all hell let loose the world at war 1939 1945

It challenged me and it has – certainly – rewarded me with increased understanding both of the situation and for those who had to try and survive it. The book is a rivetingly fresh look at a period I thought I knew something about. Max Hastings employs the technique which has made many of his previous books bestsellers, combining top-down analysis and bottom-up testimony to explore the meaning of this vast conflict both for its participants and for posterity.Ī huge and hugely impressive and moving book, All Hell Let Loose is a concise and precise, but detailed and passion-filled history of the war years of the Second World War.

This is ‘everyman’s story.’ It is an attempt to answer the question: ‘What was the Second World War like?’ and also an overview of the picture. ‘The world between 19 saw some human beings plumb the depths of baseness, while others scaled the heights of courage and nobility.’ ‘The cliché is profoundly true,’ he says. Some of Hastings’ insights and judgements will surprise students of the conflict, while there are vivid descriptions of the tragedies and triumphs of a host of ordinary people, in uniform and out of it. Among many vignettes, there are the RAF’s legendary raid on the Ruhr dams, the horrors of Arctic convoys, desert tank combat, jungle clashes. The book ranges across a vast canvas, from the agony of Poland amid the September 1939 invasion, to the 1943 Bengal famine, in which at least a million people died under British rule – and British neglect. He argues that, while Hitler’s army often fought its battles brilliantly well, the Nazis conducted their war effort with ‘stunning incompetence.’ He suggests the Royal Navy and US Navy were their countries’ outstanding fighting services, while the industrial contribution of the United States was much more important to Allied victory than that of the US Army. Hastings emphasises the Russian front, where more than ninety percent of all German soldiers who perished, met their fate.

Reflecting Max Hastings’ thirty-five years of research on the Second World War, All Hell Let Loose describes the course of events during the war, but focuses chiefly on human experience, which varied immensely from campaign to campaign, continent to continent. This is a study of the greatest and most terrible event in history, which shows its impact upon hundreds of millions of people around the world – soldiers, sailors and airmen British housewives and Indian peasants SS killers and the citizens of Leningrad, some of whom resorted to cannibalism during the city’s two-year siege Japanese suicide pilots and American carrier crews.

All hell let loose the world at war 1939 1945