The awful glee with which so many Germans went to war is revealed in a report from a young German pilot of the fun he had strafing "Ivans", and the reluctance of their opponents in the resigned, grumbling letters to wives and sweethearts. For the majority, the war meant a loss of whatever small control they exercised over their own fate. This truth is contained, most pathetically, in a letter written from the battle cruiser Hood by homesick, frightened, 17-year-old William Crawford to his mum, asking her if she could persuade the Admiralty to fix him up with a shore job. Nothing came of it and he went down with his ship, sunk by the Bismarck with almost all hands in May 1941. The sense of helplessness in the face of evil is encapsulated in the brilliant aperçu of an Austrian Jewess, Ruth Maier, who had fled from the Nazis to Norway, only for them to follow: "I think of the Germans more as a natural disaster than as a people."
Threaded through the personal accounts is a narrative which, by an impressive feat of organisation, manages to connect all the theatres of what was the closest the world has come to a truly global conflict. British and American interpretations of the war naturally emphasise their own forces' involvement and therefore focus on the periphery of events over the centre. Hastings makes it very plain that this was essentially a fight between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, two enemies of humanity locked in a struggle from which decency was utterly absent. One of the most eloquent passages is a simple recital of statistics: the Soviet Union suffered 65 per cent of all allied military deaths, the US and Britain 2 per cent each. Within the armed forces, nearly one in three Germans conscripted into the Wehrmacht died, against one in 20 British and Commonwealth combatants and one in 34 American servicemen.
Compared with the ruthlessness of the Russians, the Germans and the Japanese, the democracies' cautious style of waging war looks relatively benign, but with conflict come hard choices. Hastings does not neglect the blots on the allied record, prominent among them Churchill's refusal to divert resources to alleviate the Bengal famine in 1943 which caused a million deaths. In the end his verdict is a bleak one that rejects the romantic view of the conflict as a crusade of good against evil. The fruits of victory were sparse and perversely distributed, with the vanquished Germans reaping far greater benefits than the victorious Russians.
None of this will diminish the hold that, nearly 70 years after its end, the war still exerts on our imaginations. It is, perhaps, hardly surprising. It was, as Hastings says, the "greatest and most terrible event in world history", in which human beings touched the extremes of good and evil as well as enduring suffering and deprivation on a scale unimaginable to modern minds. As such, the story surely merits this constant sifting and retelling. For as this enthralling book shows, in the right hands, the study of the war — like the study of a sacred text — can generate an endless stream of new meanings and insights, illuminating in their turn the wider mysteries of existence.
