Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945 (original 2011; edition 2011)

I'm not particularly interested in military histories, but was drawn to this book because it is described as the stories of ordinary people -- civilians and solidiers. It is very well written, and I would have liked, if anything, even more quotes from letters, diaries, etc. and could have done with a little less quanitfying of tanks, airplanes, etc.

The author has obviously done a lot of research, and while there are many anecdotes in the book, they are well grounded in scholarship. I enjoyed thinking about all the "what if" questions the author posed. Some relatively small decisions could have changed the outcome of parts, if not all, of the war. I had not realised that, at times, the likely outcome was too close to call.

Mr. Hastings has done an excellent job of showing the divided loyalties many combatants felt; the seeming incompetence and poor judgment often displayed by senior leaders and strategists; and Russia's struggles as it took the brunt of much of the fighting.

It would have helped if the book contained a time line of major events as it is not written chronologically. I read this for a book club, and found it long and somewhat repetitive; however, I also found it deeply moving. I would, perhaps, have enjoyed it more had I not had to read it in such a short period of time -- it was overwhelming in large doses.

At the end, this book left me sad. The extent of damage to civilians was horrendous. Except for the holocaust, I had no idea how much ordinary people suffered. What a price the world paid! ( )

Max Hastings's impressive achievement here is that he has written such a readable one-volume study of the war. The book's readability is largely due to Hastings's inclusion of so many views from soldiers and civilians involved in the action. When the statesmen and generals are heard from, it is more in their human roles, not their official statuses. (For example, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Germany's Ambassador to Britain, insisted to Hitler that Britain would not intervene if Germany invaded Poland. When Britain declared war two days after the invasion, Hastings describes how Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering phoned von Ribbentrop and ripped him a new one.)

Hastings uses an effective system to make vivid and understandable points. He starts with a 10,000-foot descriptive overview, buttressed with statistics and other data, but then lasers in with a story that encapsulates his point. In one such case, he writes about how Italy was boastfully confident about its military prowess, but then lost a huge percentage of its military capacity during the North African campaign. Hastings then offers this anecdote: "Mussolini's propaganda department in Rome made a film designed to demonstrate the superiority of fascist manhood. To this end, a fight was staged between former world heavyweight champion Primo Carnera and Kay Masaki, a black South African taken prisoner in the desert. Masaki had never entered a boxing ring in his life, and was knocked down when the cameras began to roll. He picked himself up, however, and struck Carnera a blow that rendered him unconscious."

I'm much more familiar with social and political histories of WW2. This book focuses primarily on the tactical and military history (except for chapters 13 and 20), which has not been of particular interest to me previously. However, Hastings's writing is so lucid and lively that I was engrossed.

Hastings has a distinct point of view. He states strong criticisms of various well-known military leaders. He forcefully counters moral relativists who equate the bombings of Germany's cities with Germany's wartime murders. I was relieved that Hastings is not one of these "greatest generation" types who paint Allied soldiers as nonstop heroes with no real human frailties. He recognizes great contributions to the war effort and examples of bravery, but he also writes about soldiers who fell apart under the strain of battle, who committed cruelties and who deserted. One illuminating tale he tells is of Italy in the period after Mussolini was first deposed and Italy declared war on the Axis. Nearly everyone expected that fighting in Italy would cease, but Hitler sent in his troops to continue the fighting and reinstall Mussolini. From that point, desertions on both sides skyrocketed. Hastings writes that about 30,000 Axis soldiers deserted and about half as many Allied soldiers.

I was tremendously impressed by this history and I believe it would be both an excellent introduction to the topic for novices and a welcome and insightful overview for readers already familiar with WW2 history. ( )

A good solid one-volume history of the war, one which does not neglect the conflicts that occurred outside the theaters of Europe (& North Africa) and the south Pacific. It's interesting to read this consecutively with another comprehensive account The Storm of War by Andrew Roberts, which tells the story more from the more familiar military/political perspective, while Hastings makes a point of gathering anecdotage from the so-called "average" person. Not that we're deprived of the perspective of the generals, diplomats, presidents and ministers, but we're given access to generous portions of the journals of dog soldiers, children, housewives, doctors, poets, petty criminals, farmers, and many others. ( )

The history of single-volume histories of WWII is interesting in its own right. There are about half a dozen of them now, Inferno the most recent.

