Malcolm Gladwell's "The Bomber Mafia" - Weak Tea

Just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's new book, "The Bomber Mafia", and am sorely disappointed. It's like Gladwell has expanded a short blog post into a 150 page book that's big on storytelling but essentially a complete lightweight when it comes to content and conclusions.

The basic thesis of the book can be summed up in a few short sentences: During WW2, there was a group of air force officers led by Haywood Hansell called the Bomber Mafia who thought that they could bomb cities "more morally" through daytime precision bombing; they were hedging their bets on a revolutionary invention, the Norden bombsight, that allowed bombardiers to pinpoint targets from 15,000 feet. In reality, the philosophy failed miserably because the bombsight was less than perfect under real conditions, because even with the bombsight the bombs were not that precise, and most crucially because in Japan, the hitherto undiscovered jet stream which buffeted airplanes with 120 knot winds basically made it impossible for the B-29s to stabilize and successfully bomb their targets. 

Enter Curtis LeMay, the ruthless air force general who took the B-29 down to 5000 feet to avoid the jet stream, ripped most of the guns out and instead of precision bombs, used incendiary bombs with napalm at night to burn down large built up civilian areas of Japanese with horrific casualties, the most famous incident of course being the March 1945 firebombing of Tokyo that killed over 100,000 people.

Gladwell tells these stories and others like the invention of napalm well, but the core message in the book is that the switch from precision bombing by Hansell which failed to strategic bombing by LeMay which presumably worked was the linchpin air strategy of the war. This message is a highly incomplete and gross oversimplification. The fact of the matter is that strategic bombing did very little damage to morale and production until very late in the war. And while strategic bombing in Japan was more successful, the bombing in Europe did not work until the bombers were accompanied by long-range P-51 Mustang fighters, and even then its impact on shortening the war was dubious. Even in Japan, strategic bombing could have been hobbled had the Japanese had better fighter defenses the way the Germans did. The Germans used a novel method of firing called "Schräge Musik" that allowed their fighters to shoot at the British Lancaster bombers vertically - if the Japanese had used such efforts they would likely have been devastating to LeMay's strategy. Even from a civilian standpoint, the strategic bombing of Dresden and Hamburg did little to curb either morale or production. But in talking only about Tokyo and not Dresden or Hamburg, only about Japan and not Europe, Gladwell leaves the impression that strategic bombing was pretty much foolproof and always worked. These omissions are especially puzzling since he does discuss the lack of effectiveness of the bombing of civilians in London during The Blitz.

There are very few references in this short book - Gladwell seems obsessed with quoting two historians named Tami Biddle and Stephen McFarland for most of the discussion. These are fine historians, but the superficial treatment is especially jarring because strategic bombing has been written about extensively during the last several decades by historians like Richard Overy and Paul Kennedy. The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Patrick Blackett wrote about the mistaken assumptions about strategic bombing way back in the 1950s. I would also recommend physicist Freeman Dyson's essays on the part he himself played in strategic bombing during the war that really drives home how boneheaded the method was. But Gladwell quotes none of these sources, instead just focusing on Haywood Hansell and Curtis LeMay as if they and their thoughts on the matter were the only things that counted.

Perhaps worst of all, the complex moral consequences of LeMay's argument and strategic bombing in general are completely sidelined except for a short postscript in which he discusses how precision bombing has gotten so much better (except in that case the moral consequences have also gotten more complex, precisely because it's become easier). Strategic bombing was wasteful and morally unforgivable because it cost both pilot and civilian lives. LeMay generally receives a very favorable treatment and there are copious quotes from him, but interestingly the one quote which is missing is one which might have shed a different perspective - this is his quote after the war that he would have been hanged as a war criminal had the Allies lost.

