Inferno
The World at War, 1939–1945
World War II involved tens of millions of soldiers and cost sixty million lives—an average of twenty-seven thousand a day. For thirty-five 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—soldiers, sailors, and airmen, British housewives and Indian peasants, SS killers and Leningrad citizens, Japanese suicide pilots and American carrier crews—Hastings provides an intimate portrait of the world at war. He simultaneously traces the major developments and puts them in real human context. Remarkably informed and wide-ranging, Inferno is a new and essential understanding of one of the greatest and bloodiest events of the twentieth century.
