Publisher Description
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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“This book is huge, overwhelming, stuffed full of 658 pages of facts, and totally absorbing. It took me over a week to read it, but I’m glad I did. I am astonished at how much I did not know about WWII. I thought I was pretty widely read in the area for an American housewife. 🙂 But I discovered things constantly that I had NO IDEA about. 2 or 3 million Bengals starved to death in India because no one would send them food supplies to end a famine? Had NO idea. The war in northern Africa was more publicity-propaganda stunt than strategic advantage? Had not a clue. We really didn’t need to invade Okinawa, the Philippines or Japan at all? Wow. And I knew that the Eastern Front was monumental in size to anything that happened in Western Europe. Really I did. I just had no idea of the magnitude, the scope of Russian suffering, the paltry insignificance of anything contributed by Americans. The author seems very middle-of-the-road politically, sometimes excoriating Roosevelt and Churchill for cynicism and manipulation but in all believing the “standard story” that the war had to be fought, the US had to be involved, and it’s a good thing we did it. (He blew off with one dismissive sentence any idea that Roosevelt manipulated us into Pearl Harbor.) But in all I enjoyed this very much; I especially appreciated the quotes from real people of nearly every place and part of the war telling about their experiences. If someone wants an overview of the entire huge war, this would seem to me to be a pretty good place to start.”
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Michelle (5 out of 5 stars)
