A review by anti_formalist12
Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945 by Max Hastings

5.0

Any history of World War Two is a problem, and this one more than most. Hastings makes battles I had never heard of sound as if they were one of the circles of hell. The most powerful part of this book is how uniquely human he makes the war feel. It wasn't a war fought by patriots and soldiers of freedom on one side and monsters and the forces of evil on the other. Hastings devotes little time to the Holocaust, an unforgivable crime, if Hastings had not already written books that give much greater focus to the Holocaust. But he wants to make you feel what the average soldier felt, what the wife at home wrote to her husband at the front. What did the people who had to fight the Second World War think about having to fight it. Mercifully, Hastings does not devote much time to the troop movements and dispositions. What he seizes on is a state of mind, one of blood, shit, fear, and depression. It feels more real than any other history book I have ever read.