Hastings continues a recent substantial body of general audience writing on WWII (Armageddon; Retribution,) in this equally well-researched and well-presented account focusing on the conflict's human dimension, looking at both soldiers and civilians, members of both Allies and Axis. For millions of ordinary people the war was "hell let loose," imposing, at the least, drastic change and, at worst, incomprehensible horror-60 million died. Participants assembled the "vast jigsaw puzzle" of war with the pieces they had and made sense of it in terms of their own circumstances. Hastings succeeds admirably in synthesizing the results in a globe-girdling context from Guadalcanal to the Dnieper River. He establishes, in some sense, the temporary nature of war-that soldiers seldom lost their identity as civilians in uniform, and civilians counted the days until normality returned. That mind-set determined the war's nature: structured by mass participation and institutional effectiveness. In Russia, for instance, the German invasion led to "a surge of popular enthusiasm" to support Russia, followed rapidly by despair and men trying to evade the draft. As Hastings makes clear, the war's impact also outlasted the conflict: for decades people judged one another by their wartime behavior; for many the psychological impact of the horrors never left them. Illus., maps. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Contemplate the human destruction of WWII: an estimated 60 million deaths, including 20 million Soviets, 6 million Jews, and 15 million Chinese. That comes to an average of 27,000 deaths for each day of war. Inevitably, these mind-numbing numbers swamp the countless stories of individual suffering. So this masterful account, which emphasizes the experiences of ordinary people, is both engrossing and necessary. Hastings, a former correspondent and newspaper editor, does not ignore political and military aspects, but the power of his narrative lies in the many recounted stories of soldiers and civilians on all sides and various fronts. Polish soldiers describe their shock and helplessness as they are overwhelmed by the blitzkrieg. A French officer remembers the demoralization and panic as Panzers breached his defenses. A young Chinese peasant conveys the pain and humiliation as she is repeatedly gang-raped by Japanese soldiers. This is a powerful portrait of a broken, burning world.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2010 Booklist

Former UK journalist Hastings (Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45), a popular war historian who has covered World War II from many perspectives, here relates what individuals in the armed forces and the home fronts on all sides experienced. He employs excerpts from mostly contemporary diaries and letters illustrating the shortages, sufferings, destruction, fear, and death that permeated lives violently upended by the all-consuming conflict. There are also passages that bring readers back to the big picture and what various leaders were doing, but it's the stories of what ordinary people experienced at such great cost that make this an engrossing book. VERDICT This well-written history is recommended for all readers and libraries. (Photos, maps, and index not seen.)-D.K.B. (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Sir Max Hastings has done it again. After more than 20 admirable books about various campaigns and key personalities of WW II, this latest study is the sweeping culmination of the entire war. In 26 chapters, Hastings dissects the conflict, covering every major battle in theaters of operations across the globe. One chapter, for instance, is devoted to the air war, and another discusses the Mediterranean, followed by Russia, the US, and Japan. An outstanding military historian who learned his trade as a war correspondent in Vietnam and the Falklands, Hastings understands the man in the trenches. Drawing on letters, diaries, reports, and quotes, readers experience horrors from Stalingrad to Guadalcanal through the eyes of the participants. Augmenting the military side of the war, Hastings includes the unity of the home front and the changing status of women, as well as the shame of the political dithering and diplomatic perfidy as Britain and France considered coming to Poland's aid. Of particular importance is a reassessment of Russia's huge value to the war effort. Yet another chapter examines the Holocaust and the fate of the war's other victims. A wonderfully written, if lengthy, history of WW II. Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries. A. P. Krammer Texas A&M University

