Author seems a bit fond of himself and of criticizing other (obviously seen as competing) authors ( )

I read a broad assortment of genre, from science fiction, to biography to literary fiction. One of my favorites is history and military history in particular. In reviewing my library, I noted a couple of works by Max Hastings and that I had rated them very highly.

His book, Retribution, was an outstanding treatment of the final year of the World War II Pacific theater. Vietnam, an Epic Tragedy, was equally as well done. That being the case, I purchased several other Hastings works, including this treatment of the final year of the European front of World War II.

While the other two Hastings efforts were a disappointment (Korean War and Falklands campaign), this work was very similar in style and quality to Retribution (since renamed Nemesis). Very expansive in its scope, it tracks both the eastern and western fronts of the European theater from the fall of 1944 until the war’s conclusion. It does so largely through interviews and accounts of many of the survivors and participants.

While any student of military history is familiar with the stark differences in the experiences on the eastern and western fronts, many of the examples related by Hastings are jarring, both with respect to the casualties suffered, as well as the treatment of captives and civilian populations.

From time to time, Hastings offers insight into many of the personalities involved, from Montgomery, Eisenhower, Bradley and Patton to Zhukov and the assortment of German generals in place at the time. I found these observations to be fair, balanced and well-reasoned.

I can highly recommend Retribution (Nemesis), Vietnam, an Epic Tragedy, and Armageddon. I would probably leave his other work alone. ( )

I cam to this book expecting an action-packed account of the closing days of the war in Europe. As it happens, those parts were the weakest. They leaned very heavily on anecdote and skipped across space and time in a way that made keeping a coherent picture of the action difficult.

But the real surprise was the quality of this book's treatment of the war experience for non-combatants. The allied bombing of Germany, the exodus from East Prussia, and the Warsaw uprising, in particular, receive moving treatments that are very much enriched by the aforementioned anecdotes. Some of these episodes are neglected acts of history, and Hastings does an excellent of job giving them a human face. ( )

Stórfín umfjöllun Hastings um síðustu mánuðina síðari heimsstyrjaldarinnar í Evrópu. Áberandi er hve vel hann greinir í sundur uppbygginu og eðli herja og hermanna stærstu þjóðanna, kosti þeirra og helstu galla. Vel þess virði að lesa. ( )

This guy can write! Hastings is the kind of writer that makes you want to buy everything he's written, regardless of its subject matter. Armageddon takes an overall look at the last 9 months of the war in Europe as American, British, Canadian, and token French forces besieged Germany from the west and the Red army attacked from the east. I recommend this book to just about anyone who has any interest in the topic.

I say *just about* anyone because I spoke enthusiastically about this book to my grandfather, who was in Patton's 3rd Army as it fought its way into Germany in 1945, and he asked me if he could borrow it after I was done, but I had second thoughts about agreeing to loan it to him because there are some frank depictions and language that I'm not sure he'd appreciate. Of course, he *lived* this sort of stuff--having an eye blown out when his buddy stepped on a mine, watching a couple of guys in his company take a German POW, a rifle, and a shovel into the woods, and then seeing those two guys come back alone--so maybe I'm being too sensitive.

One shortcoming of _Armageddon_, as far as I'm concerned, is Hastings' apparent desire to not look too sympathetic to the plight of German civilians. For example, he writes:

"Even after sixty years, it is difficult to extend to the German people the pity due to innocent victims of Nazi tyranny. However bitterly many Germans may have regretted this by 1945, Hitler and Nazism were the creations of their society. The horrors the Nazis inflicted upon Europe required the complicity of millions of ordinary Germans, merely to satisfy the logistical requirements of tyranny and mass murder. Yet now they saw the first fruits of retribution."

This passage comes at the tail end of a chapter entitled "Blood and Ice", in which Hastings recounts the behavior of Red Army soldiers in East Prussia: gang rapes, crucifixions, etc. What if Hastings were to write about the problem of, say, prison rape? Would his response be that the victims of this practice should have thought about it before committing the crimes that put them in prison in the first place? Would he similarly justify, say, Abu Ghraib? I hope not. ( )