![]() ![]() ![]() Jonathon Sumption criticised the book's "relentlessly pessimistic message" and says that the everyman perspective gives a distorted view of the war.Īll Hell Let Loose was named as one of the The Telegraph's Books of the Year 2011, in the category of History Books. All Hell Let Loose: The World at War 1939-1945 by Sir Max Hastings A magisterial history of the greatest and most terrible event in history, from one of the finest historians of the Second World War. Thomson also says that Hastings has "a faint antipathy towards foreigners". In a review in The Observer, Ian Thomson noted the book's British-centric Western Front narrative, although not ignoring other aspects of the war, and called it "immensely long, but extremely readable". ![]() Martin Rubin, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, gave a positive review, calling All Hell Let Loose "a true distillation of everything this historian has learned from a lifetime of scholarship". Hastings concludes that whilst the Nazis fought individual battles well, their overall war effort showed "stunning incompetence". The book addresses several "triumphalist" aspects of written war history by focusing on the "misery, heroism and endurance" of individual accounts. Reviews refer to the book as an "everyman's story" made up of accounts from those with lesser roles in the conflict "ranging from ship's cooks to wireless operators, farmers and housewives to typists and black marketeers." ![]() All Hell Let Loose covers the entire span of World War II, following the military developments of the war but focusing on the reactions and experiences of different individuals (both uniformed and civilian). ![]()
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