Our bombing of Germany, according to Hastings, killed 600,000 Germans, destroyed 2 million homes and cost us the lives of 50,000 aircrew. ‘Churchill or Portal should have stopped Harris’s manic assault on Germany’s surviving cities,’ he declares. ‘Neither did so, Churchill because he was preoccupied elsewhere, Portal because he lacked the steel indispensable to great military commanders.’
Holding out until the bitter end had other terrible consequences. By 1945, we are reminded, ‘the millions who languished within the camps of the Third Reich awaited deliverance in the knowledge that they were doomed unless relief came soon’. And for many it came too late. ‘They could have been quicker,’ said one of Hastings’s 170 witnesses who enliven this narrative. He had been three years in a concentration camp. ‘The Western Allies only started to fight,’ he added bitterly and a little unfairly, ‘when the Germans were almost beaten. They were bloody slow. They were too late for too many.’ After our heady celebrations 60 years on from D-Day, that offers another perspective.
After reading this monumental study of total war and what it entailed, I understand why some visionaries believed in 1945 that Europe must unite or perish. But memories are short, and against animosities aroused by the prospect of a federal Europe that vision fades. Schools would do well to put this book in their library.
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