With its battlefields dispersed across the globe, the vastness of the Second World War was unparalleled. This was a time when nearly everything which civilised people took for granted in peace time was destroyed. Between 1939 and 1945, around 27,000 people died, every single day - most of them on the Eastern Front.. Many men and women who lived through this catastrophe struggled to find the words to describe what they witnessed daily. Many turned to a phrase, which although a cliche, summed things up: "All Hell's Let Loose!"In this definitive, single-volume history of a war that continues to fascinate and horrify us in equal measure, Max Hastings brings together many different human stories, and touches on almost every country in the world. Hastings stresses that it is impossible to compare the suffering of people during WWII - it would have seemed monstrous to a British soldier facing a mortar barrage, with his comrades dying around him, to be told that Russian casualties were many thousand times greater. However, there were some aspects of wartime experience that were universal: fear and grief; the conscription of young men and women sent to new lives remote from their choice, genocide and mass migration. ALL HELL LET LOOSE charts these experiences, along with the numerous battles on land, at sea and in the air, all over the world, that formed the greatest conflict in human history.Using a huge range of sources, including new material from Russia, Italy and Poland, ALL HELL LET LOOSE is not only a magnificent and movingly written book; it is arguably one of the most important books on the Second World War ever published.
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Max Hastings studied at Charterhouse and Oxford and became a foreign correspondent, reporting from more than sixty countries and eleven wars for BBC TV and the London Evening Standard. He has won many awards for his journalism. Among his bestselling books Bomber Command won the Somerset Maugham Prize, and both Overlord and Battle for the Falklands won the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Prize. After ten years as editor and then editor-in-chief of the Daily Telegraph, he became editor of the Evening Standard in 1996. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he now lives in Berkshire.
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Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. A magisterial history of the greatest and most terrible event in history, from one of the finest historians of the Second World War. A book which shows the impact of war upon hundreds of millions of people around the world- soldiers, sailors and airmen; housewives, farm workers and children. Reflecting Max Hastingss thirty-five years of research on World War II, All Hell Let Loose describes the course of events, but focuses chiefly upon human experience, which varied immensely from campaign to campaign, continent to continent.The author emphasises the Russian front, where more than 90% of all German soldiers who perished met their fate. He argues that, while Hitlers army often fought its battles brilliantly well, the Nazis conducted their war effort with stunning incompetence. He suggests that 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.The book ranges across a vast canvas, from the agony of Poland amid the September 1939 Nazi invasion, to the 1943 Bengal famine, in which at least a million people died under British rule- and British neglect. Among many vignettes, there are the RAFs legendary raid on the Ruhr dams, the horrors of Arctic convoys, desert tank combat, jungle clashes. Some of Hastingss insights and judgements will surprise students of the conflict, while there are vivid descriptions of the tragedies and triumphs of a host of ordinary people, in uniform and out of it.The cliche is profoundly true, he says. The world between 1939 and 1945 saw some human beings plumb the depths of baseness, while others scaled the heights of courage and nobility. This is everymans story, an attempt to answer the question: What was the Second World War like ?, and also an overview of the big picture. Max Hastings employs the technique which has made many of his previous books best-sellers, combining top-down analysis and bottom-up testimony to explore the meaning of this vast conflict both for its participants and for posterity. A magisterial history of the greatest and most terrible event in history, from one of the finest historians of the Second World War. A book which shows the impact of war upon hundreds of millions of people around the world- soldiers, sailors and airmen; housewives, farm workers and children. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9780007450725
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Book Description Condition: New. A magisterial history of the greatest and most terrible event in history, from one of the finest historians of the Second World War. A book which shows the impact of war upon hundreds of millions of people around the world- soldiers, sailors and airmen; housewives, farm workers and children. Num Pages: 768 pages, Illustrations, maps, ports. BIC Classification: 1D; 3JJH; HBJD; HBLW; HBWQ. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 197 x 129 x 47. Weight in Grams: 610. . 2012. Paperback. . . . . Seller Inventory # V9780007450725