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bookwormmichelle 's review for:
Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945
by Max Hastings
This book is huge, overwhelming, stuffed full of 658 pages of facts, and totally absorbing. It took me over a week to read it, but I'm glad I did. I am astonished at how much I did not know about WWII. I thought I was pretty widely read in the area for an American housewife. :-) But I discovered things constantly that I had NO IDEA about. 2 or 3 million Bengals starved to death in India because no one would send them food supplies to end a famine? Had NO idea. The war in northern Africa was more publicity-propaganda stunt than strategic advantage? Had not a clue. We really didn't need to invade Okinawa, the Philippines or Japan at all? Wow. And I knew that the Eastern Front was monumental in size to anything that happened in Western Europe. Really I did. I just had no idea of the magnitude, the scope of Russian suffering, the paltry insignificance of anything contributed by Americans. The author seems very middle-of-the-road politically, sometimes excoriating Roosevelt and Churchill for cynicism and manipulation but in all believing the "standard story" that the war had to be fought, the US had to be involved, and it's a good thing we did it. (He blew off with one dismissive sentence any idea that Roosevelt manipulated us into Pearl Harbor.) But in all I enjoyed this very much; I especially appreciated the quotes from real people of nearly every place and part of the war telling about their experiences. If someone wants an overview of the entire huge war, this would seem to me to be a pretty good place to start.