Nick's Reviews > Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944-1945

I bought this book sight unseen assuming it was written by a historian. After reading for a while, I suspected that the writer of this book wasn’t a historian at all. I was correct, he’s a journalist and former editor or right wing conservative newspapers The Daily Telegraph and Evening Standard.

In the foreword he claims that the “chief purpose” of the book was “objective analysis”. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I am of the view that no writing can be unbiased or wholly objective. What bothers me is the claim of “objective analysis” when the final result is the regurgitation of tired and standard cliché right wing talking points, while at the same time downplaying (or not even mentioning) events which doesn’t fit with his propagandist grand narrative.

The events on the Eastern front are rushed through, almost like an afterthought. But if someone on the Western front stubs his toe or drops his ice cream, prepare to read about it in great detail.

Three of the chapters are devoted to different themes, four cover the Eastern front and nine (!) the Western front.

Hastings describes the differences between the two fronts. In the West the allies don’t hate the Germans. There is an almost cordial, gentlemanlike relationship between the combatants, which he is careful to point out several times. In the East, however, Hastings never misses an opportunity to point out what vicious brutes the Russians are, and how they are seething with hatred for the Germans. Sure, he mentions in chapter 10 that “Hitler and his armies had aspired to enslave the Russian people, no more and no less” which is a half truth.

But when Hastings describes large parts of the Red Army as an “immense rabble of Mongols”, I actually have to question which side of the war he would have been on. Because that language is not far from the Nazi phrase “Asiatic hordes”.

To understand the actions of the Red Army you have to understand two basic concepts Hastings does not mention by a word.

Drang nach Osten predates the Nazis, and is basically about German colonial expansion into Slavic lands which are to be Germanized. See Israel for a modern day comparison. People today are probably more familiar with the Nazi version of the concept, Lebensraum. Hitler is quoted in Hitler, A Chronology Of His Life And Time as saying:

"It is eastwards, only and always eastwards, that the veins of our race must expand. It is the direction which Nature herself has decreed for the expansion of the German peoples."

2nd ed. p. 201

Generalplan Ost was Nazi Germany’s plan for what would happen with the Eastern territories. Roughly half or more of Russians were to be exterminated, a large part forcibly expelled to Siberia, and those who are allowed to remain will serve as slaves. Need I point out that Nazi Germany didn’t have a similar plan for the West?

Rape on the Eastern front was rampant, whereas it was not so on the Western front. The following quote from Surviving Hitler and Mussolini: Daily Life in Occupied Europe will suffice:

Depending on the brutality of the warfare and on the particular circumstances in each occupied country, women were to a varying degree and in unknown numbers raped, abused and sexually harassed by German soldiers. In practice the German authorities tolerated rape as part of the warfare in eastern and southeastern Europe but not in the northern and western countries.

p. 90

The suffering in the East, not at least including Russia, was immense. Nothing in the West came anywhere near it. The war on the Eastern front was a war of annihilation. What the Germans were doing, although they had no way of knowing it at the time, was sowing the storm.

Hastings laments the fate of “ethnic Germans” who were to be forcibly expelled. What was the ratio between the German “historic residents” and “recent immigrants” in the Eastern territories? How many of them lived on land stolen from the indigenous population? How many had profited from the Nazi expansionist colonial policy, including slave labor? Again Hastings doesn’t know, care or bother to tell us.

The phrase “recent immigrants” is an interesting choice of words, by the way. “Colonists” or “occupiers” would be more suited. But then again, that would complicate Hastings’ grand narrative.

When the Red Army finally struck back, it was time for the Germans to reap the whirlwind. Hastings pontificates about the glorious ideals of the West with tired platitudes about democracies and totalitarian states. While the Soviet Union, which apparently was no better than Nazi Germany, didn’t even hesitate to starve their own population and were fighting to expand its territory, the gallant West was altruistically fighting for freedom and democracy. Sure, Hastings briefly mentions that “many Americans were more troubled by the residual imperial ambitions of their British ally”, but that is as far as his discussion of Western colonialism goes.

Meanwhile, in the year preceding the events in this book, three million people died of famine in the British colony India, in Bengal alone. In part because Churchill’s War Cabinet denied India food imports (see for example Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II).

And of course there is no mention of the growing American imperialism in the so-called “Banana Wars” or the Spanish-American War for that matter, where the US was literally awarded colonies.

If the Allied goal was to liberate Europe from the yoke of oppression, it doesn’t explain why the allies rigged elections in Italy, supported various authoritarian governments, including the military junta, in Greece, and supported the Franco dictatorship in Spain (which Britain even did before the war, see for example Franco's Friends: How British Intelligence Helped Bring Franco to Power in Spain)

Hastings does all in his power to gloss over (or not even mention) crimes - murder, looting and rape - perpetrated by the Allies on the Western front. Most likely because it doesn't fit with his propagandist grand narrative. Antony Beevor on the other hand paints a for more nuanced and frank picture in D-Day: The Battle for Normandy.

The actions of the Russians on the Eastern front are repeatedly described by Hastings as an “orgy”, be it of looting, murder or rape. Of course he doesn’t use the same word to describe the mass looting and rape on the Western front (see for example Taken by Force: Rape and American GIs in Europe during WWII: or Als die Soldaten kamen: Die Vergewaltigung deutscher Frauen am Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs).

