Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

I want to preface this review by saying that this is the first comprehensive WWII history book that I’ve read. I am not in a position to question Max Hastings’ through-line on WWII history.

There’s a lot about this book that I liked, while there were some things that left me wanting more.

To start with the positive, Max Hastings is a pretty good writer. At no point in reading the book did I feel like his style was getting in the way of communicating info. He maintains an almost conversational tone throughout the book.

It’s not uncommon in academia for historians to want to try to “objectively” lay out a history, and allow it to “speak for itself”. Max Hastings is clearly a person with opinions and I appreciated reading what he had to say. Hastings has strong opinions about the effectiveness of various generals. He was not afraid to give his opinion about the efficacy of fighting certain battles. Hastings openly speculates, on myriad occasions, about whether, had an alternate decision been made, WWII may have played out in a different way. He willingly dives into the moral ambiguities of war. Hastings at times describes an almost post-moral world For example, Nazi Germany sought to enslave and commit genocide against the Jews, carried out an intentional campaign of starving the countries they conquered in order to keep German citizens fed, bombed British civilian targets, and initiated a campaign of battle against Russia that included starving Russians, raping and killing civilians, and killing untold numbers of Russian soldier POW’s. With that context, how do you weigh the scales in the also atrocious, rape-filled conquest of Nazi Germany by Russia at the end of the war? Max Hastings even describes an instance where Russian soldiers located an old hospital outside of Berlin (Wedding) that housed 800 Jewish inmates “in desperate physical condition.” The Russian soldiers raped the Jewish women. Hastings indicates that the Allies probably wouldn’t have won WWII without Russia. At a minimum, had the Russians not fought the Germans as they had, the U.S. death toll of soldiers would have been innumerably greater.

The glue holding this history together is Hastings well-curated dispersal of 1st person, largely contemporaneous accounts of people’s involvement in different aspects of the war.

Hastings book did leave me wanting in a few areas.

First, while Hastings does briefly explain how the ghosts of WWI informed the hesitance of leaders to want to engage against Germany in WWII (and, ironically, created the circumstances that allowed for the flowering of another world war), he provides the reader with almost no information about post WWI life, and how Hitler was able to obtain and expand his power. I feel like I need to read another history book just to get a better grasp on this issue. The book contains little information on the culture of “appeasement” and the conditions that allowed that culture to take root in Europe after WWI.

Second, I feel a bit ripped off in not getting a chapter on how the Nazi’s/Hitler/Goebbel used propaganda to obtain and consolidate popular support in Germany prior to WWII and maintain it during the war. Hastings only dedicates a few sentences to this issue in his book. While I don’t know a great deal about this issue, it seems to have played a major role in spurring the stalwartness of both Nazi soldiers and German civilians prior to and during the war, and helps to explain why the Nazi’s continued to fight on, even when the writing was on the wall that they were going to lose.

Third, the book feels a bit rushed towards the end. For example, Hastings provides some interesting and persuasive opinions about the U.S.’s use of the atom bomb on Japan. Yet he spends less than a page discussing the 2 actual atom bomb drops. While he catalogs the death toll, he does not describe the horrendous long-term physical tolls (radiation poisoning, increased cancer rate, etc) or environmental tolls of those drops. This omission seems a bit tone deaf to me, as, by this time in the book, Hastings had literally provided 100’s of lengthy first-hand accounts of war and the aftermath of many less consequential military strikes.

Fourth, the book did not seek to provide enough information regarding the aftermath of war. We learn very little about the Nuremberg trials or how decisions were made to attempt to bring Nazi’s to justice. We do not learn how surviving European Jews navigated Europe and/or obtained the means to have Israel as a homeland and move there after the war. While a paragraph is devoted to Israel, it provides only the most perfunctory information. We receive very little information about the form that “truth and reconciliation” did or didn’t take in Germany after the war. We do not learn how German and Japanese civilians navigated their lives in the aftermath of their devastating loss of the war. We do not receive any information about how WWII led to NATO, or how WWII informs the “world order” in the 21st century. We don’t receive much information about the post-war partition of Europe or the implications of a divided Berlin for the post WWI world order. While I understand that each of those subjects could potentially be their own book, I think a 1 or 2 chapter summary of these issues would have improved the book a lot.

