Hew Strachan October 3 2011 12:01AM
Max Hastings has been building up to this for a long time.
Editorships of two newspapers may have intervened; so too have countless words of journalism and three volumes of autobiography. But the Second World War has been the leitmotiv of a truly distinguished career, launched with Bomber Command in 1979, and reflected in his long-since lapsed commitment to write the Oxford History of the Second World War. This is not that book in another guise, for two excellent reasons.
The first is its wealth of personal accounts of mostly unknown participants of every nationality. Villains and heroes, military and civilian, they convey not just the horrors and heroics of war, but also the way in which war robs the individual, including Hastings’s readers, of personal control. Sources flash briefly on to the page and then, mostly, disappear, leaving an entirely appropriate sense of loss and uncertainty. What happened next? Did they survive the war, or were they incinerated in an air attack or killed in the gas chambers?
In many cases neither Hastings nor anybody else can know the answers.
But in other respects Hastings does. The fruit of his long exposure to the war’s debates — and this is the second distinctive feature of the book — is a sure sense on the big strategic questions. That accumulated wisdom, conveyed with conviction, gives the book its shape. It enables the reader to surface from empathy to regain a sense of coherence.
When Hastings began his career Western historians knew little of the eastern front. They saw it through the eyes of German generals, the self-declared victims of Hitler’s lack of strategic sense and his regime’s genocidal policies. Neither proposition stands up today.
The Wehrmacht was complicit in the Nazis’ war crimes . Hastings is at one with the current orthodoxy that sees the war in Russia as the epicentre of the conflict. He dismisses both the North African and Burma campaigns as ultimately irrelevant to the war’s outcome, and he regards Stalin as the most successful of the allies’ warlords.
Russia suffered total losses of 27 million. However, Hastings does not see such figures as ipso facto evidence of worth. He characterises the brutality of the Soviet soldier as he entered Germany or sacked Budapest in terms which resonate with the racial stereotypes used by the Germans themselves. The Red Army was, he says, “a barbarian army” which, unlike Western armies, saw no shame in taking revenge.
A strong moral tone, therefore, characterises All Hell Let Loose, and neither German generals nor Russian soldiers are the only ones to feel its force. Britain abandoned the Poles not once but twice, in 1945 as well as in 1939.
Its treatment of its colonial subjects, especially in south Asia, was self-centred, eroding its claim to empire even before the fall of Singapore. However, his real contempt is reserved for the French, the majority of whom preferred Vichy to resistance even when they had the opportunity to join de Gaulle. None of this amounts to moral relativism. Hastings does not exempt Germany and Japan from responsibility for what happened, not least for their refusal to concede defeat in 1943, the year by which neither could any longer win. In that sense the “irrelevant” campaigns were fought thereafter, but they were also those in which the bulk of the killing was done, particularly of Germans.
By contrast, the losses of Britain and the US were comparatively light, in large part because of their maximisation of resources other than human lives. After 1943, the Allies were unchallenged in the air, an advantage which ensured success in the key operations on land and sea. By then, the United States was master of the Pacific, and thanks both to signals intelligence and submarines, could let economic superiority do much of the fighting for it. The war was not won solely in the land battles on the eastern front.
No other general history of the war amalgamates so successfully the gut-wrenching personal details and the essential strategic arguments.
Melding the worm’s eye view and the big picture is a difficult trick to pull off — but Hastings has triumphed.
Hew Strachan is Chichele professor of the history of war at Oxford University
The second world war is still generally regarded as the ‘good war’. In the moral balance, the cause of the Axis powers was so unspeakably bad that their adversaries have rarely had to justify themselves. But there is, perhaps, more to it than the moral balance. The second war has gained in public esteem by being everything that the first war was not. It was fought for recognisable and, on the whole admirable, objectives. It did not begin, as the first had, among the conspiratorial fumblings of European chanceries. It did not become an object in itself.
Casualties among combatants were relatively light among the western allies, whose historians have tended to set the agenda, whereas everyone’s image of the first war is one of squalid mud trenches and pointless military massacre. The second war was a war of movement, of grand strategy, of decisive battles, where the first was one of slow attrition and painful stalemate. Above all, the second war produced heroes, according to our own measure of these things, whereas the leading figures of the first war now seem dated, heartless, unimaginative and personally rebarbative.
