Antony Beevor, The Second World War (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2012), 880 pp., $35.00.

WAR IS inherently dramatic, but military histories can be dull. Often written from the generals’ viewpoint, many traditional accounts of famous battles and campaigns mire the reader in a blur of unrecognizable geography and confusing unit identifications (the Third Regiment of the Second Division of the Fourth Army, etc.). These tomes are somehow arid and lifeless as well as dull; they make death and suffering abstract.

In his 1976 book The Face of Battle, the great modern military historian John Keegan established a new standard. Keegan, who died recently at seventy-eight, set out to tell what battle is really like from the perspective of the combatants, from the lowliest foot soldier to the field commanders. Among other eye-openers, he documented that armies and navies often permitted—or encouraged—their men to drink a tot or two of alcohol before going into battle to bolster courage or at least numb fear. Keegan’s in-the-trenches approach enormously influenced the telling of military history. Drawing from diaries and letters as well as official after-action reports, he showed that it was possible to be scholarly and analytical but also vivid and personal when writing about the conduct of war. Military historians now routinely describe the visceral sensations of combat, once considered unseemly—the terrible sights and smells, the human sensations of men engaged in mortal struggle, and the horrible toll imposed on the women and children caught in the middle.

An interesting question is whether these you-are-there books make war more or less seductive. In 2007, at an Aspen Ideas Festival, I watched with fascination as the novelist and writer Tobias Wolff struggled to explain why war continues to be appealing despite its ugliness, especially to young men uncertain about their manhood. In a memoir, In Pharaoh’s Army, Wolff had written about his own decidedly unheroic experience as an army officer in Vietnam in the mid-1960s. Wolff tried to bring out the pettiness, meanness and tedium of his time as a combat soldier, occasionally in danger but more often engaged in morally dubious activities such as trading TV sets for war souvenirs. But readers still found romance and bravery in his tale. “What is the weird attraction of war?” Wolff asked the audience in Aspen. He answered his own question: war has an “aesthetic quality,” however grotesque, as well as undeniable narrative power. Wolff noted that whole generations of novelists have written antiwar books that overtly seek to tell young men, “Don’t do this!” but end up subtly encouraging them to test themselves.

I thought of both Keegan and Wolff—and the lure of war, at once sordid and heroic, dull and pornographic—when I read Antony Beevor’s The Second World War. At over eight hundred pages, Beevor’s book is a doorstop. It is the third full-length treatment of World War II by a prominent historian in the past year. Max Hastings’s Inferno: The World at War, 1939–1945 is terrific, sweeping and engaging. So is The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War, by Andrew Roberts. Do we really need yet another encyclopedic tour of well-trod battlefields? Beevor once studied under Keegan at Sandhurst, the royal military academy, and he served five peacetime years as an officer in the British Army’s Eleventh Hussars. His previous works include compelling World War II battle narratives such as Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege: 1942–1943; Berlin: The Downfall 1945; and D-Day: The Battle for Normandy. His avowed motivation for writing this new, vast treatise about such a familiar subject is modest and self-deprecating: “I always felt a bit of a fraud when consulted as a general expert on the Second World War because I was acutely conscious of large gaps in my knowledge, especially of unfamiliar aspects. This book is partly an act of reparation.”

Beevor sells himself short. Perhaps he is being coy or practicing proper British understatement. (He is a public-school boy, educated at Winchester and married into a famous British family.) In his acknowledgment, he goes on to grandly but blandly say that his book is an “attempt to understand how the whole complex jigsaw fits together, with the direct and indirect effects of actions and decisions taking place in very different theatres of war.” This all sounds very worthy and high concept, like those soporific volumes by military historians of old.