I really wish this book were better, given Gladwell's fine storytelling skills which can draw the reader in. As it stands it's slim pickings, a couple of anecdotes and stories compressed as a grand philosophical message in 150 pages that leaves the reader completely unsatisfied. If you are really interested in the topic of bombing during WW2, look at other sources

The case for dumb kindness

On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union in a typhoon of steel and firepower without precedent in history. In spite of telltale signs and repeated warnings, Joseph Stalin who had indulged in wishful thinking was caught completely off guard. He was so stunned that he became almost catatonic, shutting himself in his dacha, not even coming out to make a formal announcement. It was days later that he regained his composure and spoke to the nation from the heart, awakening a decrepit albeit enormous war machine that would change the fate of tens of millions forever. By this time, the German juggernaut had advanced almost to the doors of Moscow, and the Soviet Union threw everything that it had to stop Hitler from breaking down the door and bringing the whole rotten structure on the Russian people’s heads, as the Führer had boasted of doing.

Among the multitudes of citizens and soldiers mobilized was a shortsighted, overweight Jewish journalist named Vasily Grossman. Grossman had been declared unfit for regular duty because of his physical shortcomings, but he somehow squeezed himself all the way to the front through connections. During the next four years, he became one of the most celebrated war correspondents of all time, witnessing human conflict whose sheer brutality beggared belief. To pass the time in this most unreal of landscapes, Grossman had a single novel to keep him company – War and Peace. It was to prove to be a prophetic choice.

Not only was Grossman present during the siege and eventual victory at Stalingrad – a single battle in which more Soviet soldiers and citizens died than American soldiers during all of World War 2 – but he was also part of the Soviet advance into the occupied territories in which the Nazis had waged a racial war of extermination that would almost annihilate an entire race of people. While forward-deployed units of Nazi Einsatzgruppen killed more than a million Jews in Ukraine, Lithuania and other countries, this “holocaust by bullets” was only a precursor to the horror of Auschwitz and Treblinka. Grossman became the first journalist to enter Treblinka and describe what words could scarcely bring themselves to describe. Most of all, the Holocaust hit home for him in a devastatingly personal way – Grossman’s own mother was murdered by the Nazis in the village of Berdychiv; the prewar Jewish population of this small town numbering more than 40,000 was completely annihilated. This singular episode shaped Grossman’s worldview for the rest of his life.

Over the next ten years Grossman who had seen Stalin’s 1937 purges and the postwar takeover of Europe became witness to his own country’s descent into oppression, conquest and genocidal aspirations. The words that proclaimed liberty and brotherhood during the fight against the Nazis started sounding hollow. In 1960 he put the finishing touches to what was the culmination of his career and thinking – Life and Fate, a 900-page magnum opus that was on par with some of the greatest fiction of all time. Today Life and Fate stands shoulder to shoulder with the great novels. And similar to the great novels, it takes in the entire world and nothing seems to be missing from its pages. Love, hatred, war, peace, childhood, motherhood, jealousy, bravery, cowardice, introspection, economics, politics, science, philosophy…everything is contained in its universe. More importantly, like the great works of literature, like Shakespeare and Dante, Dickens and Hemingway, like Grossman’s compatriots Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, the themes in Life and Fate are timeless, transcending nationality, race, gender and even its wartime setting. It will be relevant two hundred years from now when men and women will still be fighting and killing and discussing and loving. The novel speaks to human beings struggling with common problems across the gulf of time. And it speaks doggedly against the identity politics that riddles our discourse so widely.

Like War and Peace, Life and Fate straddles almost a hundred and fifty characters spread over a variety of times and locations, from the quiet warmth of a matriarch’s dwelling to the absolute nihilism of an extermination camp to several battle locations on the front spread around Stalingrad. Here we encounter characters whose views of life have been forced to be stripped down to their bare bones because of the sheer bleak brutality around them and forced minimalism of their existence. While there are hundreds of major and minor characters, a few key ones stand out. Broadly speaking, the characters fan out from the person of Alexandra Vladimirovna, a factory worker and steely matriarch who had lived in Stalingrad before moving out because of the war, and her two daughters Lyudmila and Yevgenia. The action also centers on Yevgenia’s old husband Krymov who has been an important party official and her new lover Novikov who is a tank commander. Meanwhile, Lyudmila lives with her husband Victor Shtrum, who in many ways speaks for the conscience of the various other characters in the novel. At least in one sense the most interesting person is Mikhail Mostovskoy, a friend of the family who has ended up in a German concentration camp.

