Inferno

The World at War, 1939-1945

By: Max Hastings

Narrated by: Ralph Cosham

From one of our finest military historians, a monumental work that shows us at once the truly global reach of World War II and its deeply personal consequences.

World War II involved tens of millions of soldiers and cost 60 million lives - an average of 27,000 a day. For 35 years, Max Hastings has researched and written about different aspects of the war. Now, for the first time, he gives us a magnificent, single-volume history of the entire war.

Through his strikingly detailed stories of everyday people - of soldiers, sailors, and airmen; British housewives and Indian peasants; SS killers and the citizens of Leningrad, some of whom resorted to cannibalism during the two-year siege; Japanese suicide pilots and American carrier crews - Hastings provides a singularly intimate portrait of the world at war. He simultaneously traces the major developments - Hitler’s refusal to retreat from the Soviet Union until it was too late; Stalin’s ruthlessness in using his greater population to wear down the German army; Churchill’s leadership in the dark days of 1940 and 1941; Roosevelt’s steady hand before and after the United States entered the war - and puts them in real human context.

Hastings also illuminates some of the darker and less explored regions under the war’s penumbra, including the conflict between the Soviet Union and Finland, during which the Finns fiercely and surprisingly resisted Stalin’s invading Red Army; and the Bengal famine in 1943 and 1944, when at least one million people died in what turned out to be, in Nehru’s words, “the final epitaph of British rule” in India.

Remarkably informed and wide-ranging, Inferno is both elegantly written and cogently argued. Above all, it is a new and essential understanding of one of the greatest and bloodiest events of the 20th century.

©2011 Max Hastings (P)2020 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“A new, original, necessary history, in many ways the crowning of a life’s work. A professional war correspondent who has personally witnessed armed conflict in Vietnam, the Falkland Islands and other danger zones, Hastings has a sober, unromantic and realistic view of battle that puts him into a different category from the armchair generals whose gung-ho, schoolboy attitude to war fills the pages of a great majority of military histories. He writes with grace, fluency and authority.... Inferno is superb.” (Richard J. Evans, The New York Times Book Review)

“If there is a contemporary British historian who is the chronicler of World War II, it would be Max Hastings.... [Inferno] is a true distillation of everything this historian has learned from a lifetime of scholarship - and more important, of real thought - on what he calls ‘the greatest and most terrible event in human history.’” (Martin Rubin, San Francisco Chronicle)

“Compellingly different...a panoramic social history that not only recounts the military action with admirable thoroughness, crispness and energy but also tells the story of the people who suffered in the war, combatants and civilians alike.” (Edward Kosner, The Wall Street Journal)

Detailed account of all theaters of the war

An excellent and detailed account of the entire war with a much appreciated focus on touching many of the less famous nations, battles, and other aspects of the war that paled in comparison to the battle of Stalingrad but which nevertheless were enormous on any typical scale. Hastings also supplies enough commentary to keep things interesting without turning the book from a work of history into an opinion piece. Well worth the listen for any student of WWII.

Virtuoso Performance of Master storyteller’s Work

Max Hastings comes highly recommended by Richard Cohen in his “Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past.” I chose this book based on Cohen’s recommendation of Hastings. What makes his WW II history unique is his telling the stories of people heretofore unheard from. He weaves these stories seamlessly into his own thoughtful interpretation of the conflict. I found myself captivated, shocked, disturbed, and amazed. One noteworthy example of lesser-known WW II history is his chapter on the battle for Budapest begun in December, 1944. Since the Battle of the Bulge was fought at the exact same time, this story has gone largely untold. But of the two battles, the Soviet siege of Budapest was far more important. Stalin needed to capture this city in the heart of Central Europe before the Yalta conference. As it turned out, Soviet success in the siege came the very day of the opening of the Yalta conference. Stalin had Churchill and Roosevelt in checkmate. The postwar control of what became the Warsaw Pact was now a fait accompli. Budapest was also significant because the Hungarian nationalist Arrow Cross Party, allied with the Nazis, carried out mass executions of Jews there, a continuation of the Holocaust.
Hastings gives us both specific new details and fresh interpretations of World War II, the most horrifically violent conflict in the history of the world.

A lot of fine social and ground-level observations

Well narrated. Sir Max always finds fascinating, diary -type narratives for his First and Second World War books. Good complement to other high politics and combat history books.

Well done broad coverage of WW2

Max Hastings does a fantastic job of managing not only to tell the general story of the worst war in human history in a single volume, but to also add the details of individual experiences from the highest leaders of great nations to the common person. I love the narration by Ralph Cosham, whose voice soothes me throughout the book.

Informative

I purchased this after finishing catastrophe 1914: Europe goes to war , and was generally impressed by the level of history covered.

Detailed yet vastly entertaining.

A brilliant job and must read for those who find WW2 fascinating. I highly recommend.

Excellent, as always

Excellent book. Max Hastings is always a superb. Highly recommended. I thought I knew quite a bit about the war, but he provided much new detail. Some of the detail almost too sad to listen to.

Gives a very personal view of the war.

The narrator does a wonderful job of telling a story about ww2. The writer gathered some informative and personal accounts of the war. Great book.

Excellent overall

I listened to this one right after the story of world war 2 by Donald e Miller and I can truly say wow. I knew quite a bit about world war 2 and I’m now astounded by how little I really did know, how much more vast and horrible this war truly was. This book covers many angles and details not covered by miller’s book and is probably slightly more thorough because, unlike millers, it does not glaze over the beginning of the war. But it does glaze over Pearl Harbor, really only mentioning it in passing, and is not very detailed on some of the major pacific battles and on the atomic bombs, all of which Millers book covers in detail. From reading inferno, you’d never know that the dropping of the second bomb was very nearly a disaster and that Nagasaki wasn’t even the primary target. In all honesty, I’d say both these books sandwiched together would be the perfect world war 2 book. In any case, I really got a lot out of it, hard to say I enjoyed it because some horrific details in this book are rightfully haunting me. I’d recommend it, and more than that I’d recommend both this one and the story of world war 2. The narrator was ok but he tends to run paragraphs together and I found it hard to realize when he would be talking about a totally different topic. The narrator to millers book was epic, much better. Sorry that I reviewed both basically, it’s hard not to.

Standing on the field

Brilliant perspective 👏 encourages further research on key causes and effects 👏 It's amazing seeing the current status of the country's today.