DO we really need another history of World War II? The book market is overflowing with them, and new ones seem to appear at almost weekly intervals. Vast though the conflict was, we probably know more about it than any other war in history. Sir Max Hastings, author of this latest survey, has already written no fewer than eight books about key campaigns and personalities of the war. Has he got anything new to say? The answer is, emphatically, yes. "Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945" sums up and surpasses all his previous publications: a new, original and necessary history, in many ways the crowning of a life's work. A professional war correspondent who has personally witnessed armed conflicts in Vietnam, the Falkland Islands and other danger zones, Hastings has a sober, unromantic and realistic view of battle that puts him into a different category from the armchair generals whose gungho, schoolboy attitude to war fills the pages of a great majority of military histories. He writes with grace, fluency and authority. "Inferno" offers an account of the war that concentrates on the lived experience of the men and women who took part in it. On almost every page there is memorable and arresting material from interviews, diaries, letters, memoirs and personal documents of many kinds. The huge cast of characters and witnesses gives the book an almost Tolstoyan sweep, as it ranges across the world, from Dunkirk to Iwo Jima, Stalingrad to Guadalcanal. Hastings is at his absolute best when he is describing battle scenes, both on land and at sea. Deftly chosen quotations are effortlessly integrated into the narratives, providing color and making the action come alive. They are supplemented where appropriate with clear and informative maps and easily digestible statistics. This is at its core very much a military history, despite the space devoted to the experiences of civilians. Brisk assessments are delivered on the competence or (mostly) incompetence of leading generals and the performance of their troops; in the book's concluding chapter, Hastings pronounces his verdicts, rather like a senior general handing out medals at the end of a campaign: Montgomery was a highly competent professional who lacked the touch of genius needed for him to be numbered among the great commanders; MacArthur was a brilliant self-publicist, but outclassed as a general by the now-forgotten Lucien Truscott; Rommel was fatally compromised by his disregard for logistics; Georgi Zhukov was a superb commander in 1944, but his storming of Berlin the following spring was brutish and clumsy. Hastings argues that the navies of the United Kingdom and the United States were their best fighting forces; he thinks the armies of the two Allied powers were mostly no match for the ruthless fighting prowess of the Germans and Japanese, whose willingness to sacrifice themselves contrasted with the care taken by Allied generals to minimize casualties among their own men. Red Army troops behaved in a manner not unlike that of the Germans, their reckless disregard for their own safety driven on by the knowledge that the Soviet secret police would shoot them if they hesitated. What shifted the balance in favor of the Allies in the end was America's industrial might, which by 1943 was supplying enormous quantities of munitions and equipment without which the Red Army's victory would have taken far longer to achieve. Germans, Russians and Japanese soldiers and civilians get their say in this book as well as Americans and British. Ninety percent of German troops killed in the war died on the Eastern Front, and Hastings gives this fact appropriately expansive treatment. He is as hard on the racism, complacency and incompetence of the British in the face of the Japanese invasion of Malaya and Singapore as he is on the cruelty and brutality of the Japanese Army as it tortured, raped and massacred its way across China, Indonesia and Malaya. As the British fled, denying Asians access to evacuation ships to make room for themselves, the young Singaporean politician, Lee Kwan Yew, exclaimed: "That is the end of the British Empire." Millions of people died of hunger, disease and mass murder under German rule in Europe, but millions died too from starvation in India under British rule. Yet Hastings is not always so evenhanded in his coverage. In describing the invasion, conquest and division of Poland by Hitler and Stalin in 1939, for example, he devotes considerable space to the Soviet arrest, deportation and murder of Poles in their zone of occupation, but says little about the mass imprisonment, deportation, enslavement and murder of hundreds of thousands of Poles by the Nazis. His brilliant and evocative account of the "winter war," in which Finland defended itself with surprising effectiveness against Stalin's invasion in 1939-40, outclasses his somewhat perfunctory narrative of the Polish campaign. And his skillful touch can fail him when it comes to dealing with nonmilitary aspects of the war. There are too many sweeping generalizations about national character. The Poles have a "propensity for fantasy," for example, while "Britain's antimilitarist tradition was a source of pride to its people." Neither claim is true; indeed, British national culture in the 1930s was suffused with celebratory memories of national military victories in Europe and across the British Empire, while pacifism was the province of only a tiny minority. On occasion, too, the military historian's propensity to judge everything in terms of military effectiveness can lead Hastings astray. "One of Hitler's greatest mistakes," he writes, "from the viewpoint of his own interests, was that he attempted to reshape the eastern lands that fell under his suzerainty in accordance with Nazi ideology while still fighting the war." Nazi brutality certainly alienated many Ukrainians and others whose resentment at years of murderous Soviet exploitation made them ready to welcome the Germans when they arrived in 1941; but for Hitler, of course, the exploitation and extermination of Slav "subhumans" was one of the major purposes of the war. And the chapter on the Holocaust is among the weaker ones in the book. Hastings sees the annihilation of the Jews as a military mistake, but in fact it did not entail "diverting scarce manpower and transport to a program of mass murder while the outcome of the war still hung in the balance," at least not on any significant scale. The "euthanasia" campaign in which Hitler ordered the murder of 70,000 mentally ill or handicapped Germans was not directed exclusively against "inmates of psychiatric units," but actually began with the forcible removal of thousands of children from their parental homes. These are minor objections, however. As military history in the round, conveying to a 21st-century readership the human experience of this greatest and most savage of human conflicts in history, "Inferno" is superb. Richard J. Evans is the Regius professor of history at the University of Cambridge and the president of Wolfson College, Cambridge. He is the author of "The Third Reich at War."

A World War II history by Hastings (Winston's War: Churchill, 19401945, 2010, etc.) may seem like a tautology, but readers familiar with his previous books will expect an enthralling account of his favorite subject. They will not be disappointed.This time, the author emphasizes personal experiences as well as his often squirm-inducing opinions. Most startlingbut not really controversialhe maintains that the Wehrmacht outclassed all other armies. The Allies, including the Soviets, never won a battle without vast superiority in men and material. However, he writes, the democracies were smarter. American industry operated more efficiently, took better advantage of science and paid more attention to logistics. German and Japanese troops regularly starved and rationed ammunition. In addition, U.S. intelligence services performed superbly, the enemies' dreadfully. Readers will perk up at Hastings' claim that Hitler's second greatest mistake, after invading Russia, was launching the Battle of Britain. If he had allowed Britain to stew for months after its humiliating defeat, Churchill would have had great difficulty sustaining national morale or fending off pressure to make a peace, which would have eliminated not only Britain but America as a threat. Most general histories sprinkle their pages with anecdotes, but Hastings has this down to a science. He employs numerous specialists, delving into Russian and Italian archives and personally tracking down obscure, vivid, often painful stories from the usual combatants as well as Poles, Bengalese, Chinese and Japanese.Excellent general WWII accounts aboundincluding those by historical superstars such as Stephen Ambrose and John Keeganbut Hastings is matchless.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.