It’s hard to keep track of all the characters, but one of the most remarkable things is how even some of the minor, intermittent players leave an indelible memory because of their pronunciations and ideas. There are some extraordinarily poignant moments, such as when Lyudmila’s son Tolya is wounded on the front and she hurries to visit him in the hospital, only to find that he has died shortly before. She asks to be escorted to his grave and spends a moment of hauntingly beautiful, ethereal and yet earthly tragedy mourning at his side, covering him with his shawl so that he won’t be cold. It takes her several minutes to realize the bare truth of Tolya’s non-existence:

“The water of life, the water that had gushed over the ice and brought Tolya back from the darkness, had disappeared; the world created by the mother’s despair, the world that for a moment had broken its fetters and become reality, was no more.”

Perhaps there is no story more emotionally devastating in the book than the story of Sofya Levinton, a Jewish friend of Lyudmila’s who has the misfortune of being snared by the Nazis and put on a cattle train to Auschwitz. On the train Sofya runs into David, a six or seven year-old boy who also shared the misfortune of being cut off from his mother and put in a ghetto with his grandmother. When his grandmother died of disease, the woman she had entrusted David to was too busy trying to save herself. Like two atomic particles randomly bumping into each other by accident, David and Sofya bump into each other on the train. They have no one else, so they have each other. They accompany each other into the camp, into the dressing room, and finally into the gas chamber where there is no light, no life, no meaning. As the Zyklon B starts hissing from the openings above, David clings to the unmarried, childless Sofya:

“Sofya Levinton felt the boy’s body subside in her hands. Once again she had fallen behind him. In mineshafts where the air becomes poisoned, it is always the little creatures, the birds and mice, that die first. This boy, with his slight, bird-like body, had left before her.

‘I’ve become a mother,’ she thought.

That was her last thought.”

In another German concentration camp, Mikhail Mostovskoy has philosophical disputes with a few prisoners who are trying to shake his confidence in communism and are also trying to organize an escape. Mostovskoy is a true believer and is keeping the flame burning bright. But reality is not so easy. The denouement comes when he is called to the office of the camp commandant. His name is Liss. Liss is interested in certain documents which a dissident named Ikkonikov has thrust into Mostovskoy’s hands, right before refusing to help build a gas chamber and being executed as a result. But that is not Liss’s main concern, and he is not here to punish Mostovskoy. Instead he does something worse than provide an easy death: he brings the hammer down on Mostovskoy’s entire worldview when he tells him how similar Nazism and Stalinism are, how they are built on the backs of oppressed and murdered people, how true believers in both ideologies should ideally stand shoulder to shoulder with each other, how this whole war is therefore an unnecessary farce. Mostovskoy is shaken, and his loss of faith very much mirrors Grossman’s own by the time he wrote the book: with its murder and suppression of all dissent, complete control of people’s lives and total disregard for individual freedom, were fascism and communism that different?

But if Mostovskoy had any lingering doubts about whether his faith in collective action has been built on a house of cards, it collapses completely when he reads Ikkonikov’s pamphlets and hears him speaking from the grave. It’s strange: Ikkonikov is a minor character who appears perhaps in four or five pages of the volume, and the transcript of his documents occupies not more than ten pages in a book numbering almost a thousand pages, and yet in many ways his pamphlet is the single-most important part of the book, communicating as it does the overwhelming significance of individual kindness and action in the face of utter, unending conflict. Individual kindness is the only thing that remains when all humanity has been stripped away from both oppressor and oppressed; when every trace of nationality, race, gender and political views has been obliterated by sheer terror and murder, this kindness is the only elemental thing connecting all human beings simply because they are human beings and nothing else, it is this kindness, this dumb, senseless kindness, that will keep propelling humanity onwards when all else is lost. It is this kindness that goes by the name of ‘good’. As Ikkonikov says,

“Good is to be found neither in the sermons of religious teachers and prophets, nor in the teachings of sociologists and popular leaders, nor in the ethical systems of philosophers… And yet ordinary people bear love in their hearts, are naturally full of love and pity for any living thing. At the end of the day’s work they prefer the warmth of the hearth to a bonfire in the public square.

