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Armageddon: The Battle for Germany 1944-1945. By Max Hastings. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. 581 pages. $30.00 ($16.95 paper). Reviewed by Colonel Leonard J. Fullenkamp, USA Ret., Professor of Military History and Strategy, US Army War College.
Max Hastings' Armageddon picks up the history of World War II where Overlord, his 1982 account of the Allied invasion, left off. Beginning with events of 1 September 1944, Armageddon covers events on the Eastern and Western Fronts through May 1945. Deliberately, Hastings ignores events on the Italian front, preferring to focus his attention on the Allies in the West, the Russians in the East, and the Germans throughout. Whether one has read widely on World War II or not, this book offers something here for readers of all stripes.
On one level, Armageddon is a conventional military history of the war, with issues of policy and military strategy examined, interpreted, and critiqued in the classical "war as an instrument of policy" interpretation of history. Here one finds judicious criticism of Franklin Roosevelt's shortsightedness on postwar issues, abetted by generals George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower, who come across in Hastings' view as decidedly anti-Clausewitzian, their protestations to the contrary notwithstanding. America's leaders, civilian and military, earn harsh criticism for their failure to understand or appreciate the dangers Joseph Stalin and his armies posed for Eastern Europe. Winston Churchill and his generals, notably Bernard Montgomery and Alan Brooke, get higher marks, for both their appreciation of geopolitics and their military direction of the war. Stalin and his generals, principally Ivan Konev and Georgi Zhukov, get Hastings' highest marks as warfighters and post-conflict architects. Adolf Hitler and his senior generals are roundly condemned, and deservedly so, for their fumbling prosecution of the war, and its associated war crimes, while the German army is described with grudging admiration as having the best, most proficient, hard-fighting soldiers right to the end.
On a second level, Armageddon provides an operational history of major combat operations on the Eastern and Western Fronts during the last nine months of World War...