Actually, Beevor plunges us right into the heart of darkness. Taking his lesson from his former teacher Keegan, he makes the war intensely personal, even as it rages across several continents over a span of almost a decade. (Beevor dates the beginning of the conflict to the Second Sino-Japanese War’s outbreak in 1937, not to the more customary starting gun, Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939.) He opens his story with a revealing anecdote about a young soldier who surrendered to American paratroopers during the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944. The soldier, at first mistaken for Japanese, was Korean. He was conscripted into Nippon’s Kwantung Army in Manchuria in 1938, then captured by the Russians and sent to a labor camp. Then, he was drafted into the Red Army in 1942. After being taken prisoner by the German army in 1943, he was sent to man the Atlantic Wall in 1944. He died in Illinois in 1992. Yes, it truly was a world war. It was also, Beevor writes, the “greatest man-made disaster in history.” Beevor’s contribution is to show convincingly how World War II, which Americans have come to regard as “the Good War,” was an epically stupid war, not to mention degrading and dehumanizing beyond belief. The cruelties and beastliness he recounts in clear, vivid, well-documented prose left me exhausted and sad. And, I have to admit, thrilled.

THE MOST mesmerizing, fantastically awful confrontation was in the East—the Godzilla versus King Kong death match of Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. Woe to the Pole or Ukrainian caught between these two monsters. Why the German people followed a psychotic criminal with a death wish—a shaman who promised a thousand-year Reich but had no heir and was sure he would die young—remains a mystery, even in Beevor’s insightful and unsentimental retelling.

Hitler was hardly subtle about his madness. His policy, stated on the first page of Mein Kampf—a copy of which every German couple had to purchase upon marriage—was to drive the Jews and Slavs from Eastern Europe and Russia west of the Urals to create lebensraum, living space for the Aryan master race. “The Jews must get out of Germany, yes out of the whole of Europe,” Hitler told his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels on November 30, 1937. “That will take some time yet, but will and must happen.”

Germans didn’t really take his apocalyptic ambitions seriously, at least for the first few years of the Third Reich, according to Beevor. Enjoying the fruits of an economy heated by rearmament, they chose to believe the Führer’s avowals that he did not seek war. By and large, Germans accepted and even embraced Hitler’s paranoid fascism. The Gestapo, writes Beevor, “was surprisingly idle. Most of its arrests were purely in response to denunciations of people by their fellow Germans.”

In his megalomania, Hitler saw himself as a quasi deity. He was not religious; in a petty show of self-sacrifice, he gave up Christmas as well as watching movies for the duration of the war. But he believed providence was on his side, especially after escaping, by twelve minutes, a bomb intended to kill him in 1939. (The reaction in London, wrote a commentator, was “summed up in a calm British ‘Bad luck’, as though someone had missed a pheasant.”)

Still, he was in a hurry; Beevor notes that “in the spring of 1939, he explained his impatience to the Romanian foreign minister: ‘I am now fifty,’ he said. ‘I would rather have the war now than when I am fifty-five or sixty.’” In the struggle for world domination, he knew that ultimately he would confront the United States. He wanted to conquer Europe and Russia first, before America was ready to send a force across the Atlantic. He believed he had until 1943 or 1944; he regarded the Americans as a strong “Nordic” race undermined by a Jewish cabal. Yet, he foolishly declared war on the United States on December 11, 1941, four days after Pearl Harbor (FDR had declared war on Japan but not Germany). “A great power doesn’t let itself have war declared on it—it declares war itself,” proclaimed Hitler’s foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, probably echoing Hitler’s own words. “From that moment, Germany became incapable of winning the Second World War outright,” writes Beevor.

Probably, Hitler already had assured the Reich’s demise with an even greater blunder. In June 1941, he recklessly broke the taboo against a two-front war and ignored the injunction of Germany’s great statesman Otto von Bismarck to never invade Russia. Defeating “Jewish Bolshevism” would be easy, predicted Hitler. “We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten edifice will come crashing down,” he told his commanders. Some were not so sure; they were rereading General Armand de Caulaincourt’s account of Napoleon’s march on Moscow and dreadful retreat. But they stayed mum.