Yes, as well as this terrible Good with a capital ‘G’, there is everyday human kindness. The kindness of an old woman carrying a piece of bread to a prisoner, the kindness of a soldier allowing a wounded enemy to drink from his water-flask, the kindness of youth towards age, the kindness of a peasant hiding an old Jew in his loft. The kindness of a prison guard who risks his own liberty to pass on letters written by a prisoner not to his ideological comrades, but to his wife and mother.

The private kindness of one individual towards another; a petty, thoughtless kindness; an unwitnessed kindness. Something we could call senseless kindness. A kindness outside any system of social or religious good.

But if we think about it, we realize that this private, senseless, incidental kindness is in fact eternal. It is extended to everything living, even to a mouse, even to a bent branch that a man straightens as he walks by.

Even at the most terrible times, through all the mad acts carried out in the name of Universal Good and the glory of States, times when people were tossed about like branches in the wind, filling ditches and gullies like stones in an avalanche – even then this senseless, pathetic kindness remained scattered throughout life like atom…

This kindness, this stupid kindness, is what is most truly human in a human being. It is what sets man apart, the highest achievement of his soul. No, it says, life is not evil!”

And who promotes this kindness? Not religion with its conditional acceptance and demands to conform. Not the state which also imposes its own demands for conformity. Not even capitalism which makes kindness conditional on the invisible hand of selfish actions. In fact no system of organization can impose this kindness, no matter how much it speaks of it in glowing terms. It can only come about when all systems of organization have been obliterated, when humanity’s bare existence compels its members to recognize a quality in each other that is completely independent of every group identification, every kind of “ism”.

And who spoke of this kindness? Not the religious prophets who sought salvation in the one true God and heaven, not the commissars whose mind-numbing bureaucratic machinations threatened to grind every human particle of unique identity into the featureless dust of one level playing field, not even the scientific rationalists whose discoveries can only describe, not prescribe. No, to describe senseless, stupid, all-encompassing kindness one must look to the great poets and writers, not the philosophers. And through everyday characters and conversations, nobody demonstrates the timeless nature of individual kindness as well as Chekhov:

“Chekhov said: let’s put God – and all these grand progressive ideas – to one side. Let’s begin with man; let’s be kind and attentive to the individual man – whether he’s a bishop, a peasant, an industrial magnate, a convict in the Sakhalin Islands or a waiter in a restaurant. Let’s begin with respect, compassion and love for the individual – or we’ll never get anywhere.”

If you haven’t already, dear reader, I cannot exhort you enough to read Chekhov. Read his plays, read especially his short stories, read anything by him. Throughout Life and Fate the nature of indivisible, immutable bonds between human beings – whether it is a commander and his aide, an aging communist and her son-in-law, and of course the more common and enduring sets of relationships between sons and mothers, daughters and fathers – stand above and beyond the basic essentials of the narrative.

Another character, in a completely different set of circumstances on the Stalingrad front:

“Human groupings have one main purpose: to assert everyone’s right to be different, to be special, to think, feel and live in his or her own way. People join together in order to win or defend this right. But this is where a terrible, fateful error is born: the belief that these groupings in the name of a race, a God, a party or a State are the very purpose of life and not simply a means to an end. No! The only true and lasting meaning of the struggle for life lies in the individual, in his modest peculiarities and in his right to these peculiarities.”

If that is not a soaring counterpoint to and a damning indictment of the identity politics that has completely taken over our discourse today, I do not know what is.

