all his works that the best troops throughout the course of hostilities were Germans who were nevertheless effectively outdone by the crazed ambitions of a totalitarian monster particularly in sheer lunatic ambition of the Eastern theatre. Even as the German Army swept all in front of it during Operation Barbarossa key Generals like Halder and Hoepner were unnervingly aware that a nation with an almost limitless supply of manpower was stirring. Thus the war was won and lost in Stalin's Russia which despite the unbelievable ineptitude of its own leader particularly in almost destroying the whole of his own officer corps in purges had the crucial element of numbers on its side. This fact was readily accepted by Churchill at the time which in turn and his relationship to "Uncle Joe" has recently been chronicled with great detail by another British historian David Reynolds. Perhaps the most brutal statistic in the whole book is the fact that 750,000 Russians were shot by their own comrades for cowardice, desertion or simply to maintain army discipline, as it turns out this exceeds the total number of British dead in the entire war. The brutality of the Soviet invasion has been captured in a range of books not least Anthony Beevor's epic "Stalingrad" and the central thesis of Hastings book is equally located in the Soviet Union with its "hierarchy of cruelty" elevated beyond all other conflicts.

That said other pivotal events are not skimped on. The sheer horror of the "Rape of Nanking" in 1937 is vividly captured with its terrifying litany of mass murder, genocide and war rape. The treatment of non combatants prefigured the latter outrages of the war and with estimates of nearly 200,000 Chinese killed by marauding Japanese soldiers. As such Hastings is right to see this as a kind of appalling racist overture to the main act. Unsurprisingly Hastings also uses more well worn sources like the great Eugene Sledge's "With the old breed" his visceral account of the Pacific War as a primary source. The sights and the smells of battle also infuse the book and the everyday acts of living are elevated into small horrors in their own right. As Hastings points out "Excretory processes became an obsession. In battlefield conditions, many never made it to a latrine. But as one soldier recalled: `No one said anything about how you smelt, because everyone smelled bad.'

At over 700 pages this is a long book and your reviewer deliberately avoided the Kindle edition because of this since there were pages of text that needed to be reread and referred to for continuity purposes. Hastings however has the gift of writing an often-complex story in clear and understandable prose. He also cares deeply about the participants in his history and that humanity and gift for narrative shines through this excellent book.