Basically Inferno is a Ken Burns treatment with lots of dramatic anecdotes from sources that are off the beaten track. Hastings had a team of silent helpers scour sources to find obscure but interesting quotes. It's a popular history, but well grounded in the scholarship of its sources. It does a great job with balance: the USSR did most of the heavy lifting; the US and UK had their own share of atrocities; 1914-1945 represented the end of colonialism as a global power structure. The simplistic view of the war as a fight of good versus evil, we learn, is much more nuanced. The Nazis and the Japanese were incompetent and weak in ways that counters their fearsome reputation, they never really had a chance of winning strategically. I was surprised to learn Hitler knew the war was militarily lost as early as December 1941, just 6 months after the invasion of Russia when they stalled outside Moscow, and the rest of the war was an attempt to reach better bargaining grounds for peace terms with the West that never came. Hitler thought western capitalism wouldn't join forces so readily with totalitarian Communism, but he was mistaken, at least until the start of the Cold War, by which time it was too late. Overall this is a decent enough book and feels opinionated but accurate, it's my second single-volume history and my second favorite. Robert Leckie's Delivered From Evil is deeply flawed compared to Inferno, but it did a better job teaching me about the events of the war and people involved in a way that sticks in memory. I don't regret reading Inferno, there was hardly a page I was not captivated, and look forward to trying out some more single volume WWII books. ( )

I am not a reader of military history; not interested at all in deadly battle statistics. And do we really need another WWII book? Don’t we already have hundreds, maybe thousands of them? But early reviews of Max Hastings’ magisterial WWII epic piqued my interest because it was described as a book about the people, told in their voices through letters, diaries and other correspondence. So when it landed on the New York Times 100 Best Books of 2011 I knew it was going to be read…by moi. And when I got into the book, it became clear very quickly, that this was an exceptionally well written narrative that I would have a hard time putting down as I made my way through its 700+ painful pages. It was last summer that I read a book based on another war and realized for the first time (consciously, anyway) that it’s children who actually fight all the wars, sent there, most often, by old men. And a feeling of isolation is a common thread through all wars.

”Combat opened a chasm between those who experienced its horrors and those at home who did not. In December 1943, the Canadian Farley Mowat wrote to his family from the Sangro front in Italy: ‘The damnable truth is we are in really different worlds, on totally different planes, and I don’t really know you any more. I only know the you that was. I wish I could explain the desperate sense of isolation, of not belonging to my own past, of being adrift in some kind of alien space. It is one of the toughest things we have to bear---that and the primal, gut-rotting worm of fear.’” (Page 406)

That isolation is a main theme in the book and is even expressed by John Steinbeck:

”Isolation was a towering sensation, even for men serving amid legions of their compatriots. ‘I see all these thousands of lonely soldiers here,’ John Steinbeck wrote from the British capital in 1943 about the GIs on its streets. ‘There’s a kind of walk they have in London, an apathetic shuffle. They’re looking for something. They’ll say it’s a girl---any girl, but it isn’t that at all.’ Although soldiers often talk about women, under the stress and unyielding discomfort of a battlefield most crave simple pleasures, among which sex rarely features.”

If that was the case, it’s hard to explain the occurrences of violent rape that occurred with almost frightening regularity by servicemen on both sides of the struggle. That was one of the many things I learned about the war. I knew about the rape of thousands of German women in Berlin when the Russians finally occupied the city, (mostly from A Woman in Berlin by Anonymous) but I didn’t realize that the Allies were also guilty of the crime.

I ended up with pages and pages of notes, many delineating topics of which I was woefully ignorant. It would take pages and pages to discuss all these topics but here are the main items I took from the book: most of the other countries involved in the war suffered much more devastating human losses than the U.S. and Great Britain none greater than Russia and (very surprisingly) China. In unoccupied Western nations, some people prospered, especially U.S. farmers who saw their incomes rise by 156%. The Red Army was the main engine of the German defeat (as a matter of fact, they could probably have defeated the Nazi’s without the aid of the Americans and the British). The U.S. industrial might contributed more to victory than did its armies. Himmler diverted resources that could have been used for winning in Russia for the extermination of the Jews. There was a slow or no response by the Allies to the Jewish extermination. Soviet victories were purchased at a human cost no democracy would have accepted. The blunders of the German and Japanese leaders led to defeat. Truman’s greatest mistake, in protecting his own reputation, was his failure to deliver an explicit ultimatum before dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And finally, WWII was the greatest and most terrible event in human history, involving citizens from every inhabited continent in the world except South America.

This was a truly awe-inspiring narrative, surprisingly comprehensive and written elegantly. Told through the voices of those who fought in or stood by those who did this book is very highly recommended especially for those who are not readers of military histories. ( )