HITLER’S BLIND self-regard was exceeded only by Stalin’s. The Kremlin dictator cynically allied with his avowed archenemy. He even accommodated Hitler’s anti-Semitism. On May 3, 1939, troops of the NKVD, the Kremlin’s secret police, surrounded the commissariat of foreign affairs. “Purge the ministry of Jews,” Stalin ordered. “Clean out the ‘synagogue.’” Then he remained in complete denial as Hitler prepared to turn on Russia by massing an army of 140 divisions along its border. The Russian dictator believed the Germans’ protestations that they were just relocating troops beyond the range of British bombers. Warnings of more sinister motivations were dismissed by Stalin as angliiskaya provokatsia, provocations planted by English spies. Truth tellers were shot for spreading “disinformation.” Stalin’s appeasement of Hitler was so complete that in June 1941, trains bearing food and fuel from Russia to Germany passed trains carrying German troops to invade Russia.

The Red Army was ill prepared for the German onslaught. Stalin had purged most of its best generals. Huddled in the Kremlin as the Wehrmacht stormed eastward in the summer of 1941, Stalin seemed to despair. “Lenin founded our state,” he was known to say, “and we’ve fucked it up.”

He was saved by the vastness of the motherland and the stubbornness of its people. German army officers were depressed by Russia’s endless flatness and the willingness of her soldiers to fight back. German intelligence reckoned on two hundred enemy divisions and encountered 360. Obsolete Russian warplanes rammed the German planes head-on. The Russians found that women made good snipers; they resisted cold better and had steadier hands. (The female snipers often had to do double duty as “campaign wives” for their commanders.)

Not all Russians volunteered. The People’s Levy, a mass conscription, was thrown into murderous attacks, literally acting, in the Russian phrase, as “meat for cannon.” One survey of a thousand hospitalized soldiers found that almost half had shot themselves in the left hand or forearm to avoid frontline combat. Confessing to self-inflicted wounds, they were sent to “punishment companies” to walk through minefields.

The ghastliest sideshow on the eastern front was Leningrad, a city of 2.5 million, four hundred thousand of them children. Hitler intended to pave over the city and give the land to Finland. First, he would starve it out. During the 880-day siege of Leningrad, roughly a million civilians died of hunger and disease—more than the toll of all American and British soldiers killed in World War II.

Hitler’s generals faced a logistical quandary: How to feed the Wehrmacht’s three million men and six hundred thousand horses? The perversely social Darwinian answer was to save food by starving the Russians. Under the “Hunger Plan,” Russian POWS would not be fed but rather “turned out to pasture,” like cows. Two-thirds of the three million Russian POWS died on forced marches across a frozen and burned land. The Germans didn’t want their trains “infected” by a “foul-smelling” mass.

The German invasion was meant to be a war of extermination. Hitler wanted to get rid of thirty million Soviet citizens, leaving just enough to be slaves in a German “Garden of Eden.” In the meantime, Russian women were rounded up and placed into official brothels. This was awkward; by German law, sex with untermenschen (subhumans) was forbidden. Still, rules had to be bent to maintain discipline over the troops and control venereal disease. The plight of the Ukrainians, abused first by Russians and then by Germans, is especially pitiable. Some Christian Orthodox Ukrainians, seeing the black crosses on German armored vehicles, prayed that the Germans had come to deliver them from godless Bolshevism.

The Germans arrived at the gates of Moscow along with the Russian winter. With temperatures falling to thirty degrees below centigrade, the number of soldiers lost to frostbite in the Wehrmacht—which lacked proper winter coats—exceeded the number wounded by Soviet fire. The Germans took to sawing off the legs of frozen comrades and melting the limbs before a fire, the better to pull off and reuse their boots.

Now it was Hitler’s turn to go into denial. He simply disbelieved reports of new Russian armies and ordered his troops to stand and die, which they did, holding ground so that German soldiers could perish in even greater numbers over the next two years in abattoirs like Stalingrad.

