Inferno: The World At War,
1939-1945
By Max Hastings
(Knopf, 729 pages, $35)
“At 3:15 A.M. Berlin time on 22 June 1941, Russian border guards
on the Bug River Bridge at Kolden were summoned by their German
counterparts ‘to discuss important matters,’ and machine-gunned as
they approached,” writes Max Hastings on the commencement of
Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet
Union.
This routine bit of duplicity and disregard for human life began
“the defining event of the war” and, ultimately, the complete
destruction of Hitler’s Germany, as described by Hastings in his
Inferno: The World At War, 1939-1945 (recently
released in
paperback).
This volume is the culmination of Hastings’ long career as a
historian of the Second World War, “this greatest and most terrible
of all human experiences,” beginning with Bomber Command
(1979) and followed by seven other books on all aspects of the
conflict, including one on the defeat of Japan. Avoiding the
detailed military narrative of the author’s other works,
Inferno takes a synoptic view of the war and surveys the
“big picture, the context of events” in order to “illuminate the
conflict’s significance for a host of ordinary people of many
societies…” To accomplish this, Hastings draws on eyewitness
accounts of soldiers, civilians, journalists, peasants, and wartime
victims that were contained in letters, diaries, journals, and news
accounts in numerous languages.
“Many people witnessed spectacles comparable with Renaissance
painters’ conception of the inferno to which the damned were
consigned; human beings torn to fragments of flesh and bone; cities
blasted into ruble; ordered communities sundered into dispersed
human particles,” says Hastings. “Almost everything which civilized
peoples take for granted in time of peace was swept aside, above
all the expectation of being protected from violence.”
Yes, the violence was unimaginable then and now. Hastings
reckons that “at least 60 million were terminated by death.” An
average of 27,000 people perished each day between September 1939
and August 1945. Between 1937 and 1945, China lost 15 million
lives. Yugoslavia suffered 1 million dead, including those lost in
a concurrent civil war. Even on the American home front, 100,000
wartime workers lost limbs in accidents, compared to 17,000 combat
amputees.
Hastings provides a panoramic tour of the war, from the invasion
of Poland, Norway, and France, through the final collapse of
Japanese resistance after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But he deftly
combines this with very personal and wrenching stories of human
beings caught up in an evil they do not — cannot — comprehend.
During the final battle for Berlin, with the victorious Soviet army
“embarking on an orgy of celebration, rape and destruction on a
scale such as Europe had not witnessed since the seventeenth
century,” he offers this report from a Berlin woman regarding her
neighbor, a baker who “comes stumbling towards me down the
hall…white as his flour, holding out his hands: ‘They have my
wife…’ His voice breaks. For a second I feel I’m acting in a play.
A middle-class baker can’t possibly move like that, can’t speak
with such emotion, put so much feeling into his voice, bare his
soul that way, his heart torn. I’ve never seen anyone but great
actors do that.”
When Singapore fell to the Japanese, 22 Australian nurses
escaped, only to be captured on a Dutch Island. “As they were
driven into the sea to be machine-gunned, the last words of their
matron Irene Drummond were recorded by the sole survivor: ‘Chin up,
girls. I’m proud of you and I love you all.’”
These moving, grim tales, laced throughout the text of
Inferno, make a sad story even more human, tragic, and
forlorn.
There are several cruel and ironic themes that Hastings
articulates throughout the book. The invasion of Poland was the
casus belli for the French and British to declare war on
Germany. Yet, Poland was the price Stalin demanded for waging a
merciless war on the Eastern Front, a monumental one at that.
French ambivalence regarding the Allied cause is another theme,
especially given the romanticized role of the Resistance in
post-war memories.
Most cruel of all, given the years of blood and steel that
followed, was the realization on the part of both the Japanese and
German high commands — very early in the war — that neither could
actually win the struggle. For instance, once the Germans failed to
take Moscow in 1941, the Wehrmacht generals understood that the
best they could hope for was to hold out for favorable terms from
the Americans and British. Hitler also understood this reality but
had no choice but to fight on to the death.
The most significant theme emphasized throughout Max Hastings’
compelling history is the overwhelming nature of the savage war on
the Eastern Front, which dwarfed Allied military efforts in Italy
and France. So vast was the spilling of Soviet and German blood and
treasure that Hastings makes this unequivocal judgment in the
concluding chapter of the book:
The Soviet Union revealed an industrial and military capability
that would have enabled it to complete the destruction of Hitler’s
war machine even had the Western Allies never landed in Italy or
France, though their interventions hastened the end. There is a
powerful argument that only a warlord as bereft of scruples or
compassion as Stalin, presiding over a society in which
ruthlessness was even more institutionalized than in Germany, could
have destroyed Nazism. Stalin proved a supremely effective tyrant,
as Hitler was not.
