Our book today is Max Hasting’s smashingly good 2004 Armageddon: The Battle for Germany – 1944-1945, a fat, heavily-detailed account of the final months of World War II in Western Europe, the fitful and protracted mopping-up about which Winston Churchill said in February of 1945, “Tonight the sun goes down on more suffering than ever before in the world.”

One of the many, many strengths of Hastings’ pitiless book is its willingness to assign a chunk of that suffering to Churchill himself, who insisted on continuing the savage, comprehensive carpet-bombing of German cities long after they posed any strategic or logistical threat to anybody. But there’s plenty of blame to go around here, from the German populace displaying itself every bit as callous and jingoistic in defeat as it had been in victory to the remorseless Red Army troops raping and pillaging their way across Eastern Europe in a whirlwind of destruction the other Allies disgracefully allowed to the British and American troops slogging their way deeper and deeper into the German heartland, increasingly concentrating on all the wrong things:

A contemporary British report identified three causes for sluggish forward movement: enemy resistance, difficulty of supply and repair; and “the desire of soldiers to enjoy ‘the fruits of victory.’” Bing, one of 13 Para’s Alsatian dogs which had jumped at the Rhine in special harnesses, disappeared one morning and was found hopelessly drunk in a German wine cellar. Loot had become the chief preoccupation of some men. “Did he have a Luger? Did he have a Luger?” a captain in Private Charles Felix’s battalion demanded, almost jumping up and down with excitement, when he heard that his men had captured a German officer.

Hastings is one of our best living military historians, and the Second World War is his speciality. He delves in primary sources like few historians of any period, always in search of the telling human details that make his writing so dramatic:

When front-line soldiers escaped from imminent peril for a few hours, their desires were usually pathetically simple. Soldiers talk much about women, but on the battlefield their private cravings were seldom sexual. A British officer described his men’s priorities as “char, wad, flick and kip” – tea, food, a movie, and sleep.

This is necessarily a brutal story. The Third Reich was in ruins by this point, and the German army was split between swaths of surrender and many hard chunks of desperate, last-man fighting after all hope was lost. It’s to this period that the famous confrontations at Arnhem and the Hurtgen Forest belong, as well as what Hastings refers to as an “American Epic,” the Battle of the Bulge. As the net inexorably tightened on Germany, it caught more and more civilians; Hastings’ book, almost always supremely uneasy reading, is full of women who are clearly outrageously traumatized (at one point a British officer exasperatedly tries to explain to a bawling German housewife that her misery was only a small fraction of the misery her nation had visited on countless others, but he soon gives up). And it’s full of children who’ve been blasted completely out of childhood:

A British tank officer glimpsed some tiny figures beside a wood half a mile away, from which a German half-track had just emerged. He fired a few rounds of high explosives from his gun, then followed up with a long burst of Bess machine-gun fire. Trees caught fire. He saw survivors start to move across the tanks, hands held high. “To my horror, they were civilians,” wrote William Steel-Brownlie, “followed by a horse and cart on which were piled all kinds of household goods. They were children, a boy and a girl, holding hands and running as hard as they could over the rough ploughed earth. They came right up to the tank, looked up at me, and the small boy said in English, ‘You have killed my father.’ There was nothing I could say.”

In addition to being superbly talented, Hastings is also prolific – a happy combination that isn’t as common as it once was – and Armageddon is one of his best books. A hard, horrifying book, but a great one.