[This is Part 1 of a 2-part audiobook Cassette Library Edition.] World War II involved tens of millions of soldiers and cost sixty million lives--an average of twenty-seven thousand a day. For thirty-five years, Max Hastings has researched and written about different aspects of the war. Now, for the first time, he gives us a magnificent, single-volume history of the entire war. Through his strikingly detailed stories of everyday people--soldiers, sailors, and airmen, British housewives and Indian peasants, SS killers and Leningrad citizens, Japanese suicide pilots and American carrier crews--Hastings provides an intimate portrait of the world at war. He simultaneously traces the major developments and puts them in real human context. Remarkably informed and wide-ranging, Inferno is a new and essential understanding of one of the greatest and bloodiest events of the twentieth century.