Inferno
Books | History / Wars & Conflicts / World War II / General
4.5
(75)
Max Hastings
From one of our finest military historians, a monumental work that shows us at once the truly global reach of World War II and its deeply personal consequences. World War II involved tens of millions of soldiers and cost sixty million lives—an average of twenty-seven thousand a day. For thirty-five years, Max Hastings has researched and written about different aspects of the war. Now, for the first time, he gives us a magnificent, single-volume history of the entire war. Through his strikingly detailed stories of everyday people—of soldiers, sailors and airmen; British housewives and Indian peasants; SS killers and the citizens of Leningrad, some of whom resorted to cannibalism during the two-year siege; Japanese suicide pilots and American carrier crews—Hastings provides a singularly intimate portrait of the world at war. He simultaneously traces the major developments—Hitler’s refusal to retreat from the Soviet Union until it was too late; Stalin’s ruthlessness in using his greater population to wear down the German army; Churchill’s leadership in the dark days of 1940 and 1941; Roosevelt’s steady hand before and after the United States entered the war—and puts them in real human context.Hastings also illuminates some of the darker and less explored regions under the war’s penumbra, including the conflict between the Soviet Union and Finland, during which the Finns fiercely and surprisingly resisted Stalin’s invading Red Army; and the Bengal famine in 1943 and 1944, when at least one million people died in what turned out to be, in Nehru’s words, “the final epitaph of British rule” in India. Remarkably informed and wide-ranging, Inferno is both elegantly written and cogently argued. Above all, it is a new and essential understanding of one of the greatest and bloodiest events of the twentieth century.
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More Details:
Author
Max Hastings
Pages
672
Publisher
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published Date
2011-11-01
ISBN
0307957187 9780307957184
Ratings
Google: 4.5
Community ReviewsSee all
"It’s absolutely excellent! Anything by Hastings is going to be good but I’ve always wanted to read a “bottom-up” version of the war and this book is exactly that. I not only appreciated the detail (being trained as a historian) but the general truth of the matter he says in the end is also very good:<br/>We (meaning the US, UK and to a lesser extent the French) did not bring democracy and freedom to everybody, everywhere. We bought those things to some people in certain parts of the world.<br/>I learned this in undergrad and I think it is worth repeating here: The US and the UK could only agree that the Germans need to lose. We spent more time screaming at each other than actually working together (even though that was better at the lowest end, meaning the guys with rifles and machine guns in their hands, tasked with carrying out orders dictated to them from above). This got worse as you went up the chain. <br/>France is a mixed bag but more French people worked against the Western Allies than for them. But that’s a different story for another day.<br/>This is something that most Westerners don’t know or won’t admit to: Dictatorships make better soldiers than democracies. The Wehrmacht fought harder and better than the Western Allies did (even though the SF soldiers of both the US and the UK were of equal fighting abilities) but the Nazis made war terribly. This reflected the societies from which the fighting men were drawn, which is also the reason why the Eastern Front was so terrible for those involved. <br/>The last one is another truth of the war: The Russians won the war for us. More than 80% of Germans died on the Eastern Front. The Russians lost more than 10 million men and 17 million civilians during the war. Only the Russians could have endured such losses and bleed the Wehrmacht to death. We can talk about this later. <br/>"
Kevin Huang