The book ranges across a vast canvas, from the agony of Poland amid the September 1939 invasion, to the 1943 Bengal famine, in which at least a million people died under British rule – and British neglect. He argues that, while Hitler’s army often fought its battles brilliantly well, the Nazis conducted their war effort with ‘stunning incompetence.’ He suggests the Royal Navy and US Navy were their countries’ outstanding fighting services, while the industrial contribution of the United States was much more important to Allied victory than that of the US Army. Hastings emphasises the Russian front, where more than ninety percent of all German soldiers who perished, met their fate. Reflecting Max Hastings’ thirty-five years of research on the Second World War, All Hell Let Loose describes the course of events during the war, but focuses chiefly on human experience, which varied immensely from campaign to campaign, continent to continent. This is a study of the greatest and most terrible event in history, which shows its impact upon hundreds of millions of people around the world – soldiers, sailors and airmen British housewives and Indian peasants SS killers and the citizens of Leningrad, some of whom resorted to cannibalism during the city’s two-year siege Japanese suicide pilots and American carrier crews.
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