The war on the Russian front defies belief. The Wehrmacht, on
the eve of Operation Barbarossa, assumed the starvation of at least
30 million Russians in order to feed the German army as it
penetrated the heartland of the Soviet Union. Most of the 3.5
million Soviet POWs were starved or shot, and this was reciprocated
in kind by Stalin’s forces. At any given time, the Russian front
extended anywhere from 900 to 1,400 miles, from Leningrad to
Odessa. At one point the Soviets were losing 44,000 soldiers per
day.
Yet, between June 1941 and May 1944, the month before D-Day, the
Germans suffered an average of 60,000 men killed each month in the
east.
Hastings describes the fierce battle for Budapest in which the
Russians suffered 80,000 dead and a quarter of a million wounded.
During the siege, 38,000 civilians died, and tens of thousands more
were deported to the Soviet Union for forced labor. Many of them
never returned. The German and Hungarian forces lost 40,000 men,
and 63,000 more were taken prisoner.
“This savage, futile battle would have been accounted an epic
had it taken place on the Anglo-American front,” writes Max
Hastings. “As it was, only the Hungarians took much notice of its
horrors, then or later.”
Benjamin Schwarz, the literary editor for the Atlantic,
wrote a provocative book review of current and emerging scholarship
on the Second World War entitled, “Stalin’s
Gift,” in which he argued for a reorientation or reappraisal of
our understanding of the conflict:
It’s time for those (mostly male) readers interested in the
Second World War to put down the umpteenth account of D-Day and
turn to the new crop of books on the most colossal conflict the
world has ever seen: the German-Soviet clash on the Eastern Front.
Since the late 1980s, a historiographical revolution has been
underway, as scholars fundamentally alter their understanding of
this epic struggle, which killed 27 million Soviet soldiers and
civilians and nearly 4 million Wehrmacht troops. They aren’t merely
revising an established narrative; they’re discovering new facets
of the conflict — even entire battles — that had been lost to
history.
Both Schwarz and Hastings comment on the role of the NKVD in
maintaining discipline in the Soviet ranks and inflicting harsh
punishment for desertion. The Soviets executed more than 158,000
soldiers for desertion.
Citing the British historian Norman Davies, Schwarz observed
that, for four years, more than 400 Red Army and German divisions
fought over a front of 1,000 miles. “At its most intense, the war
in the West was fought between 15 Allied and 15 Wehrmacht
divisions,” wrote Schwarz. “Eighty-five percent of the German
military dead fell there; in July 1943, in the decisive battle of
the war, the Soviets permanently broke the Wehrmacht’s capacity for
large-scale attack at Kursk, ‘the one name,’ Davies properly
asserts, ‘which all historians of the Second World War should
remember.’”
Schwarz continues: “So…the most odious criminal regime in
Europe’s history was defeated by an even more murderous regime, if
numbers are the yardstick — which significantly tarnishes any
notion of the ‘Good War.’” He concludes his essay with a quote from
historian Geoffrey Roberts, who ventures to say that “Stalin…saved
the world for democracy.”
The reappraisal of the slaughter in eastern Europe is also
reflected in Timothy Snyder’s powerful, daunting book
Bloodlands (2010), which treats the killing fields between
Berlin and Moscow, from 1933 to 1945, as a single, intertwined
history of 14 million murdered souls. The story encompasses not
just the Holocaust, but also Stalin’s starvation of 3.3 million in
the Ukraine, the extermination of Polish elites, and other assorted
horrors. “This is a history of political mass murder,” writes
Snyder. “A quarter of them were killed before the Second World War
even began. A further two hundred thousand died between 1939 and
1941, while Germany and the Soviet Union were not only at peace,
but allies.” Again, cruelty and irony present themselves in
contemporary histories of these infernal regions.
Max Hastings’ final assessment of the Second World War is very
much in line with Benjamin Schwarz and the historians he
surveyed.
Hastings recognizes the valor and contribution of the U.S. Navy,
Marines, and Army Air Force in defeating the Japanese. He applauds
the sacrifices of American, British, and Commonwealth forces in
Italy and France. He rightly praises the code breakers at Bletchley
Park, the courage of the RAF, the heroism of the Poles and
Norwegians, and the skill and fortitude of the Royal Navy.
But, in the end, Max Hastings believes it was the Soviet war of
mass rather than maneuver — of brute force, heedless of the loss
of human life — that, in the final analysis, broke the back of the
German army and with it the Third Reich.
“Whatever the limitations of the Red Army’s weapons, training,
tactics and commanders, Soviet culture armoured its forces to meet
the Wehrmacht with a resolution the softer citizens of the
democracies could not match,” he writes. A more unsettling
conclusion to a masterful history of the war can hardly be
imagined.
