Another War Book

Review of All Hell Let Loose: The World At War 1939 - 1945

by Max Hastings

Harper Press, 2011

My well-worn copy of this book

I have long been fascinated with why human beings of one nation make war on another. Another lifelong preoccupation has been what motivates some of our kind to dominate and subjugate others. As individuals we are complex creatures, and as groups or nations we are equally complicated, if not more so.  The intertwining evils of hate and its concomitant violent consequences have cast ominous shadows over human cultures since the dawn of civilisation.  Max Hastings' 750 page tome is an amazingly comprehensive account of the Second World War that is based chiefly on thousands of individual accounts from all nations involved in that dreadful cataclysm that befell humankind between the years 1939 and 1945. In short, what we get in Hastings' brilliant and comprehensive tome is a "worm's eye" of the greatest tragedy that befell humankind in the twentieth century - perhaps the greatest tragedy ever to befall the human species - with occasional "bird's eye" commentary and reflection by the learned and well-informed author. 

Hastings employs a technique that has made many of his previous war books - like Bomber Command, The Battle of Britain, Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy and many others - very successful, namely that of a "bottom-up" testimony accompanied by an astute "top-down" analysis.  This technique engages the reader both at gut (emotions) and head (intellect) levels, thereby making for a riveting read.

The most spectacularly moving aspect of All Hell Let Loose for this reader is Hastings' brilliant use of statistics, judiciously scattered throughout the moving evidence from individual testimonies and his astute military commentary and analysis.  Let me list here some of the gripping statistics of which the author informs us. For instance, take these examples: About one German in 12 died, and one in four soldiers from the Japanese and Russian armies.  The Second World War resulted in some sixty million dead, a similar number displaced, and hundreds upon hundreds of cities obliterated. Amazingly, some 300,000 Russian soldiers were shot by their own commanders during the war, more than the entire death toll of British soldiers in Europe.  Further, take this confounding statistic and reflect on it: the city of Leningrad alone lost more people than the British and American armies combined. Or, reflect for some moments on the fact that 632,253 people died during the siege of Leningrad, and that most of this number passed away through starvation. Another interesting statistic to contemplate is that 9 out of every 10 German soldiers who perished did so fighting the Soviets, or that a quarter of all Allied casualties were Chinese. However, perhaps the most amazing and shockingly poignant statistic is this strange one: As all of the cats in Leningrad had been eaten during the siege, and as there were none left to combat the plague of rats that were feasting off the carcasses of the dead, an entire trainload of cats had to be sent to the city in 1943 for public health purposes.

Here, I would like to give the reader of this review a taste of the kind of wonderful use Hastings makes of the personal diaries of people on the ground as WW II progressed. One of the opening diary entries quoted is that of a vanquished Polish army officer during the fall of Poland who reports on the shooting dead by a Luftwaffe pilot of a teacher and her class of children whom she was trying to lead to safety: "Suddenly, there was the roar of an aeroplane.  The pilot circled, descending to a height of fifty metres.  As he dropped his bombs ad fired his machine guns, the children scattered like sparrows.  The aeroplane disappeared as quickly as it had come, but on the field some crumpled and lifeless bundles of bright clothing remained.  The nature of the new war was already clear." (quoted p. 7) One can only state that such a judicious selection of quotation is the hallmark of this book. It is in the aptness of quotation that the starkness of war is depicted and it is in the astuteness of commentary that the success of this book lies for this reader.  Take the following quotation from General Adrian Carton de Wiart, head of the British mission in Poland in 1939: "I saw the very face of war change - its glory shorn, no longer the soldier setting forth into battle, but the women and children being buried under it." (p. 7) 

A Jew on the streets of Lodz, very shortly after the occupation of Poland by Germany in 1939 reports the following in his diary: "I encountered chaos in the streets. People were running wildly in every direction.  Somebody stopped and grabbed me by the sleeve.  "Hide! Hide!" he shrieked, "The Germans are capturing Jews at gunpoint and taking them away in trucks." (p. 23) 

Again, take this wonderfully apt, but deeply moving diary entry by a young British pilot, David Crook, fighting during the Battle of Britain, who is here reflecting on how strange he finds it to enter the room he shared with his roommate who had failed to return to base from their last sortie: "I could not get out of my mind the thought of Peter with whom we had been talking and laughing that day.  Now he was lying in the cockpit of his wrecked spitfire at the bottom of the English channel." (p. 86)

Moreover, there were, of course, inevitable suicides by despairing and defeated troops.  Here is the diary entry of a New Zealand soldier after the fall of Greece: "Everything was dead quiet.  You could have heard a pin drop.  Every man was left to his own thoughts, that is, if they could think.  Now and again you would hear a shot ring out further down the waadi - some poor chap was taking his own life.  Then later on, I heard my first German words; "Alle man raus, schnell, schnell!" and I looked up and saw him standing there, rifle at the ready. We were marched back to Canaea like a mob of sheep." (p. 123)

I have given the reader enough examples of Hastings' judicious use of quotations from diary entries.  Suffice it to say that thereby he manages to communicate a veritable galaxy of experiences and reflections of real people on the dreadful suffering that all wars bring in their wake.  The bitter beauty of this work is that we meet the people behind the statistics and are brought imaginatively as willing listeners into their company.  The whole tome is filled with small insignificant stories in the context of the vast destruction of war like that of the Finnish woman who left matches and kindling for the guards who came to burn her house down or the sad story of the officers who had to deliver the awful news to the American parents of the five Sullivan brothers who perished when their ship was sunk or the strange bitter beauty of the thought of the Jewish couple who danced in the ruins of the sports club in Lodz, knowing that it was the last time they would ever see one another.

Journalist, war correspondent and historian Max Hastings

This history of the Second World War lives up to its apt title.  Within this tome we do get a taste of "all hell let loose" and are left moved and not a little disturbed, as well we should be, as armchair witnesses of the horrors of the worst war to mar the history of our kind. Hastings brings us a plethora of voices, indeed often small and insignificant voices, from all over the world, from all combatants and innocent civilians from every nation involved in that dreadful holocaust of war and he weaves or, dare I say it, orchestrates those voices into an all-encompassing powerful symphony-like narrative that we as readers are simply swept along in its tide. Hastings' tome leaves this reader exhausted at such horrible and wanton destruction of millions of little lives and yet burning with the conviction that we can never let such a universal holocaust occur ever again.  Or am I only a dreamer?

In short, this book is a brilliant and sobering read that calls us to work with conviction for justice for all humans.  After all, justice is surely the only road to peace.

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