OVER THE last 12 months or so, the number of books available on our website has grown to 5.5 million. I say this because it underlines how drastically the whole business of bookselling has changed with the now not so new revolution in technology.
It is curious that among that vast stock of books, one or two books should emerge heads and shoulders above the rest as bestsellers, bringing us as individual booksellers down reading tracks we would otherwise never have considered.
Most of these bestsellers last a week or two but when a book consistently sells in significant daily amounts over a period of up to two months and since then in more modest numbers, and that orders for them should come from all over the world, then it is impossible not to pick it up and look at it more closely.
From the beginning of October last right up to Christmas, Max Hastings’s All Hell Let Loose The World At War 1939-1945 sold in considerable numbers and is still going out the door on a daily basis. It was somewhat inevitable that I would, at some stage, peer inside its covers. It was an experience, that as a certain Belgian detective would say, was “most rewarding”.
The first paragraph is worth quoting in full as it gives a wonderful overview of what the book has to offer:
“While Adolf Hitler was determined to wage war, it was no more inevitable that his 1939 invasion of Poland precipitated global conflict than that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria did so in 1914. Britain and France lacked both the will and the means to take effective action towards fulfilment of security guarantees they had given earlier to the Poles. The declarations of war on Germany were gestures which even some staunch anti-Nazis thought foolish, because futile. For every eventual belligerent save the Poles themselves, the struggle began slowly: only in its third year did global death and destruction attain the vastness sustained thereafter until 1945. Even Hitler’s Reich was at first ill-equipped to generate the intensity of violence demanded by a death grapple between the most powerful nations on earth.”
The book gives a panoramic view of the Second World War from Hitler’s invasion of Poland to a chapter entitled ‘Victors and Vanquished’ and it does so on three different levels;
1 ) The poker game played by the politicians throughout the hostilities, each one watching his (there were no women ) own back and elbowing for position
2 ) The military history of the war, more particularly the bungling by generally inept generals whose every error cost thousands of military and human lives, a fact that appeared not to concern them too much.
3 ) The devastating effect the war had on all foot soldiers, sailors, pilots, and civilians who, with the possible exception of the non-combatant Americans, died in their millions.
Superbly structured, the book is most accessible to the normal punter like yours truly, and while it can hardly be called an entertaining read, although it does have its moments, it is certainly informative and thought provoking.
Hastings’s strong narrative powers enable the reader to live the horrors of the Stukas diving on Warsaw, of the forced marches without proper clothing through sub zero temperatures, the desperation of whole populations forced to cannibalism through famine and starvation, not to mention the Jewish and other Holocausts endured by tens of millions of ordinary people going about their own business because of the colour of their skin or their personal profoundly felt religious beliefs.
And all for what? So that the powers that be can begin a new poker game of power achieving nothing except the definite possibility that, despite their loud protestations, this will happen again, because if the book teaches us anything, it is that human beings have learnt nothing.
All Hell let Loose is definitely worth reading. It should be taken slowly so that its content are fully digested. It unveils some curious facts such as, despite being one of the main belligerents, England’s military actually played a minor role until late in the conflict; that the Polish contribution toward Hitler’s defeat was far greater than hitherto thought; and that the war was in fact won by the general whose army made fewest mistakes.
