Inferno

Review by Dennis Showalter

Max Hastings has for years successfully and appropriately blurred the line between journalist and historian. His latest work exemplifies that approach. It is best understood not as a history of World War II in the conventional sense, but as the conflict’s story. Hastings explores the war as a human experience, bringing together material from around the world to describe experiences that in some cases were universal, in others as variegated as the circumstances that generated them.

In less expert hands the result might have been a disconnected series of anecdotes and vignettes, an exercise in cultural anthropology. But with a quarter-century’s experience and more than 20 books behind him, Hastings has produced a work best understood as a complement to Gerhard Weinberg’s A World at War. Inferno offers a solidly unobtrusive chronological framework for an empathetically-chosen spectrum of personal experiences derived from a vast base of interviews, correspondence and published material.

That data base is complemented and completed by Hastings’ own asides, opinions and conclusions on everything from the turning point in the Russo-German War (December 1941, because Russia remained undefeated), through the wartime erosion of Britain’s Indian empire, to describing the Grand Alliance as a grand charade and evaluating the abilities of commanders from Mark Clark to Erich von Manstein. He discusses Japanese biological warfare, and the “extraordinary cynicism” with which the U.S. amnestied its senior officer in return for information that proved worthless. He presents Anglo-American cryptanalysis as a case study in mobilizing civilian talent in a way the Axis refused to match. He comments on weapons systems from Spitfires to Sten guns.

It is all worthwhile, and if Hastings’ individual positions can be challenged, they cannot be casually dismissed. The book’s core and essence, however, is its human dimension. Hastings pays attention to aircrew selection and training as well as aerial operations. He balances “the exhilaration of an existence in the high blue sky” with “…a destiny as a bloody jam of compressed flesh and bones, or surmounting a petrol-fuelled funeral pyre." He succeeds in showing both as integral aspects of the airman’s experience.

When he turns to ground fighting, Hastings concentrates on the effects of stress, terror and randomness. Experience exacerbated fear rather than diminishing it. Fear and filth went hand in hand. Everybody stank. Loss of bowel and bladder control was normative. One staff under bombardment took shelter beneath map tables and broke into group song. In Normandy, British tankers and infantry considered each other mutually expendable. On the German side phone linemen were often the first to die as they sought to restore communications vital in an army lacking field radios.

And the consequences? Victimhood and bitterness, albeit in varying degrees, were universal outside the U.S. So were desires for dramatic social and political changes. The actual result was a series of compromises—and a world saved from the much worse fate of an Axis triumph. Not perfect, not even a “good war”—but Hastings’ approach shows it was good enough in an imperfect world.