All Hell Let Loose by Max Hastings - review

All Hell Let Loose. The World at War 1939-1945

The farther the Second World War recedes into history, the more evident it becomes that it was the central and defining episode of the 20th century. The unfinished business of the First World War and ushering in the Cold War, this most terrible of conflicts, costing more than 55 million lives and with unprecedented genocide at its centre, gave decisive shape to the bloodiest century in history. Though the Second World War has been the subject of immense historical research, Max Hastings here demonstrates how much there is still to know. Using the techniques that served him so well in his earlier books on various aspects of the war, he now offers a fast-moving, highly readable survey of the entire war, in all its phases and on all fronts, in under 700 pages.

He makes clear that Britain, after courageously defying Hitler in the anxious months of 1940-41, played a starkly diminished role in the defeat of both Germany and Japan as the war proceeded. The Red Army bore the brunt of the war against Hitler, even after D-Day, with horrendous losses. Hastings emphasises the brutality of the Stalinist regime with its ruthless contempt for human life, also of its own soldiers, which sustained the fight. He points to the siege of Leningrad as an indicator to the ability of the Soviet Union to prevail. "It is unthinkable," he pithily remarks, "that British people would have eaten each other rather than surrender London or Birmingham - or would have been obliged by their generals and politicians to hold out at such a cost."

The immense productive resources as well as the fighting power of the US increasingly proved decisive, both in Europe and in the defeat of Japan in the Far East. Germany and Japan simply lacked the economic capacity to sustain the war against such powerful enemies once their run of easy triumphs had come to an end. In Germany's case, as some Nazi leaders recognised, the writing was already on the wall in December 1941 with the defeat before Moscow and America's entry into the war. In the Far East, the Battle of Midway in June 1942 - of which Hastings provides one of his many concise but absorbing descriptions - broke the back of Japanese power.

Hastings brings out both the contours of the horrific war on the eastern front and also of the terrible struggle against the Japanese. While upholding the civilised values that underpinned the war of the western Allies, he castigates the British treatment of the people of their colonies, vividly describing the appalling 1943-44 Bengal famine and highlighting Churchill's "brutal insensitivity which left an irreparable scar on Anglo-Indian relations". Hastings combines a mastery of the military events with invariably sound judgment and a sharp eye for unusual telling detail. And he makes very good use of little-known statistics, pointing out for example how few, not how many, Atlantic convoys were attacked by U-boats, which were far too small in number to win the war for Hitler.

Above all, this is the story of the war as experienced by ordinary men and women. Hastings draws on eye-witness accounts and anecdotes from soldiers of all armies to show graphically what the war was like for the ordinary people who fought it, and, overwhelmingly, how terrible it was for the combatants. While many of the frontline commanders of each of the belligerent powers come in for some harsh treatment for their ineptitude or bungling, the valour, heroism and, above all, the extraordinary stoicism of their troops amid scarcely imaginable pain, suffering and losses are repeatedly highlighted. This is military history at its most gripping. Of all Max Hastings's valuable books, this is possibly his best - a veritable tour de force.

Ian Kershaw is the author of The End: Hitler's Germany 1944-45