When word of Grossman’s magnum opus got out the KGB stormed his apartment. They considered the novel so dangerous that they confiscated not only the manuscript but also the typewriter ribbons which were used to craft the novel. This level of paranoia could only exist in the Soviet Union. Why they did this is clear after reading it. Not only does Life and Fate show, through devastatingly understated examples of indelible characters who gradually become disillusioned, the hollow nature of the Soviet system’s promises and its similarity with the fascism that its patriotic adherents thought they were fighting, but it also demonstrated through the character of physicist Victor Shtrum, the anti-Semitism that while not as fatal as that in Nazi Germany, was slowly but surely brewing in the country’s corridors and the hearts and minds of its people. Even before the war ended it was clear that the Germans’ campaign of Jewish cleansing in Ukraine and parts of Russia could not have been carried out without the complicity of local populations who held grudges against Jews for decades. Grossman’s personal motivation because of his mother’s murder brought to his depiction of the Soviet Union’s initially “benign” and then increasingly oppressive anti-Semitism particularly strident and urgent force. The party line in the country refused to have writers like Grossman single out Jewish victims of the Holocaust because they knew that doing so would shine a mirror into their own faces. The combination of Grossman’s expose of the Soviets as being little different from the Nazis and anti-Semites to boot sealed his novel’s fate.

When Grossman asked when his book might see the light of day, a high-ranking party official named Suslov said there was no question of the volume being published for another two hundred years; by announcing such a draconian sentence on Grossman’s work, he inadvertently announced the novel’s incendiary nature. Grossman died in 1964 without seeing his book smuggled out and translated by Robert Chandler, a sad and lonely man in a Moscow apartment battling stomach cancer.

But his act of defiance, expressed in this profound book as an assertion of the fundamental nature of the individual and a rejection of collectivism of all kinds, spoke to the ages, escaped the fetters of its two hundred-year oppressors and brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union. And it could well bring about the collapse of the systems we take so much pride in because we fail to see how they are turning us into inchoate groups. So let us now practice thoughtless, stupid, unwitnessed kindness. It’s the one constant in life and fate.

First published on 3 Quarks Daily

Book review: Andrew Roberts's "The Storm of War"

The contemporary World War II historian faces a monumental task. He must sort through the enormous literature on the most devastating conflict in human history, both known and recently unearthed, and then pick out the gems. He must then string these gems together into a coherent narrative that strikes the right balance between offering all important details and yet not miring the reader in a dense thicket of minutiae. The achievement of this objective is the mark of a true historian, and in his new, stunningly succinct and yet comprehensive history of World War II, Andrew Roberts more than accomplishes this objective and reveals himself as a historian of the first rank; in the words of The Economist, "Britain's finest military historian".

What distinguishes Roberts's book from other World War II histories is that it's simply the most stunning encapsulation of every single front in the conflict in a relatively slim 600 pages that I have read. In his drive to leave no stone unturned and his capacity to compose brief portraits of key people and events, Roberts surpasses even eminent historian John Keegan. Roberts's style is distinguished by terse, tightly knit chapters that deliver the goods in brief paragraphs and analyses. While generally chronological and covering each important front, the chapters also include separate ones on the Holocaust and on strategic bombing. A single, absolutely masterful chapter summarizes the conflict at the end. Bringing new information to bear on well-known events, Roberts provides striking new insights into the war and puts some long-harbored beliefs to rest.

