I’ve read several histories of World War II. But Max Hastings’ Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945 goes to the top of my list of Best WWII Histories. Hastings astonished me with his control over the complicated narrative: the invasion of Poland, the blitzkrieg of France, the Japanese invasion of China and Southern Asia, Pearl Harbor, the Battle of Britain, the invasion of the Soviet Union, etc. Hastings manages to keep the narrative moving, never getting bogged down in detail, and also manages to put a face on the war by quoting from journals and memoirs. I had no idea Japan used biological weapons in China. Hastings also critiques the generals on all sides of the conflict showing the gaffs and the brilliant strategic strokes. I can’t recommend Inferno more highly. GRADE:A+
I took a course on the war in the nineties but it’s time for a refresher once I am done with the Shakespeare book.
You’ll find INFERNO a fascinating, but draining book, Patti. War is so stupid.
George, it is a fascinating book, and you might also enjoy his ARMAGEDDON, a chronicle of the last year of the war in Europe, just as much. (And RETRIBUTION, about the climax of the war in Asia, is also very good.)
Imperial Japan committed numerous and appalling atrocities in China and elsewhere.
I’ll be reading more of Max Hastings’ books in the future, Drongo. But right now, I need a break from slaughter and atrocities.
I just started listening to the audio version of this book. Sad, tragic and still fascinating.
Wow! The audio book version of INFERNO has to be about 20 hours of listening, Jim! The book weighs in at over 700+ pages.
Yes, George, war is stupid, but that doesn’t seem to keep most nations from participating in it, including the U.S. We need to pull out of Afghanistan, and oh my how we could use that money here at home for health and education!
This is a book I’ll consider, but it’s long! How does it compare to The rise and Fall f the Third Reich?
THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH is more reporting, Rick. In INFERNO, Max Hasting’s gives you an overview of the entire war. It’s a masterful job!
So he went into Unit 731? Did he also mention all the woman that the Japanese kidnapped and forced into prostitution for their troops?
They went into a lot of this stuff back when the History Channel still had history programming . . .
Yes, Hastings documents the raping of women everywhere in WWII, Stan. His description of the Russian invasion of Berlin is particularly dire.
There’s even an exploitation film, of a particularly brutal sort, made by Chinese filmmakers, called in English usually something like THE MAN BEHIND THE SUN, which details also the atrocities of the Japanese invaders, including biological warfare.
Nobody should be particularly proud of World War II, something that THE WORLD AT WAR made abundantly clear when I was young. But the Japanese and the Germans did their level best to make even the Stalinist Russians and the Fascist Italians, and our A-bomb hawks and Dresden firebombers, look less vicious by comparison.
And that was the closest thing to a “good” war we’ve had. And the worst so far. Fun for everyone.
Max Hasting’s estimates 27,000 people died each day from October 1939 to August 1945 in WWII, Todd. WWII may have been a “good” war, but the cost in lives and material was incredible.