Max Hastings begins his magisterial history of World War II with the simple declaration, “This is a book chiefly about human experience.” Nearly 500 pages later he expands upon that:
“Historians describe events chiefly in terms of clashes of arms, which of course determined outcomes. But the conflict should also be understood as a human experience which changed the lives of hundreds of millions of people, many of whom never saw a battlefield. Fear of injury or death created the most obvious apprehension, especially in the new age of air bombardment. But beyond this, there were many other causes of distress: about food and health; the absence of loved ones; the dissolution of communities. There were simple sorrows, such as being unable to give presents to loved ones. ‘Eva’s birthday,’ Victor Klemperer, a Jew rendered destitute by Nazi confiscation of all that he owned, wrote of his wife in Dresden on 12 July 1944. ‘My hands quite empty again, not even a flower.’ ”
(Knopf) - ‘Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945’ by Max Hastings
Heartbreaking details such as that abound in “Inferno,” yet the book never descends into pathos. Instead it is at once a human history of the war and a military/political/diplomatic history as well. Hastings, the eminent British journalist and historian whose previous books include accounts of the Battle of Britain, D-Day, the Holocaust and the epochal leadership of Winston Churchill, here has written what is essentially a work of synthesis, though it is fleshed out and given additional life by the testimony of eyewitnesses with whom he “held conversations at some time over the past thirty-five years.” It is an immense book that cannot be read in haste, and at moments the stories it tells are almost more than the heart and mind can bear, but press on: It is the best one-volume history of the war yet written — a judgment that includes Andrew Roberts’s fine but more conventional “The Storm of War,” published earlier this year — and its pertinence to a world still at war in 2011, albeit in different ways, is evident on almost every page.
Hastings no doubt would be the first to insist that this is less an account of battles, troop movements, great leaders and grand strategies than of people at war, yet in interweaving the stories of soldiers and civilians he makes plain, as have few others before him, that in truth they simply cannot be separated. Obviously there are books that focus on specific aspects of the war that also do justice to the human stories — a superb example is Antony Beevor’s “The Fall of Berlin, 1945” (2002), with its harrowing picture of the sufferings of German women at the hands of Soviet soldiers — but I know of no book that performs this feat throughout all six years of the war and extends it to theaters too often ignored, notably India and China.
We tend to think of this “world” war as essentially a European and East Asian conflict, but Hastings is at pains to emphasize that it really was a global conflict. To be sure, South America was relatively lightly affected — though Argentina, to its eternal shame, became a safe haven for Nazi war criminals — and with the exception of Pearl Harbor the United States went unscathed, but elsewhere devastation went unchecked. A “culture of massacre” prevailed on the Eastern Front and swiftly spread to virtually every other arena. In Japan the leadership instilled “a culture of ruthlessness indistinguishable from barbarism into its armed forces,” as we know from the familiar stories of Singapore and Burma and the Philippines; fewer people know that Chinese civilians were massacred “in their thousands and hundreds of thousands,” leaving their country “a great victim, second only to Russia in the scale of its sufferings and losses, while denied the consolation of any redemptive military achievement.”
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