The most important thread running through Robert's retelling of The War constitutes the singular mistakes that Adolf Hitler made and his underlying motivations while also highlighting his strengths. Hitler had an unusually prodigious knowledge of military equipment and detail and was a shrewd controller of men; a striking example was when, in the aftermath of his victory over France, he suddenly promoted twelve generals to Field Marshals, thus generally diluting the distinguished character of the rank and emphasizing his dominion over his officers. However, whatever his strengths were were far overshadowed by the stupendous mistakes he made. Admittedly the greatest was to decide to attack the Soviet Union. Hitler completely underestimated the sheer tenacity of the ordinary Russian soldier and citizen and, on the other side of the continent, also underestimated the tenacity of that tiny island named England. His second great mistake was to foolishly declare war on the United States. Here Hitler made an even more elementary error in underestimating the enormous resources and production capacity of the United States which soon started bolstering the great Soviet war machine as well as the British. Most importantly, Hitler committed both mistakes fueled by his essential Nazism and thirst for Lebensraum (living space) in the East. And the fundamental underlying ideology driving this thinking which finally drove a stake into his grand plans was his racial theory about inferior Slavs and Jews. It was this rabid racial ideology for instance which prevented him from shrewdly taking advantage of Eastern Russians' contempt for Stalin's regime and turning them into allies; instead Hitler assigned the feared Einsatzgruppen to essentially wipe out Russian towns from the map. These SS units participated in the wholesale personalized murder of a million Russians in 1941 alone, killing on a scale whose sheer personal nature and horrifying brutality dwarfs even the later industrialized gassings of The Holocaust. Roberts does a superb job of highlighting how it was this basic racial and xenophobic mentality that drove almost all of Hitler's mistakes including most of his military ones.

Roberts also has revealing analyses of more tactical errors by Hitler. These include not ramping up U-boat production in time to possibly starve Britain and make her sue for peace, not focusing on fighter development without which his cherished bombers would be useless, and being almost blissfully indifferent to the Japanese whose help he could have considered in invading the Soviet Union. And then there were of course his two cardinal tactical errors; letting the British get away at Dunkirk (Roberts demolishes the belief that Hitler did this because he was interested in peace negotiations with Britain) and even more importantly, halting the advance on Moscow in the summer of 1941 and suddenly driving his forces to the South. This miscalculation, combined with Stalingrad and the later great tank battle of Kursk, signaled the death knell for the Nazi regime.

Roberts also pays due attention to the Pacific theater of war including the incredibly bloody fighting at Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima and Okinawa (although readers wanting a more complete treatment should check out Max Hastings's excellent "Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-1945"). His discussion of this front includes a superb chapter on the Battle of Midway which was the turning point in the Pacific war, and most notably a detailed and riveting analysis of the more under-appreciated stage of the battle in Burma. The British response in Burma against a determined enemy in a sweltering thicket of tropical heat and rain forests was comparable to anything else in the War, and Roberts calls the defeat of the Japanese in Burma the "greatest gift that the British could have given India". He also has detailed and tactically accomplished accounts of the war in North Africa, (against Rommel's famed Afrika Corps), Normandy, Sicily and Italy and of the Ardennes offensive (The Battle of the Bulge) and the march towards Berlin. These accounts are interspersed with sharp portraits of men like FDR, Churchill, Eisenhower, Montgomery, Manstein, Rommel, Keitel and Goring.

Robert's chapter on the U-boat war is particularly skilled and he carefully documents the initial disasters that befell the British navy in the Atlantic. The U-boats sank millions of tons of shipping, and if Hitler had stepped up production earlier he could have starved off Britain much sooner in the war. However, in the end it was not the resilience of the Royal Navy nor Germany's increasingly dwindling war production capability that were decisive; it was a secret weapon that was developed by mathematician Alan Turing and his colleagues at Bletchley Park near London. It is difficult to overemphasize the absolutely crucial role that breaking the Enigma code of the Nazis played in the war. It is a silent undercurrent running through Roberts's narrative but its overwhelming importance is clear; it was code-breaking that won the critical Battle of Midway, and it was code-breaking that proved pivotal not just in the U-boat battle but in North Africa and in Normandy. It was not the atomic bomb, not even radar, but the obscure code-breaking work of brilliant scientists toiling away in the utmost secrecy that really won the war.

