Reviewed by Michael Peck
The Military Book Review

Whether you agree with Max Hastings depends on whether you see the glass as half-full or half-empty. The glass contains a question that has simmered for years: After D-Day, with the Third Reich clearly on the ropes, could the Allies have defeated Germany sooner?

The optimist says the Anglo-Americans and Soviets did well to defeat perhaps the most formidable military in history, even if it was in its death throes. The pessimist asks why the Allies, who owned the skies, seas and a crushing superiority in weapons and supplies, took nearly a year to end the conflict.

Hastings is a pessimist. The thesis of his book is that the United States and Britain could and should have defeated Germany within a few months of the Normandy landing. Hastings acknowledges from the start that he wrote the book "to satisfy my own curiosity about why the German war did not end in 1944, given the Allies' overwhelming superiority. It is often asserted that in the West, they had to overcome a succession of great rivers and difficult natural features to break into Hitler's heartland. Yet the Germans' 1940 blitzkrieg easily surmounted such obstacles. In 1944-45, the Allies were masters of armored and air forces greater than the Nazis ever possessed."

That they didn't, the author argues, is because of the timidity and limited abilities of Allied commanders like Eisenhower and Montgomery, as well as the caution (he is careful not to say cowardice) of Allied fighting men. He contrasts this with the ruthless battlefield savvy of Soviet generals like Zhukov, and the willingness of Stalin's soldiers to bear horrendous casualties. In the end, the Western Allies only did as well as they did because the Red Army did the fighting and the dying.

These will be fighting words to patriotic Westerners, but they are not new. Despite the tensions of the Cold War, it is generally acknowledged that the Eastern Front tied down and ground up the bulk of Hitler's army. Shortcomings in the Allied armies, such as problems with British and American infantry (the former were tired, the latter were given the worst of the draftees), have been well-documented.

But Hastings goes far beyond the military dimension. He also spotlights the atrocities committed by all sides, especially the widespread rape of German women by the Soviet soldiers. The medieval trail of looting and sexual assault that followed the Red Army has been obscured by Soviet denials, Western apologists and German shame (who may have felt that it was payback for German atrocities in Russia).

Yet if there's a weak point to this epic book, it's that it is difficult to know where the author stands. First the Western Allies appear cruel, then the Soviets and then the Germans. It's as if Hastings himself believes all were equally bad (a moral relativism that many would disagree with). Hastings, the former editor of the conservative Daily Telegraph, does seem to have it in for the Russians — the Germans are portrayed as highly civilized yet cruel, while the Soviets are described as "Mongol rabble."

Nonetheless, Hastings is one of the most prominent writers of popular military history, and he delivers a well-written and compelling book. The author conducted many interviews with veterans who will soon no longer be with us. Unfortunately, he doesn't include a bibliography (because it would be an exercise in "virility"). Nonetheless, Armageddon may very well be the definitive popular work on the final year of Nazi Germany.