Max Hastings: Armageddon. The Battle for Germany, 1944-1945. NY: Vintage, 2005. 584 pp. Ill.
What is always most impressive about Max Hastings is the effort he puts into being judicious, laying out for example the short-comings of Eisenhower’s decision not to race to Berlin, then going on to explain its rationale: There was no military need, and the political decisions had already been made far in advance at Tehran and Yalta. In the end the future president comes off rather well, if not as a general, then as the manager of a fractious alliance.
What Hastings excels at is presenting the larger picture, then filling in details collected from interviews conducted with ordinary soldiers, lower-ranking officers, and civilians. The drawback is that some of their stories end up scattered across the book. Particularly towards the end, one needs to consult the index repeatedly to remind oneself who this obscure individual is that we last encountered a hundred or so pages earlier.
A minor annoyance: His spelling of place-names sometimes relies on transcriptions from German into Russian without taking into account the peculiarities of Russian transliteration conventions. “Thjorn” is said to be the location of a PoW camp; in reality, it was in Thorn (or Thorun), Poland (p. 393). While the maps are generally good, one shows towns called “Wittenburg” and “Griefswalde” instead of “Wittenberg” and “Greifswald” (p. 467). And I am confident that no movie was ever titled “Der Katzenstag,” which – though it looks German – in fact makes little sense. The last syllable of this word should not be “-tag” (day) but “-steg” (walkway). So the reference is to the 1927 silent classic “Der Katzensteg” (The Catwalk).
The best chapter is on East Prussia and its harrowing end. I just wish the author had said a bit more about the role of the German navy. We are comparatively well informed about the sinking of the Bismarck and the wolf-pack hunting in the Atlantic, but the surface and submarine warfare in the Baltic remains a relatively neglected topic. To be fair, he does devote three pages to the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, a major humanitarian catastrophe, though of little direct military impact.
While Hastings tries to do justice to the German point of view, this does not make him any less severe in his judgment. On balance, his verdicts seem sound and sensible.
Related reviews elsewhere at this site include the following:
- Rodric Braithwaite: Moscow 1941
- Prit Buttar: Battleground Prussia
- Richard Evans: The Third Reich in Power
- The Hitler Book, ed. Henrick Eberle, Matthias Uhl (with extended discussion of translation issues)
- Michael Jones: The Retreat
- Lev Kopelev: To Be Preserved Forever (Kopelev describes what he witnessed when the Red Army entered East Prussia)
- Timothy Ryback: Hitler’s Private Library
- Albert Seaton: Battle for Moscow
- Timothy Snyder: Bloodlands
- Thomas Weber: Hitler’s First War
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