Monday, November 19, 2012  Book Review: 'Inferno' by Max
Hastings   Infernal Regions  Who really defeated Hitler: the
Western democracies, or the mass and brute force of the Red
Army? Inferno: The World At War, 1939-1945 By Max Hastings
(Knopf, 729 pages, $35) "At 3:15 A.M. Berlin time on 22 June
1941, Russian border guards on the Bug River Bridge at Kolden
were summoned by their German counterparts 'to discuss important
matters,' and machine-gunned as they approached," writes Max
Hastings on the commencement of Hitler's Operation Barbarossa,
the invasion of the Soviet Union. This routine bit of duplicity
and disregard for human life began "the defining event of the
war" and, ultimately, the complete destruction of Hitler's
Germany, as described by Hastings in his Inferno: The World At
War, 1939-1945 (recently released in paperback). This volume is
the culmination of Hastings' long career as a historian of the
Second World War, "this greatest and most terrible of all human
experiences," beginning with Bomber