BACK IN the fatherland, Hitler’s toadies were grappling with more logistics. What to do about the “Jewish problem”? The Nazis had hoped to push the fifteen million Jews of Europe eastward, across the Urals, to forage or starve with the thirty-odd million uprooted Slavs. But with the Russian line holding at Moscow and the ghettos and concentration camps filling in Prussia and Poland, a disposal problem loomed.

Hitler had hinted strongly at the “final solution.” In 1939, on the sixth anniversary of his taking power, he predicted, “If international Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will be not the Bolshevization of the earth and therefore the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.” Beevor writes: “Breathtaking confusion of cause and effect lay at the heart of Hitler’s obsessive network of lies and self-deception.”

Yet Hitler himself shied from seeing the literal consequences of his demonic logic. Fearful of being held responsible for genocide, he was also squeamish about the details. “His desire to keep violence abstract was a significant psychological paradox in one who had done more than almost anyone else in history to promote it,” observes Beevor.

German efficiency does not describe Hitler’s Reich. A chaotic overlapping bureaucracy of death competed to please the Führer and fulfill his “prophesy.”

At first, the killing was haphazard and piecemeal. Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s chief executioner as commander of the dreaded SS, initially regarded genocide as the “Bolshevik method,” at once “un-German” and “impossible.” For a brief time, he thought of shipping the Jews someplace far away, like Madagascar. As the Wehrmacht drove eastward, Einsatzgruppen death squads, roughly three thousand men of the SS, began shooting male Jews and driving women and children into the swamps. (The SS was an intellectual elite; most Einsatzgruppen commanders had doctorates from Germany’s great old universities.) These clever men figured out how to stack bodies in open graves to waste fewer bullets (this was known as “the sardine method”). Cruder SS thugs enjoyed burning the beards of rabbis. Soon the SS was killing Jewish women and children, too, so that no one would be left alive to seek revenge.

But slaughter by guns and explosives was messy and inefficient. Over the course of late 1941 and early 1942, the “Shoah by bullets” gave way to the “Shoah by gas”—industrialized murder.

The Germans had practiced with euthanasia on “degenerates,” “useless mouths” and “lives unworthy of life.” Beginning in July 1939, under a program set up by Hitler’s personal physician, parents began sending off lame or mentally disturbed children to be “better cared for” than at home. The children did not come back; “Died from ‘pneumonia’” was the explanation. Many were gassed. In Poland, the Nazis began experimenting with sealed trucks and exhaust fumes. At Auschwitz, an insecticide called Zyklon B was used for the first time in an improvised gas chamber.

Himmler himself came to observe. He was concerned for the “spiritual welfare” of the executioners who were getting stomachaches and nightmares from shooting Jews. Gas was tidier. Himmler also recommended sing-alongs for the guards. He did not neglect music for the doomed inmates. When he came to inspect Auschwitz in the summer of 1942, the camp orchestra of Jewish musicians played the triumphal march from Verdi’s Aida. The Nazis had a sick sense of humor: supplies of Zyklon B were delivered in vans marked with the Red Cross.

Beevor notes that some have claimed that the production-line method of Auschwitz was “influenced by” Henry Ford, the American car magnate who had in turn borrowed the efficiencies of Chicago slaughterhouses. Ford was a virulent anti-Semite; Hitler hung his portrait on the wall of his office in Munich. But Beevor cautions that no real evidence has emerged that Ford production lines were in fact copied by the extermination camps.

DESPITE SHOWING the oppressive and almost indiscriminate depravity of war, Beevor does not fall into the trap of moral equivalence. Churchill and FDR were right; World War II was a battle of light against darkness, freedom against tyranny. That does not, however, mean that the Allies were free of moral opprobrium or that their commanders were not sometimes pigheaded butchers.

Beevor’s fellow Britons come across as obtuse, sometimes charmingly so. British soldiers evacuated from Dunkirk, where their wounds filled with maggots, are speechless at the sight of cricketers dressed in white, playing away on green fields as the hospital trains chug by. Shot down in a dogfight over southern England, a Pole flying with the RAF parachutes into an exclusive tennis club. Someone signs him in as a guest, finds a spare set of flannels and hands him a racquet so he can join in the tournament.