When I was writing this review I was waffling a bit between a 3 and a 4. But, as someone new to this area of history, I think that Hasting’s insights into the war bring it alive to the point where a 3 would be too low.

I’m in my 80s and began reading about the War before I grew up and served in the Korean War. Over the years I’ve read, learned from and admired numerous book about WWII. This book is the best WWII history I’ve read in over 20 years. The breath of the war that it covers is extraordinary and greater than any other that I’ve read. Moreover, the author never fails to include individuals both from the military and civilian life and their words help to bring readers like me closer to them, to their achievements and their sufferings. I’ve never read another WWII book that covers almost all of the countries that fought or suffered during the war.

In his 651 page tome, “Inferno The World at War 1939 – 1945, Max Hastings does the impossible – he makes World War II boring, or at least reading about it, a slog. I have read many World War II histories, and seeing the adulatory reviews, was excited to read Hastings’ latest effort. There is no debating the obviously massive amount of work and scholarship he put into the book, and that should be praised. Rather than “balanced and elegantly written, ” as the Associated Press described Hastings’ prose, I would describe it as clinical and detached. His descriptions of historic battles, even the horror of the Holocaust, seem somehow bloodless. There is at times, a smugness to Hastings’ writing. He is enamored of the German Wermacht, commenting a number of times on their tactical and fighting skills, while at the same time minimizing the skill of American soldiers, and those of his own country England. I cannot say whether or not his assessments are correct, but his style brings to mind an image of a pipe smoking academic in his ivory tower, knowingly judging the acts of people caught in unimaginably difficult circumstances. Bizarrely, as Hastings ends his book writing about the post-war, he notes not the Marshall Plan or the wonder that Germany and Japan are now America’s allies. Rather, Hastings suggests that the creation of the State of Israel was illegitimate, and ignoring the Jews’ historic connection to their land, opines that “Widespread bitterness persists that the Western powers assauged their own guilt about the wartime fate of the Jews by making a geat historic gesture in lands identified by Muslims as rightfully Arab.” Hastings’ book, with its many controversial opinions, undoubtedly adds to the scholarly research about World War II. I would prefer anything written by Stephen Ambrose, Rick Atkinson, James Hornfischer, or Ian Toll.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from a one-volume history of World War II but it turns out that this really isn’t a conventional history of the war. Instead of writing about the chronology of the war or battles, Hastings writes about the human experience of the war. He writes about what soldiers, sailors, and airmen experienced as well as what civilians experienced. A recurring theme is the cost of the war in the east versus the cost of the war in the west. Often, World War II histories seem to gloss over things the Allies did wrong and mistakes they made, but Hastings is also balanced and honest. He points out that while the Axis were guilty of war crimes, the Allies’ reputation was lily white either. This is a book that, in my opinion, should be required reading on the war because it lays out the human cost of World War II and puts the war in perspective.

In other books, Max Hastings has focused on particular parts of World War II. This one covers the whole conflict, and does so very convincingly. As well as describing the key battles, the author deals extensively with the human side of the conflict. For me, this was the most valuable aspect of the book, bringing much greater understanding of (for example) the full implications of newsreel footage showing refugees trying to lead their families and possessions to safety along overcrowded roads subject to merciless strafing from the air.

Another key area covered very well is the full savagery of the conflict on the Eastern front, with Soviet losses being massively greater than those suffered by the Western allies in other theatres.

Other theatres of war are also described in a new light, questioning for example the need to take Pacific islands such as Okinawa at enormous human cost when Japan was in effect already beaten. The author always makes a clear case for his sometimes controversial conclusions.

This book is not an easy read, but a necessary one.

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