All Hell Let Loose: The World at War 1939-1945. By Max Hastings.
HarperPress; 748 pages; £30. Buy from  The Second World War. By
Antony Beevor. Little, Brown; 863 pages; $35. Weidenfeld &
Nicolson; £25. Buy from,  HISTORY is full of wars that were
bloodier than the second world war. As a proportion of the
population, more people were killed during the An Lushan
rebellion in eighth-century China, for example, or by the Thirty
Years War in 17th-century central Europe. But the sheer
magnitude of the human tragedy of the second world war puts it
in a class of its own, and its relative closeness to the present
day makes claims on the collective memory that more remote
horrors cannot.  The statistics of the war are almost mind-
numbing. Estimates differ, but up to 70m people died as a direct
consequence of the fighting between 1939 and 1945, about two-
thirds of them non-combatants, making it in absolute terms the
deadliest conflict ever. Nearly one in ten Germans died and 30%
of their army. About 15m Chinese perishe