Other Brits are more grimly bloody-minded than insouciantly dashing. The RAF’s Sir Arthur Harris was determined to bomb Germany into submission. He believed he could break the morale of the German population by relentless night bombing, and he regarded anyone who doubted him as a fainthearted gentleman. Pilots and airmen who broke down under the strain (2,989 of them) were labeled LMF, “Lacking in Moral Fibre.” In the summer of 1943, “Bomber Harris” devised Operation Gomorrah to burn Hamburg. Incendiary bombs created a chimney or volcano of heat, sucking hurricane-force winds to spread the fire. At seventeen thousand feet, the aircrews could smell the burning flesh. Over three nights in February 1945, Harris’s bombers, aided by American bombers, leveled Dresden. “The fact that this baroque jewel on the Elbe was one of the great architectural and artistic treasures of Europe did not concern him for a moment,” writes Beevor. In addition to seeking to impress Stalin with Allied air power, “Harris was also keen to attack Dresden simply because it remained one of the few major cities which had not yet been flattened.”

Harris’s strategy failed. The German people remained stoic, and their leaders refused to give up, in part because they feared being hanged as war criminals. (“Hitler’s greatest fear was not execution, but of being captured and taken back to Moscow in a cage.”) Invasion and absolute victory were the only answer to Hitler’s Götterdämmerung. The endgame, as played by the Red Army in Beevor’s telling, is appalling.

“Russian solders were raping every German female from eight to eighty,” observed Soviet war correspondent Natalya Gesse, a friend of the Soviet nuclear scientist Andrei Sakharov. “It was an army of rapists. Not only because they were crazed with lust, this was also a form of vengeance.” Beevor writes: “Altogether on German territory some two million women and girls are thought to have been raped.” East Prussia saw the worst of it. When the Red Army arrived at a hunting lodge that had belonged to the Prussian royal family and been used by Reich Marshal Hermann Göring, a Russian soldier used black paint to write khuy, the Russian word for “prick,” across a nude of Aphrodite by Rubens. The Russians did liberate Auschwitz, where the Germans were trying to cover up the evidence but left 328,820 men’s suits, 836,255 women’s coats and dresses, and several tons of human hair (good for making warm clothes for the German army).

I have dwelled on Beevor’s recounting of the European war, but he is equally devastating in his description of the war in the Pacific. The cruelties were no less gruesome. U.S. Air Force commander General Curtis LeMay was an even more efficient fire bomber than “Bomber Harris,” incinerating one hundred thousand residents in Tokyo in one night in March 1945. For sheer sadism and beastliness, the Japanese may take the prize. In New Guinea and Borneo, they ate their prisoners. “The practice of treating prisoners as ‘human cattle’ had not come about from a collapse of discipline,” writes Beevor. “It was usually directed by officers.” Because the subject was deemed too upsetting for the families of soldiers who died in the Pacific War, the Allies suppressed the evidence of cannibalism at the war-crime trials in Tokyo in 1946. (Another statistic that didn’t make the American papers: over ten days after the arrival of U.S. troops at Yokohama on August 30, 1945, there were 1,336 cases of rape reported in the city and surrounding region.)

In all the poor judgment, not to say madness, that went into World War II, the Japanese hold a special place. There is considerable evidence that many in the Japanese leadership knew they were going to lose if they attacked the United States. But fatalistic and obsessed with national honor, they dropped their bombs on Pearl Harbor anyway.

Evan Thomas is the author of Sea of Thunder and The War Lovers. His biography of President Eisenhower, Ike’s Bluff: President Eisenhower’s Secret Battle to Save the World, will be published in September by Little, Brown and Co.

Pullquote: Beevor’s contribution is to show convincingly how World War II, which Americans have come to regard as “the Good War,” was an epically stupid war, not to mention degrading and dehumanizing beyond belief.Image: Essay Types: Book Review