All Hell Let Loose: The World at War 1939-1945 [Hardcover]

I must confess I have read all of Mr Hastings past offerings concerning the Second World War, finding him to be consistently informative about the conflict that never ends - in publisher's eyes at least. In many ways a Hastings book is like your favourite grey cardigan, you slip it on, finding its feel both reassuring and comfy i.e you know what you will get. It is the same with this book, a general account of WW2 as seen by the grunt at the front or the person slaving away in a labour camp or factory. As ever, the usual suspects get a positive mention; the German army in retreat and Churchill as inspiring war leader. On the other hand, Mr Hastings 'controversial' views on the merits of the Australian armed forces also crop up again - a fact that will probably be picked up by some Aussie newspaper in the future.
Some real gems, however, are also to be found in this book, as Mr Hastings dips into aspects of the conflict often neglected in more precise histories of the war - for instance the partisan war that took place in Yugoslavia. Much of the book also concentrates on the Eastern Front struggle, correct in my view, given that 90% of German war deaths occurred in this theatre of war - a statistic that illustrates where the war was won and lost - although this does not diminish the sacrifices that other people made for freedom.
In short, most of the people who buy this will already be fans of Mr Hastings and thus will not be disappointed. To those who are not, I suggest this is a good starting point.

It is hard to find a narrative theme through a world war lasting for almost six years.

Weighing in at a huge 768 pages All Hell Let Loose certainly isn't a whistle stop tour through the conflict, and it doesn't dwell overlong on any particular areas.

The author himself in the forward says that he has deliberately steered clear of delving too deeply into the subjects of his previous books, so the fall of Berlin, the Overlord landings and the final days of Japan are barely commented on.

His researchers have dug up some interesting accounts, particularly from the Eastern front, and even long serving students of the second world war will find much new in the first person testimonies. This battlefield is firmly at the centre of the book - after all 90 per cent of the German fatalities occurred there and it is in Russia where the war was won and lost.

In a book of this scope one isn't really searching for a single revelation or argument. The conclusions - that the Russians would have won on their own, the Axis war effort was very incompetently run and by far and away the biggest allied contribution to victory was through America's industrial might - have been discussed in much greater depth elsewhere.

I felt that the biggest success of the book was how Hastings managed to convey the brutal indifference which characterised the Russian approach to victory - happily accepting enormous piles of their own dead with unimaginative tactics to eventually wear down the Wehrmacht.

The British don't come out overly well - our `finest hour' was having the courage, bolstered by the rhetoric and bulldog spirit of Winston Churchill, to stay in the war alone in 1940. Otherwise our performance in the Western Desert, the Far East and Italy was dull and plodding and characterised by poor commanders. The RAF and Royal Navy are hailed as by far the most successful services. Perhaps controversially he equates the allowing of millions of deaths in the Indian sub continent from starvation during the war to the treatment by the Germans of their conquered countries. The Germans allowed some to starve so their people would have food. The British did the same, and it is hard to argue with the logic.

Overall, I found All Hell Let loose to be an enjoyable read, and I was pleased, as a Hastings fan, that he didn't go over areas his pervious works covered in too much detail. A very solid history of the Second World War, and I raced through it in pretty quick time.

Do we really need another general history of World War II? In recent years we have seen new studies by Evan Mawdsley, Martin Gilbert and in particular Andrew Roberts excellent populist history "The Storm of War" to name but a few. The years 1939 to 1945 are a very crowded field for historians and yet there is always a warm welcome for an historian of the calibre of Sir Max Hastings, recent chronicler of Churchill as a wartime leader and political commentator. Hastings is a conservative historian but what is interesting about "All hell let loose - the World at War 1939-45" is that employs the approach of producing an history from below drawn from eyewitness accounts of events. Accounts which in turn demonstrate and confirm William Sherman's maxim "that war is all hell" since we see an overwhelming view of very brave participants who are nonetheless generally terrified, demoralized and often beaten into a fossilised torpor. One British solider reflected in a letter to his wife that `I am absolutely fed up with everything. The dirt and filth, the flies - I'm having a hideous time and I wonder why I'm alive'. Another British soldier William Chappell "never ceased to ache for the civilian world from which he had been torn. He missed his home and his friends and bemoaned the loss of his career. His feet hurt, he was `sick of khaki, and all the monotonous, slow, fiddle-de-dee of Army life.' The fatalistic will of Russian soldiers is particularly well described not least the experience of Private Ivanov, of the 70th Army, who wrote despairingly to his family. `I shall never see you again because death, terrible, ruthless and merciless, is going to cut short my young life. Where shall I find strength and courage to live through all this?'

Those who have read Hastings previously on World War II will detect the ongoing preoccupations which he has developed over many years that have gradually become historical orthodoxy. He maintains in all his works that the best troops throughout the course of hostilities were Germans who were nevertheless effectively outdone by the crazed ambitions of a totalitarian monster particularly in sheer lunatic ambition of the Eastern theatre. Even as the German Army swept all in front of it during Operation Barbarossa key Generals like Halder and Hoepner were unnervingly aware that a nation with an almost limitless supply of manpower was stirring. Thus the war was won and lost in Stalin's Russia which despite the unbelievable ineptitude of its own leader particularly in almost destroying the whole of his own officer corps in purges had the crucial element of numbers on its side. This fact was readily accepted by Churchill at the time which in turn and his relationship to "Uncle Joe" has recently been chronicled with great detail by another British historian David Reynolds. Perhaps the most brutal statistic in the whole book is the fact that 750,000 Russians were shot by their own comrades for cowardice, desertion or simply to maintain army discipline, as it turns out this exceeds the total number of British dead in the entire war. The brutality of the Soviet invasion has been captured in a range of books not least Anthony Beevor's epic "Stalingrad" and the central thesis of Hastings book is equally located in the Soviet Union with its "hierarchy of cruelty" elevated beyond all other conflicts.

That said other pivotal events are not skimped on. The sheer horror of the "Rape of Nanking" in 1937 is vividly captured with its terrifying litany of mass murder, genocide and war rape. The treatment of non combatants prefigured the latter outrages of the war and with estimates of nearly 200,000 Chinese killed by marauding Japanese soldiers. As such Hastings is right to see this as a kind of appalling racist overture to the main act. Unsurprisingly Hastings also uses more well worn sources like the great Eugene Sledges "With the old breed" his visceral account of the Pacific War as a primary source (see separate review). The sights and the smells of battle also infuse the book and the everyday acts of living are elevated into small horrors in their own right. As Hastings points out "Excretory processes became an obsession. In battlefield conditions, many never made it to a latrine. But as one soldier recalled: `No one said anything about how you smelt, because everyone smelled bad.'

At over 700 pages this is a long book and your reviewer deliberately avoided the Kindle edition because of this since there were pages of text that needed to be reread and referred to for continuity purposes. Hastings however has the gift of writing an often-complex story in clear and understandable prose. He also cares deeply about the participants in his history and that humanity and gift for narrative shines through this excellent book.