Although there was widespread looting on the Western front, naturally the “Anglo-Americans were a great deal less brutal than the Russians”, and of course some gentlemanly Western soldiers feel really bad about it, which Hastings is careful to point out.

All men who participate in wars find themselves obliged to do things which, if they are decent people, they afterwards regret. That was the case with many American and British soldiers, and some German and Russian ones, after the Second World War. More than a few were traumatized for years by events in which they had participated. Other Germans and Russians, however, including those who must be categorized as war criminals, suffered no guilts or doubts.

Chapter 16

Rarely has chauvinist Westernism been so obvious. How many in the Western allies felt any guilt about mass murdering civilians in the strategic bombing campaign? Hastings himself has this to say about it:

There sometimes seemed a peculiar bloodlessness about the routine of massed bomber operations in the final months of the war. The fliers tripped their switches 21,000 feet above Germany, and those who had not suffered misfortune or disaster went home to see that night’s movie or to head for the huge dance hall in London’s Covent Garden that was their favourite rendezvous.

Chapter 11

Hastings rarely misses an opportunity to lament the fate of Germans on the Eastern front, only to go out of his way to whitewash allied crimes on the Western front. The Germans (including civilians) only have themselves to blame since they started it.

For example, the Soviet Union sinking the Wilhelm Gustloff gets more than three pages, or 1 261 words. When the British sink the Cap Arkona, which is carrying 5 000 concentration camp inmates, it’s brushed away with four sentences, or 87 words. (Actually, Hastings deserves credit for even mentioning Cap Arkona, something which Anthony Beevor doesn’t do in The Fall of Berlin 1945)

He devotes some pages to describe the effects of the Allied strategic bombing campaign on ordinary Germans. But I actually balked when I read the following:

Some Germans today brand the bombing of their cities a war crime. This seems an incautious choice of words. It is possible to deplore Harris’s excesses without accepting that they should be judged in such emotive language.

Chapter 11

First of all, Hastings' own book is brimming with "emotive language". And to dismiss this claim by saying that “some Germans” think the strategic bombing campaign was a war crime is propaganda on the highest level. You could compare it to the strategic fire bombing campaign in Japan, about which Robert McNamara had the following to say in the documentary Fog of War:

LeMay said, "If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals." And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?

What the Americans did in Japan, they did in Germany, albeit on a smaller scale. There is no doubt that if the Germans had won the war, it would be British and American politicians and military leaders who would be swinging from the gallows.

Hastings has the following to say about Japan:

Japan’s surrender in August 1945, before the Allies were obliged to invade its mainland, undoubtedly spared it from death and destruction on a scale to match that which took place in Germany.

Chapter 16

Again Hastings is carefully toeing the line of decades long right wing propaganda. To even imply that Japan was in any way “spared” is such a display of magnificent ignorance and arrogance that it boggles the mind. I would direct anyone interested in this to read Hiroshima Nagasaki: The Real Story of the Atomic Bombings and Their Aftermath by Paul Ham, a journalist capable of critical thinking, as opposed to armchair general Hastings.

Then again, Hastings is the author who dismissed that one of the reasons for dropping the atomic bombs on Japan was a power demonstration against the Soviet Union as a “conspiracy theory”. I urge anyone interested in reading the work of a real journalist to pick up Paul Ham’s book:

Still, Hastings frantically tries to defend the atrocities carried out by the allies on the Western front:

But by the mid-twentieth century civilized societies imposed upon their military leaders parameters of humanity and respect for life. Thus it was that the least civilized combatants of the Second World War performed the most notable military feats achieved by flesh and blood. It was left to the Western allies to amaze the world by the deeds that could be accomplished through the brilliant application of technology and industrial might.

Chapter 16

Meanwhile, Basil Liddell Hart, had the following to say about the allied bombing campaign on the Western front in his private diary:

It would be ironical if the defenders of civilisation depend for victory upon the most barbaric and unskilled way of winning a war the world has seen.

What is the moral difference between murdering civilians eye to eye or doing so en masse from the relative safety of a bomber? Why is the latter morally superior to the former? How does it make any difference to the civilian population? If you expect any kind of answer from Hastings you are mistaken.

In summation: The way Germany acted in their invasions of the Western and Eastern fronts, and the suffering the population under occupation endured, is very different. When the tides turned, the Soviet Union meted out the same punishment which they themselves had suffered in the hands of the Germans. Tit for tat. On the Western front, which had not experienced the same suffering as the in the East, the allies still responded with their own mass rape, murder and looting, although not on the same scale as in the East. How does that make the former reprehensible and the latter morally superior?

If there is supposed to be any substantial difference between democratic and authoritarian states, there must be something more than the way the leaders are selected. “They killed a million civilians, we only killed half a million civilians, therefore we’re better” is hardly any basis for claiming moral superiority. Why should authoritarian regimes be the standard for what is acceptable or not?

Paul Ham ends his book with the following words, which are just as applicable to the European theatre:

Taken together, or alone, the reasons offered in defence of the bomb do not justify the massacre of innocent civilians. We debase ourselves, and the history of civilisation, if we accept that Japanese atrocities warranted an American atrocity in reply.

Nothing I have written is meant to excuse or downplay the atrocities carried out by the Soviet Union on the Eastern front. It is merely an attempt to put their actions into context, something which Hastings is reluctant to do.

Or simply don’t claim that your goal is “objective analysis”.