Inferno - Likewise Book Reviews

"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/>"