Of Max Hastings’s nine books about the second world war, this is the one with the broadest sweep and most relentlessly pessimistic message. Like so much recent writing on the second world war, it tries to correct the triumphalist and self-righteousness clichés by pointing to the black side: the ‘cynicism’ (his word) of going to war for Poland when there was nothing to be done to save her; the myth of a united Britain defying Hitler; the bondage in which Britain is said to have held her colonies in order to extract the maximum of resources for a war which was no concern of theirs; the strategic errors and tactical incompetence of the armed forces, especially that familiar target of Hastings’s earlier invectives — the British army; the occasional incidents, such as the shooting of prisoners, which would have ranked as war crimes if done by the Germans. He hardly has a good word to say about the top allied field commanders apart from for Slim and Patton.
Above all, Hastings sets out to deglamourise the experience of war. His title says it all. As portrayed here, it was ‘all hell’. The common experience of contemporaries, says Hastings, was the emptiness of military glory and strategic ambition, and the universal perception of war’s barbarity. ‘The authentic expression of war,’ as Tolstoy wrote, ‘is not beauty, order and formation, but blood, suffering and death.’
These are fair points, within limits. But the picture which emerges from Hastings’s pen is exaggerated, and does scant justice to the variety of human experience at a very complex crisis in its history. Part of the problem is that he tries to portray the war through the words of countless lowly individuals. The anecdotes and quotations with which he illustrates his themes are often fascinating. They give immediacy to his narrative. The extracts from letters home taken from the bodies of men who died in action are profoundly moving.
But the letters and diaries of those who were at the sharp end of the war often give a distorted view of great events. The outlook of individual soldiers or airmen is inevitably partial and often ill-informed about the wider picture. The author’s selection gives undue weight to those whose experience was particularly intense or articulately described, and therefore quite likely to be untypical. Lord Carrington was certainly not the only man who remembered his war service in the army as a ‘happy time’. My father, who served in submarines, regarded his war years as the finest in his life and all that followed as a disappointment. As a young man, I met many people of his generation who thought the same. Who is to say whose experience was truly characteristic of so vast an event? The realistic answer is none of them. Generalisation is meaningless.
Generalisation is, however, very much Max Hastings’s forte. His judgments, crisp, dogmatic, and sweeping, add greatly to the interest of his book and make it highly readable. But they are often wrong, or at least not as invincibly correct as he makes them sound. Three random, and very different examples may illustrate the point. First, Britain and France did not declare war to defend Poland, but to defend the principle which Hitler’s invasion of Poland violated. They were not cynical about helping Poland, for they had always known that it was indefensible. They hoped that the mere threat of war would persuade Hitler to pull back. It was a reasonable calculation, which might well have worked if he had not dismissed it as a bluff.
Second, it is not true that outside the Indian princely states all educated Indians resented England’s involvement of their country in the war. Many did, but others did not. The issue split the Indian National Congress. Even Nehru (often quoted here) was ambivalent about the official position of his party. Four million Indian volunteers served with loyalty and distinction in the army on the Indian frontier, in Burma, North Africa, Italy and Northern Europe.
Third, Churchill’s failure to sack Harris, head of Bomber Command, does not make him responsible for Harris’s follies. The government would have liked to sack him and came close to doing so in the winter of 1944/5, when he refused to comply with the policy on targeting oil installations. But he was unsackable because he was worshipped by his air crew, whose morale would have suffered a serious blow by his dismissal. Many other examples could have been chosen. In each case, there is an arguable point to be made, which is spoilt by the author’s incomplete analysis, unqualified statements and exaggerated manner.
It would, however, be unfair to end this review on a sour note. Max Hastings writes with verve and elegance. His range is truly impressive. All Hell Let Loose has a remarkable global range. And even prejudice and error have their place. There are now too many books about the second world war for reheated platitudes to find readers. At least Max Hastings makes his readers think.
The Greatest and Most Terrible
PATRICK BISHOP
October 2011
For many years — indeed since the close of the event itself — the Second World War has been the gift to the publishing industry that keeps on giving. It was thought for a while that the new millennium might mark a cut-off point in the public appetite for World War II history. Not a bit of it. The fascination continues. As I write, the number one bestseller on the list of Random House, the world's biggest English-language publisher, is Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand of Seabiscuit fame, about a US flier shot down in the Pacific. Another war-themed book, In the Garden of Beasts, is at number three.
