Max Hastings - Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright 2011 by Max Hastings
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York
www.aaknopf.com

Originally published in Great Britain as All Hell Let Loose by HarperPress, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, London.

Knopf, Borzoi Books and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hastings, Max.
Inferno : the world at war, 19391945 / by Max Hastings.
p. cm.
Originally published: London : HarperPress, 2010.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN: 978-0-307-95718-4
1. World War, 19391945. I. Title.
D743.H364 2011
940.54dc22 2011013890

Jacket image: U.S. Marines blowing up cave connected to Japanese blockhouse on Iwo Jima, December 31, 1944, by W. Eugene Smith/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images
Jacket design by Jason Booher

v3.1

To Michael Sissons,

for thirty years a princely agent,

counsellor and friend

Poles catch a rst glimpse of the Luftwaffe, September 1939. (Hulton Deutsch Collection/CORBIS)

SS, police and ethnic German auxiliaries conducting a search at Bydgoszcz in Poland, September 1939. (Instytut Pamieci Narodowej/United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

Finnish ghost soldiers, December 1939. (Keystone/Getty Images)

A Russian soldier frozen in death. Finland, March 1940. (Keystone/Getty Images)

German troops ghting near Haugsbygd, Norway, April 1940. (akg-images/Ullstein Bild)

Dunkirk evacuated, MayJune 1940. (IAM/akg-images)

German troops enter Paris, 14 June 1940. (U.S. National Archives &Records Administration, Washington, D.C.: 208-PP-10A-3)

Coventry after an air raid, November 1940. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

British artillery in action in the North African desert, January 1943. (Mirrorpix)

Frenchwoman and German ofcial in occupied France, c. 1943. (Paul Almasy/akg-images)

Mass execution of Russian Jews by SS Einsatzgruppen D, c. 1942. (Library of Congress, Washington D.C.)

An American family celebrates Thanksgiving, November 1942. (Bettmann/CORBIS)

Starving man with bread ration in Leningrad, 194142. (akg-images)

Japanese troops on Bataan, c. 1942. (U.S. National Archives & Records Administration, Washington D.C.)

Indian refugees escaping from Burma, January 1942. (George Rodger/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

American prisoners in the Philippines, May 1942. (U.S. National Archives & Records Administration, Washington, D.C.: 127-N-114541)

Crew abandoning USS Lexington, Battle of the Coral Sea, May 1942. (AP Photo/Press Association)

Japanese soldiers killed on Guadalcanal, August 1942. (AP Photo/Press Association)

Australian troops carrying a wounded comrade to a dressing station on Papua New Guinea, December 1943. (AP Photo/Press Association)

HMS Vansittart on convoy escort duty in the Arctic, February 1943. (AP Photo/Press Association)

Survivors of a U-boat sunk in the North Atlantic, April 1943. (Photo by Jack January/USCG Historians Ofce)

WRENS wheeling a torpedo alongside a submarine at Portsmouth, September 1943. (Imperial War Museum A 19471)

Chinese foot soldiers, August 1945. (Jack Wilkes/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

German grenadier during the retreat from the Soviet Union, 194344. (Keystone/Getty Images)

The Soviet Union, 1943. ( The Russian State Documentary Film and Photo Archive at Krasnogorsk [RGAKFD]/N. Asnina)

Women riveters in an American dockyard, 1942. (CORBIS)

Twelve-year-old mill operator at the Perm Engine-Building Works, Soviet Union, 1943. (ITAR-TASS)

The Red Army advances. ( The Russian State Documentary Film and Photo Archive at Krasnogorsk [RGAKFD]/Minkevich collection)

GI feeding an orphan in Italy, c. 1944. (U.S. National Archives & Records Administration, Washington, D.C.: 208-AA-240C-3)

Burial at sea for ofcers and men of USS Intrepid, Leyte Gulf, November 1944. (U.S. National Archives & Records Administration, Washington, D.C.: 80-G-468912)

Pilot escaping the cockpit of a burning Hellcat ghter, September 1944. (AP Photo/U.S. Navy/Press Association)

A British bomber crew returns from a raid on Germany.

A collaborator having her head shaved in a town near Paris, c. 1944. (U.S. National Archives & Records Administration, Washington, D.C.: 111-SC-193318)

Japanese family hiding in a cave on Saipan, June 1944. (U.S. Marine Corps/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

British soldier in Burma, November 1944. (Imperial War Museum SE 564)

Medics removing a wounded U.S. soldier from the battleeld near Brest, Normandy, August 1944. (AP Photo/Press Association)

Paratrooper preparing for the assault on Arnhem, September 1944. (Airborne Assault Museum)

Dutch child during the Hongerwinter of 194445. ( Marius Meijboom/Nederlands Fotomuseum)

Two teenage German soldiers captured on the Rhine, March 1945. (Mirrorpix)

Russian artillery on the OderNeisse front, April 1945.

U.S. troops at Ohrdruf concentration camp, April 1945. (AP Photo/Byron H. Rollins/Press Association)

U.S. Marines on Iwo Jima, March 1945. (AP Photo/U.S. Marine Corps/Press Association)

A mother and child among the ruins of Hiroshima. (Alfred Eisenstadt/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

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 clich: 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 60 million 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.