The terrible beauty of reading Max Hastings.

[NNadir]

Having just completed Ian Toll's Pacific War Trilogy, on my reading list this week is Max Hastings' Inferno: The World At War 1939-1945.

There is, in my opinion, no historian of war, quite like Hastings, no one who writes of the horror, the criminality of war with equal condemnation of all participants, mixed with resigned but muted praise for those who had war forced on them and somehow prevailed.

His prose, dryly factual, makes you want to weep.

I have only read the introduction to Inferno, but I know I'm in for it. This is not, like his other books, say on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Nemesis, The Battle for Japan, 1944-1945, a military history but is an effort to see the war from beneath, from the perspective of the suffers "on the ground."

Excerpts of the introduction:

...This book sustains a chronological framework and seeks to establish and reflect upon the "big picture," the context of events: the reader should gain a broad sense of what happened to the world between 1939 and 1945. But its principal purpose is to illuminate the conflict's significance for a host of ordinary people of many societies, both active and passive partcipants - though the distinction is often blurred. Was, for example, a Hamburg woman who ardently supported Hitler, but perished in the July 1943 firestorm gnerated by Allied bombing, an accomplice to Nazi war guilt or the innocent victim of an atrocity?...

...and...

...The plight of the Jewish people under Nazi occupation loomed relatively smlal in the wartime perceptions of Churchill and Roosevelt, and less surprisingly in that of Stalin. About one-seventh of all fatal victims of Nazism and almost one-tenth of all wartime dead, ultimately proved to have been Jews. But at the time their persecution was viewed by the Allies merely as one fragment of the collateral damage caused by Hitler, as indeed, the Russians still see the Holocaust today. The limited attention paid to the Jewish predicament by the wartime Allies was a source of frustration and anger to informed coreligionists at the time, and has prompted indignation since. But it is important to recognise that between 1939 and 1945 the Allied nations saw the struggle overwhelmingly in terms of the threat posed by the Axis to their own interests, though Churchill defined these in generous and noble terms...

...and...

...It would have seemed monstrous to a British or American solider facing a mortar barrage, with his comrades dying around him, to be told that the Russian casualties were many times greater. It would have been insulting to invite a hungry Frenchman, or even an English housewife weary of the monotony of rations, to consider that in besieged Leningrad starving people were eating one another, while in West Bengal they were selling their daughters...

...and...

In Britain and American, confidence that our parents and grandparents were fighting "the good war" is so deeply ingrained that we often forget that people in many countries adopted more equivocal attitudes: colonial subjects, and above all India's 400 million, saw little merit in the defeat of the Axis if they continued to endure British suzerainty...

Hastings has a very different perspective, sees through the glorified bullshit to see war as it is.

...a tough, horrible, but strangely compelling and necessary read...