March 28, 2015

Finest Hour 127, Summer 2005

Page 42

By Rege Behe

Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944-1945, by Max Hastings. Knopf, 584 pp., $30, member price $24.


Histories of war are not only written by the victors; they are told predominately through the viewpoint of the statesmen, generals and leaders. Max Hastings’ Armageddon includes those, but also interviews 170 contemporary witnesses described as “ordinary human beings to whom extraordinary things happened.”

2024 International Churchill Conference

Join us for the 41st International Churchill Conference. London | October 2024
More

Hastings, the award-winning author of Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy, 1944, thinks the stories of soldiers in the trenches and citizens affected by war helped him develop a deeper respect for the men and women whom journalist Tom Brokaw called “The Greatest Generation.”

“We tend to look at the world in which we’re living today and to see everything in terms of what’s going on around us,” Hastings says from his home outside London. “You often hear people saying today we live in a terrible world, we have the threat of international terrorism and al-Qaida and 9/11. I personally believe each generation has to face different challenges, but when you see what our parents and grandparents who lived through the Second World War went through, it helps us to understand, for all our problems today, we’re a fantastically privileged and pampered generation.”

Hastings has been interviewing people about their experiences during World War II for twenty-five years. He remains amazed by the “summits of courage” some attained and the “depths of baseness” others plumbed. Particularly striking in Armageddon is the author’s portrayal of the difference in the conflicts between the Western and Eastern fronts. While it is folly to compare the relative evils of combat, Hastings says, the animosity between Russia and Germany led to scenes of carnage and abuse that surpassed the conflicts of the Western front:

“It sounds ridiculous to say people in Northwest Europe had an easy time. They certainly didn’t. But they had an awful lot easier time than the Russians and Germans in the East. An lot of Germans who were posted in the Western Front, after serving in the East, found it less rough.”

American and British soldiers had radically different views of the German army from their Russian counterparts, Hastings continues: “A lot of Americans, and British too, said they didn’t feel any great hatred for the Germans until the revelations of the concentration camps came through. There was much more American hatred towards the Japanese—stemming, of course, from Pearl Harbor— than there was towards the Germans.”

From interviews he conducted, Hastings discovered there was a surprising degree of mercy among the combatants in the West. But in the East, “it was impossible to come across any case where anybody showed mercy. These were two huge, terrible tyrannies engaged in a terrible struggle.”

One of the points of emphasis in Armageddon is the popular contention that there were missed opportunities to end the war after it seemed the Allied forces were in control during August, 1944. Instead of pressing their attack, there was an attitude that was, if not leisurely, decidedly less than urgent among the Allies. By then, however, it was far too late to prevent Russian forces from asserting their dominance in the East; a rift between President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill illustrated the Allies’ divided state:

“From 1944 onward, Churchill became fed up with Roosevelt because he felt the Nazi tyranny in Eastern Europe was going to be supplanted by the Soviet tyranny,” Hastings says.

“The truth was that the Russians were getting there first. If we were going to prevent the Soviets from taking over Eastern Europe and imposing their own terrible tyranny, the Western allies would have to have invaded Normandy much sooner.”

The United States adopted a “very altruistic attitude” toward its involvement in World War II. Henry Kissinger, who served as staff sergeant in the U.S. Army, told Hastings that America was determined to be one of the first nations in the history of war to have no territorial objectives. “America was determined to bring down the Nazi tyranny and not demand anything for itself, and this was very noble,” Hastings believes. “But it also proved quite naive, when you’re up against the Russians, who were pursuing absolutely ruthless territorial objectives.”

Hastings also contends that the U.S. made a conscious decision to win World War II “by using its superior industrial and technological powers, creating a smaller army than any of the other combatants.” By comparison, Russia committed more troops, and suffered more casualties. “There was a reluctance, even as the Cold War got going, to face up to how far the Western allies had morally compromised the cause of freedom by depending on the Soviets, who were in their way as ghastly as the Nazis, to do a lot of the fighting for us. Without the Russians, we might have won, but it would have taken a terribly long time, because they were prepared to go at it with a savagery the Western democracies couldn’t.”


Mr. Behe is a book reviewer for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, by whose kind courtesy this review is reprinted.

A tribute, join us

#thinkchurchill

Subscribe

WANT MORE?

Get the Churchill Bulletin delivered to your inbox once a month.