Further on Roberts has separate chapters on the Holocaust and on strategic bombing. His chapter on the Holocaust is painful to read and captures the key facts, including why FDR avoided bombing the train tracks to Auschwitz; there was genuine concern about killing prisoners (concern that in hindsight seems misguided) and such bombing was seen as a diversion of bombers from German cities. Roberts's analysis of strategic bombing is highly readable. Along with the atomic bombing of Japan, it's strategic bombing that is the most controversial part of the Allied campaign. The destruction of Hamburg and Dresden are well known (the latter made famous by Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five"). Roberts wisely avoids passing any moral judgement and simply analyzes whether the carpet bombing of German cities worked, and whether it was necessary. The answer to the first question is decidedly yes. There is a clear correlation between dwindling German war production and air power and the Allied bombing campaign; the bombing also kept German aircraft away from the Eastern front. The answer to the second question is more ambiguous, but in hindsight provided by the first answer it too appears favourable. Certainly the number of people killed in German cities by bombing, while quite high, was dwarfed by ground losses on both Western and Eastern fronts.

If I have a minor gripe with the book, it is that Roberts could have added about a hundred more pages and fleshed out the chapters on Stalingrad and the Holocaust in more detail. No matter how many books you read about the War, the Eastern Front and the Holocaust comprise a set of events which constantly beggar belief by their sheer magnitudes and leave one's mind shatteringly numbed. While 6 million Jews and others were murdered in an orgiastic frenzy of factory-like slaughter, 27 million Russians lost their lives in what can only be described as Dante's worst nightmare, a sea of blood whose volume is unmatched in human history. Just one statistic puts the staggering Russian losses in perspective; for every American soldier who died on the battlefield, 60 Russian soldiers lost their lives. About a million men died at Stalingrad alone compared to half a million or so American soldiers in the entire War. At the same time, the unimaginable ferocity on the Eastern Front was possibly matched only by Josef Stalin's own monstrous barbarity toward his own people; not even Hitler personally tortured and murdered hundreds of thousands of his own officers and generals for absolutely no reason. In the annals of twentieth century brutality nobody can match the excesses of Stalin, and these excesses manifested themselves dangerously in the complete lack of preparation the Soviet Union faced during the early Nazi onslaught. It was only the gargantuan resolve of ordinary Russian citizens and soldiers combined with the certain death at the hands of their own officers that deserters would face (thanks to Stalin) that forced every Russian to fight for his or her life. The Nazi-Soviet conflict can only be seen through the lens of one of those mythical conflicts signaling the end of the world. While tomes have been published both on this conflict as well as the singular horror that was the Holocaust, Roberts has relatively brief (although highly well-informed) chapters on both topics and I thought that an addition of a hundred or so pages would have been a small sacrifice for some added narrative on these earth-shattering events.

But these are minor issues. In the purview of his analyses, the crisp and riveting style of his narrative and the comprehensive detailing of every single important front, battle and fact of this great conflict, Roberts is second to none. While Roberts's basic thrust is to highlight Hitler's tactical mistakes, his overweening racial ideology and his conflict with his generals, in retrospect of course such analysis is relatively easily enunciated. Just think of how we would have written history differently had the Nazis, God forbid, won the war. We would possibly be talking about French casualties incurred by Allied bombing instead of British casualties in the Blitz (the former actually exceeded the latter), and General Mark Clark letting the Nazi tenth army get away in Italy instead of Hitler letting the British get away at Dunkirk. Given the capacity of Hitler's armies, the experience and fighting capability of the German solider (probably the most well trained of any in the conflict), the superiority of German weaponry and the brilliance of his generals (of whom some like Manstein, Rommel and Guderin were regarded as the finest strategic minds on any side), it was by no means obvious that the Nazis would lose. But as Roberts's overall message in the book overwhelmingly indicates, in the end Adolf Hitler lost the war because of the same reason that he almost won it; because he was a Nazi.

I highly recommend this sweeping historical narrative. The Second World War was a transformative event in human history that should be remembered until the end of time. It deserves the constant and passionate attention of the finest historians of their generations, and Andrew Roberts proves himself as one of the best of this class.