MARCH 16, 2023 – Currently, I’m deep into Inferno by Max Hastings, a British military historian, who’s written extensively about the biggest conflagration ever visited upon civilization. I’ve read lots about WW II, and I wasn’t looking for yet another (650-page) tome on the subject. When a mint-condition copy of “hell on earth” surfaced atop a crate of books that my wife, an online bookseller, was about to haul out of the house, she handed Inferno to me and said, “Would you be interested? I’ve had it listed for a while, but it’s not selling.”
I thumbed through the mint-condition book and decided it was a keeper. Later that day I started reading, and in short order Inferno leap-frogged ahead of several other books-in-progress. It’s a well written work of impressive scholarship, and I have trouble pulling myself away from it, even when pressing demands require.
Hastings mixes innumerable primary sources—field notes, letters, diaries—with riveting accounts and critiques of what was happening behind the scenes at all levels of prosecution of the war. Also, he provides a comprehensive perspective from the standpoint of each major belligerent. The result is that the reader is struck by the reality that few outcomes were inevitable, even though the end results have long been etched by the victors upon the granite of time.
The reader is also impressed or perhaps more accurately, disturbed, by the patently wrong-headed bigotry, prejudice, brutality and incompetence by so many people caught up in the conflict. For example, when a German soldier on the Eastern Front writes in a letter or diary entry that “Slavs are a subhuman race that therefore deserve to die like animals,” the reader wants to sit down with that soldier, who’d been exposed to years of propaganda and shake some reality into his head. But Germans weren’t the only ones to harbor crazy ideas about the enemy.
Far from being orderly, organized and destined for victory, every belligerent stumbled badly tactically, as well as strategically. It’s a wonder that the war concluded with a clear victory by any country. In short, during much of the conflagration, little about V-E Day or V-J Day was inevitable.
As I gain insight into the full depth and breadth of the disaster that was WW II, I’m compelled to wonder about the presumed inevitability of policies and politics of our own times. Is Russia any more likely to prevail in Ukraine in 2023 than Germany was to lose there in WW II? Or on the domestic front, is implosion of the Republican Party any more inevitable than its total victory—House, Senate, White House—in 2024?
The only thing certain in the course of human events is that nothing is certain, except that whether as star actors, players in supporting roles or crowd scene extras, no one entering the stage of history stays forever or for long, in the grand scheme of time. Accordingly, no one can guarantee outcomes—except historians.
The moral of the story—of history—is two-fold: (1) never assume anyone’s gig is up until it is; and (2) fasten your seatbelt.
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
