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Can there be anything else to say about the collapse of the Third Reich—anything worth saying, that is? Sir Max Hastings, one of Great Britain's most respected military historians, convincingly shows that there is much more to the end of the Third Reich than speculations about mystery weapons and accounts of those murky final days in Hitler's Berlin bunker. Hastings' new book, Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944–1945 (Knopf), is an impressive and disturbing account of the last stage of the European war. This was nothing short of a cataclysm, and Hastings recounts some of the "extraordinary things that happened to ordinary people" on both fronts. What emerges is a picture of suffering, degradation, dignity, and profound moral complexity.
Hastings was an award-winning foreign correspondent for many years, reporting from more than sixty countries for BBC TV and the London Evening Standard. He has presented historical documentaries for BBC TV, including most recently (2003) on Churchill and his generals. He has written 18 books on military history and current events, including Bomber Command (which won the Somerset Maugham Prize for nonfiction), The Battle for the Falklands, and Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy. He was editor-in-chief of the Daily Telegraph and Evening Standard, from which he retired in 2002. Donald A. Yerxa, editor of Historically Speaking and a professor of history at Eastern Nazarene College, interviewed Hastings in the Boston offices of the Historical Society on December 1, 2004.
What drew you to write an account of the battle for Germany?
It was a bit of unfinished business. Twenty years ago, I wrote Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy, which ended in September 1944. I have always had a nagging fascination with what happened afterward, in particular with why the Allies didn't win in 1944. At the beginning of September 1944, most of the Allied leadership, with the notable exception of Winston Churchill, was completely convinced that the war was going to be over by the end of the year. In the West, the Germans seemed completely beaten. The Western Allies had overwhelming superiority in tanks, aircraft, everything—you name it. So I wanted to look at this question of why we didn't end the war in 1944. Secondly, and almost as important, virtually all the books that have been written about this period look at either the Eastern or the Western front—not both. And I wanted to set the two in context: to see what happened to the Western Allies in the context of what happened with the Soviets. This nearly overwhelmed me because it is such a huge subject. My wife, by the way, warned me not to write books that people can't hold up in bed. One has to remember that the last months of World War II witnessed the greatest human cataclysm of the 20th century, and trying to cover all that ground did prove to be a big task. But, I must add, it became utterly fascinating.
Could you comment on your claims that the Germans and Russians in World War II were better warriors but worse human beings?
This is a very important truth. When I wrote Overlord, I caused quite a lot of controversy by saying flatly that man-for-man, the German Army was the best in the war. This claim is generally accepted now, but when I first made it in 1984, it wasn't. British and American veterans took umbrage. When I was writing Armageddon, my assessment of the German Army was confirmed. The evidence is so clear: again and again small numbers of Germans managed to hold up for hours, days, weeks much larger numbers of Allied soldiers. But I also realized that there was an important corollary: if we wanted British and American soldiers to fight like the Waffen-SS, they would have needed to become people like the Waffen-SS. And then, of course, the very values for which the whole war was fought would have been out the window. We have good grounds today to be enormously grateful that American and British veterans mostly preserved all the inhibitions and decencies of citizen-soldiers. In the main, these veterans never thought of themselves as warriors. They were bank clerks, laborers, train-drivers, and so on, thrust into uniform to masquerade as warriors for a time. They wanted to do their duty and do it right, but equally they wanted to live to come home and share the fruits of victory. All this is very admirable, but of course you do pay a price because it takes much longer to win a war against German fanatics.
