So what can Hastings bring to a new study? For one thing, he has had a long and distinguished career writing about World War II. He has written books on the bomber offensive, the Normandy Campaign, the end of the war in Europe, and the end of the war in the East, to name a few. Secondly, he has been a war correspondent: the first Briton into Port Stanley when it was recaptured from the Argentinians in 1982. Then, as a newspaperman, Hastings has a journalist’s eye for a telling anecdote. In the Introduction to this book, he states that he has favoured relatively obscure anecdotage. This is largely true, although the frequent appearance of stories from Nella Last, Victor Klemperer, and Vassily Grossman indicates that he has not always been successful in dodging the old favourites. Nevertheless, even when Hastings uses well-known sources, he can often produce an unexpected comment, such as Klemperer’s conclusion – made as early as July 1942, from the isolation of a Jew in Dresden – that Rommel had lost the desert war.

Hastings’s method is to describe the main military events with great clarity and then swoop down to an individual participant for ‘bottom-up’ views and experiences. This is not quite as revolutionary an approach as Hastings seems to think. Most of his emphasis is in fact on decision-making at the top; the anecdotes merely flesh out the story.

And the story is well told. The military events are clear – no small achievement when it comes to the Eastern Front, where armies of immense size fought across thousands of kilometres of front. I can find little to disagree with in Hastings’s major conclusions. He is surely right in concluding, against the run of recent historiography, that German success in the West could not have been averted. Given the sclerotic French command system and their lack of decent commanders, it is impossible to see how the German advance could have been halted. His view that the halt before Moscow in 1941 meant that the war in the east was no longer winnable also seems sound. On the bomber offensive, which remains one of the most controversial aspects of World War II, he is judicious, recognising that, while the mass killing of civilians is to be deplored, the historic evil that Nazi Germany represented meant that those unfortunate enough to live under it would be made to pay whatever price was considered appropriate to defeat it. Similarly, concerning the use of the atomic bomb, Hastings has no truck with those who thought (and think) that countless Allied lives should have been sacrificed to spare the Japanese from the stupidity of their leadership.

The book is also well balanced. There are chapters on the war at sea, the impact of the war on India, the Holocaust, and an excellent chapter on the impact of the war on Italy. These aspects are not always to be found in survey books, and it is to Hastings’s credit that he has found space for them.

There is, however, one facet of Hastings’s book that perpetuates a hoary old myth that is totally out of place in a study of modern industrial war: namely, the view that man for man the German infantry was superior in every way to Anglo-American forces. They showed more dash, initiative, were more skilful at small-group tactics, and so on. This tendency has appeared in his earlier works, in particular in Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944–45 (2004),where he constantly denigrates the efforts of the Anglo-American armies. This is also a constant theme in All Hell Let Loose. For examples of this I direct readers to pages 61, 91, 140, 179, 208, 336, 337, 449, and 541. No doubt there are other examples that I have missed. It seems otiose but necessary to point out to Hastings that the armies of the western democracies eventually triumphed in this war. Hastings’s answer to this is twofold. First, it was only the Russians who could face German soldiers and beat them at their own game. When in such battlefields as Normandy the Allies did triumph, it was only because they could bring overwhelming firepower to bear on their enemies. That the Russians played the major role in defeating the Germans is beyond question. But on the second of his points Hastings shows a fundamental misconception of modern war that is startling in such an experienced historian. World wars, it seems essential to emphasise, are not won by small-group infantry tactics. It is industrial might that in the end triumphs. The Anglo-American armies used their war machines of all types against the Germans, in order to inflict the maximum losses on the enemy for minimum loss to themselves. In this they were successful. Had they used the mass infantry tactics employed by the Russians, one can hear Hastings condemning them for returning to the methods of Haig and Joffre. It is difficult to explain why Hastings’s works have taken this peculiar turn. One can only hope they stop.

There is another quite peculiar section in Hastings’s book. He devotes two pages to the Australian war effort and is not pleased with it. He portrays the country, on the evidence of such expert witness as General MacArthur, as having lost its spirit through twenty years of socialist government in the interwar period. Such men as Stanley Melbourne Bruce, Joseph Lyons, and Robert Menzies would be surprised to find themselves described as socialists, although between them they dominated Australian politics in this period. Moreover, Hastings is moved to add that a ‘substantial number of [Australians] exercised their democratic privileges to stay away from the battlefield’. This is just plain wrong. A glance at the mobilisation efforts of comparable countries such as Canada demonstrates that Australian mobilisation and the size of the armed forces were almost identical. Finally, our war effort was apparently crippled by ‘vicious trade union practices’, which must come as a surprise to those few men who, despite the dockers, managed to find their way to Greece, Syria, Alamein, the Kokoda Track, Borneo, and elsewhere.

What have we done to Hastings for him to peddle this nonsense? To me it is not the historian speaking here but the old fogey editor of the Daily Telegraph. There is a whiff of port and cigars in the Carlton Club about all this, and it does Hastings no credit to see such prejudices laid bare. However, it is with some satisfaction that I can report that the vicious trade unions have had the last laugh on Hastings. My copy of his book was printed at the Griffin Press in Adelaide – no doubt a closed shop of Trotskyites still – and it fell to pieces before I had even read half of it. Perhaps I was not the only person to read pages 412–13.