#190 Book Review - Inferno by Max Hastings

You have to learn from the past, not live in it.

On doit tirer des leçons du passé mais non pas y vivre

Debes aprender del pasado, pero no vivir en él

I finally finished reading the book called Inferno. It is, in my opinion, a must-read book for everyone. It is awful to read due to what it informs you about. But it does an excellent job of delineating the breadth and scope of the Second World War and all the affected parties, including many whom history has more or less ignored. As the author says, the inhumanity and the sheer evilness of the players involved is mostly incomprehensible to the generations who did not live through it. [Inferno:” human beings measure risk and privation within the compass of their personal knowledge”] And, even though the allies were the “good guys”, much of their behavior was utterly reprehensible as well.

And so much of this malevolent insanity was caused by a remarkably small number of people probably numbering in the thousands. And yet the vast population of the countries allowed themselves to be swept up in it, ignored their leaders, or just preferred not to believe what was going on.

And just as the stupidity of WWI and the Treaty of Versailles led directly to the Second World War, so too can you see much of what happened in WWII, especially after the so-called victory, feeding into the problems that are in the world today. The Cold War, the war in the Balkans, the Middle East, and I would say even the current conflict in Ukraine can directly attributed to the actions (or lack of action) that took place at the end of WWII.

The author did an extremely good job of being objective in his observations of all the players, including the allies. Or one might say, especially the allies. But it is absolutely clear to me that none of the players involved should be anything but ashamed on the whole of what they did. The incompetence of the politicians and the commanders that were involved on all sides is beyond belief. The egos and aggrandizement as well as the malevolence and stupidity of the players involved was just so sad. Tens of millions of people died as a result of actions that were rooted in tribalism and the sheer brutality of not caring about human beings.

The reason that I say you must learn from the past should be obvious. Hopefully so that we do not repeat the same mistakes. What I see in places like the Middle East and in Ukraine, is the people (and by the people I mean the jackasses who are at the top of the power structure in countries like Iran, the USA, Israel, and Russia) have NOT learned from the past, they are still living in it. (See Putin’s comment “the fall of the Soviet Union was the greatest tragedy of the 20th century”), and the Iranians and the Israelis are still going on about how in essence my god or my prophet is better than your God and your prophet and your great great great grandfather did blah blah blah to my great great great grandfather or grandmother or whatever and as a result we still hate you. In fact, they are using the past to INCITE people to violence!

And, for the umpteenth time, the powers in the West are abandoning Eastern Europe to Russia. The way the West broke it’s promise to Poland after WWI and the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of Polish soldiers in support of the Allied war efforts is shameful.

I will leave it there except for some quotes from the book. I can’t recommend it strongly enough.

“When Gen. Władysław Anders, who had suffered in Stalin’s prisons between 1939 and 1941, met Churchill in Cairo in August 1942, the Pole vehemently denounced the Soviet Union: “There was, I said, no justice or honor in Russia, and not a single man there whose word could be trusted”

“Churchill closed the talk by saying that he believed Poland would emerge from the war a strong and happy country.” Anders allowed himself to be persuaded that “we Poles were now going home (so we thought) by a different route, a longer one, indeed, but one with fewer hardships.” The Western Allies exerted themselves to sustain this delusion.”

“A people who could endure such things displayed qualities the Western Allies lacked, which were indispensable to the destruction of Nazism. In the auction of cruelty and sacrifice, the Soviet dictator proved the higher bidder.” [Stalin’s actions – the ‘hero’ of Russia]

“But a fundamental reality persists: the Allied powers provided for their own peoples levels of nourishment which they denied to others, including societies notionally under their protection.” – The Bengal famine in which almost 3 million people in Britain’s colony died for lack of effort on the part of Britain.

“The Ultra achievement owed much to three Polish mathematicians, led by Marian Rejewski, who conducted critical early work on the German Enigma code machine between 1932 and 1939” – Ultra, which allowed the Allies to read Axis message traffic was one of the keys to winning the war. And yet this additional help from Poland was ignored, as was everything else they did when the Allies left Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe to suffer under Stalin’s boot at the end of WWII.

“The Jews of Europe suffered the most dramatic fate, but millions of other civilians—Russians, Poles, Yugoslavs, Greeks, Chinese, Malays, Vietnamese, Indians—were extinguished by willful murder, chance explosion, disease or starvation.” – And much of the time with specific instructions from both Allied and Axis leadership.

“Posterity is fascinated by the ease with which the Nazis found so many ordinary men—to borrow the title of Christopher Browning’s classic study—willing to murder in cold blood vast numbers of innocents, of all ages and both sexes. Yet there is ample evidence in modern experience that many people are ready to kill others to order, once satisfied that this fulfils the wishes of those whose authority they accept. Hundreds of thousands of Russians were complicit in the deaths of millions of their fellow countrymen at the behest of Stalin and Beria, before the Holocaust was thought of. Germany’s generals may not themselves have killed civilians, but they were happy to acquiesce in and even enthuse about others doing so.”

“In Yugoslavia, as everywhere that Stalin’s soldiers went, the Soviet Union declined—as modern Russia still declines—to acknowledge the crimes committed by those wearing its uniform.”

“British lieutenant David Fraser wrote: “There was still too much vile cruelty in the world for us to be able to say with true satisfaction, ‘Good is victorious.”

I could do this for pages. But better you read the book. 😊👍