Max Hastings Two-Book Collection: All Hell Let Loose and Catastrophe
A two-book collection of Max Hastings’ bestselling works about the 20th century’s most terrible global conflicts.‘Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914’: In this centenary year, Hastings’ thrilling and also deeply moving account seeks to explain both how Europe plunged into what was then called ‘The Great War’, what befell the millions of people of many nations caught up in the first months on the battlefield and as civilian victims.‘All Hell Let Loose: The World at War 1939-1945’: This is ‘everyman’s story’ of 1939-45 from a host of viewpoints across the world- British fighter pilots and Russians tanker crew, Chinese peasants and French housewives, American naval gunners and Italian partisans. Here, with an extraordinary blend of top-down and bottom-up testimony is Hastings’s acclaimed answer to the question ‘what was World War II like?’
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Max Hastings Two-Book Collection:
All Hell Let Loose
Catastrophe
Contents
Max Hastings
All Hell Let Loose
The World at War 1939–45
Dedication
TO MICHAEL SISSONS,
for thirty years a princely agent,
counsellor and friend
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
List of Maps
Introduction
1 Poland Betrayed
2 No Peace, Little War
3 Blitzkriegs in the West
1 Norway
2 The Fall of France
4 Britain Alone
5 The Mediterranean
1 Mussolini Gambles
2 A Greek Tragedy
3 Sandstorms
6 Barbarossa
7 Moscow Saved, Leningrad Starved
8 America Embattled
9 Japan’s Season of Triumph
1 ‘I Suppose you’ll Shove the Little Men Off’
2 The ‘White Route’ from Burma
10 Swings of Fortune
1 Bataan
2 The Coral Sea and Midway
3 Guadalcanal and New Guinea
11 The British at Sea
1 The Atlantic
2 Arctic Convoys
3 The Ordeal of Pedestal
12 The Furnace: Russia in 1942
13 Living with War
1 Warriors
2 Home Fronts
3 A Woman’s Place
14 Out of Africa
15 The Bear Turns: Russia in 1943
16 Divided Empires
1 Whose Liberty?
2 The Raj: Unfinest hour
17 Asian Fronts
1 China
2 Jungle-Bashing and Island-Hopping
18 Italy: High Hopes, Sour Fruits
1 Sicily
2 The Road to Rome
3 Yugoslavia
19 War in the Sky
1 Bombers
2 Targets
20 Victims
1 Masters and Slaves
2 Killing Jews
21 Europe Becomes a Battlefield
22 Japan: Defying Fate
23 Germany Besieged
24 The Fall of the Third Reich
1 Budapest: In the Eye of the Storm
2 Eisenhower’s Advance to the Elbe
3 Berlin: The Last Battle
25 Japan Prostrate
26 Victors and Vanquished
Picture Section
Notes and References
Bibliography
Searchable Terms
Acknowledgements
Maps
The Last Phase of the 1940 French Campaign
The German Winter Offensives 1941
The Russians Encircle Hitler’s Sixth Army
The 1942–43 Advance of Eighth Army
The Russians Exploit Victory at Kursk
Russian Advances Across Ukraine
The Allied Breakout from Normandy
The 1944 Allied Advances on Germany
Introduction
This is a book chiefly about human experience. Men and women from scores of nations struggled to find words to describe what happened to them in the Second World War, which transcended anything they had ever known. Many resorted to a cliché: ‘All hell broke loose.’ Because the phrase is commonplace in eyewitness descriptions of battles, air raids, massacres and ship sinkings, later generations are tempted to shrug at its banality. Yet in an important sense the words capture the essence of what the struggle meant to hundreds of millions of people, plucked from peaceful, ordered existences to face ordeals that in many cases lasted for years, and for at least sixty millions were terminated by death. An average of 27,000 people perished each day between September 1939 and August 1945 as a consequence of the global conflict. Some survivors found that the manner in which they had conducted themselves during the struggle defined their standing in their societies for the rest of their lives, for good or ill. Successful warriors retained a lustre which enabled some to prosper in government or commerce. Conversely, at the bar of a London club thirty years after the war, a Guards veteran murmured about a prominent Conservative statesman: ‘Not a bad fellow, Smith. Such a pity he ran away in the war.’ A Dutch girl, growing up in the 1950s, found that her parents categorised each of their neighbours in accordance with how they had behaved during the German occupation of Holland.
British and American infantrymen were appalled by their experiences in the 1944–45 north-west Europe campaign, which lasted eleven months. But Russians and Germans fought each other continuously for almost four years in far worse conditions, and with vastly heavier casualties.>* Some nations which played only a marginal military role lost many more people than the Western Allies: China’s ordeal at Japanese hands between 1937 and 1945 cost at least fifteen million lives; Yugoslavia, where civil war was overlaid on Axis occupation, lost more than a million dead. Many people witnessed spectacles comparable with Renaissance painters’ conception of the inferno to which the damned were consigned: human beings torn to fragments of flesh and bone; cities blasted into rubble; ordered communities sundered into dispersed human particles. Almost everything which civilised peoples take for granted in time of peace was swept aside, above all the expectation of being protected from violence.
It is impossible to detail within a single volume the vastness of the war, the largest event in human history. I have already described aspects of it in eight books, most significantly Bomber Command, Overlord, Armageddon, Nemesis and Finest Years. While any work such as this should be self-contained, I have striven to avoid repetition of either anecdotage or analysis of large issues. For instance, having devoted an entire chapter of Nemesis to the 1945 dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it seems fruitless to revisit my own arguments. 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 participants – though the distinction is often blurred. Was, for example, a Hamburg woman who ardently supported Hitler, but perished in the July 1943 firestorm generated by Allied bombing, an accomplice to Nazi war guilt, or the innocent victim of an atrocity?