The trend is not confined to nations which had a good war. Last year a polemic by a 93-year-old Resistance hero, Stéphane Hessel, topped the French charts and in Germany readers have lapped up the republication of Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin.
It is in the English-speaking world, though, where the interest is strongest. British and American readers cling to the war like a spiritual comfort blanket. For Britons, it was our last great achievement before the onset of moral and economic decline; for Americans, a reminder of an age of innocence and simple choices. It was, of course, more complicated than that, but no amount of revisionism can erode the popular belief that war brought out the best in us, setting a standard of national conduct that we will never match again. Familiarity does not breed indifference. As time passes, the stories of those who endured the war seem to gain in remarkableness and their achievements appear more extraordinary.
One of the main beneficiaries of this trend is Max Hastings, whose nine books on aspects of the conflict have given him a claim to be our pre-eminent military historian. In All Hell Let Loose he attempts to tell the whole story in a single volume, and succeeds triumphantly, combining fluid narrative with some piercing insights and unsentimental judgments. The French are not going to like this book, nor too perhaps the British Army, whose performance "seldom surpassed adequacy and often fell short of it".
This is above all, though, a book about how individuals experienced war, an answer to the question, "What was the Second World War like?" Over the years Hastings has moved away from the traditional military-historical preoccupation with leadership, strategy, tactics and materiel to take a more humanistic slant. Here, the nigh-on 750 pages are crammed with thousands of nuggets of testimony from all corners of the conflict that horrify, inspire, touch and dismay.
The awful glee with which so many Germans went to war is revealed in a report from a young German pilot of the fun he had strafing "Ivans", and the reluctance of their opponents in the resigned, grumbling letters to wives and sweethearts. For the majority, the war meant a loss of whatever small control they exercised over their own fate. This truth is contained, most pathetically, in a letter written from the battle cruiser Hood by homesick, frightened, 17-year-old William Crawford to his mum, asking her if she could persuade the Admiralty to fix him up with a shore job. Nothing came of it and he went down with his ship, sunk by the Bismarck with almost all hands in May 1941. The sense of helplessness in the face of evil is encapsulated in the brilliant aperçu of an Austrian Jewess, Ruth Maier, who had fled from the Nazis to Norway, only for them to follow: "I think of the Germans more as a natural disaster than as a people."
Threaded through the personal accounts is a narrative which, by an impressive feat of organisation, manages to connect all the theatres of what was the closest the world has come to a truly global conflict. British and American interpretations of the war naturally emphasise their own forces' involvement and therefore focus on the periphery of events over the centre. Hastings makes it very plain that this was essentially a fight between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, two enemies of humanity locked in a struggle from which decency was utterly absent. One of the most eloquent passages is a simple recital of statistics: the Soviet Union suffered 65 per cent of all allied military deaths, the US and Britain 2 per cent each. Within the armed forces, nearly one in three Germans conscripted into the Wehrmacht died, against one in 20 British and Commonwealth combatants and one in 34 American servicemen.
Compared with the ruthlessness of the Russians, the Germans and the Japanese, the democracies' cautious style of waging war looks relatively benign, but with conflict come hard choices. Hastings does not neglect the blots on the allied record, prominent among them Churchill's refusal to divert resources to alleviate the Bengal famine in 1943 which caused a million deaths. In the end his verdict is a bleak one that rejects the romantic view of the conflict as a crusade of good against evil. The fruits of victory were sparse and perversely distributed, with the vanquished Germans reaping far greater benefits than the victorious Russians.
None of this will diminish the hold that, nearly 70 years after its end, the war still exerts on our imaginations. It is, perhaps, hardly surprising. It was, as Hastings says, the "greatest and most terrible event in world history", in which human beings touched the extremes of good and evil as well as enduring suffering and deprivation on a scale unimaginable to modern minds. As such, the story surely merits this constant sifting and retelling. For as this enthralling book shows, in the right hands, the study of the war — like the study of a sacred text — can generate an endless stream of new meanings and insights, illuminating in their turn the wider mysteries of existence
