Inferno - Max Hastings [424]
Within Western culture, of course, the conflict continues to exercise an extraordinary fascination for generations unborn when it took place. The obvious explanation is that this was the greatest and most terrible event in human history. Within the vast compass of the struggle, some individuals scaled summits of courage and nobility, while others plumbed depths of evil, in a fashion that compels the awe of posterity. Among citizens of modern democracies to whom serious hardship and collective peril are unknown, the tribulations that hundreds of millions endured between 1939 and 1945 are almost beyond comprehension. Almost all those who participated, nations and individuals alike, made moral compromises. It is impossible to dignify the struggle as an unalloyed contest between good and evil, or rationally to celebrate an experience, and even an outcome, which imposed such misery upon so many. Allied victory did not bring universal peace, prosperity, justice or freedom; it brought merely a portion of those things to some fraction of those who had taken part. All that seems certain is that Allied victory saved the world from a much worse fate that would have followed the triumph of Germany and Japan. With this knowledge, seekers after virtue and truth must be content.
Acknowledgements
I feel very fortunate that the cast of colleagues and friends to whom I am indebted for assistance changes little with my successive books. At HarperCollins in London, the counsel of my editors, Arabella Pike and Robert Lacey, together with that of Andrew Miller at Knopf in New York, much enhanced the text. My agents, Michael Sissons, in London, and Peter Matson, in New York, have been steering my courses for longer than any of us care to remember. Professor Sir Michael Howard, OM, CH, MC; Don Berry; Professor N.A.M. Rodger; Richard Frank; and Dr. Williamson Murray offered immensely valuable comments on all or sections of the manuscript, and corrected some of my most egregious errors. Dr. Lyuba Vinogradova translated much Russian material, while Serena Sissons culled Italian memoirs, letters and diaries. Dr. Tami Biddle of the U.S. Army War College is wonderfully generous in passing on to me material which she gathers for her own researches. Rod Suddaby is only the foremost of the Imperial War Museum staff whose assistance contributes so much to the works of every historian of modern war, while the London Library and the National Archive provide wonderfully sympathetic settings for research. With only a brief interruption, Rachel Lawrence has been my long-suffering and peerlessly effective personal assistant for twenty-five years, an ordeal which includes collating my notes and references. My wife, Penny, is never less than a perfect partner, though I sometimes fancy that she would prefer to have lived through the Second World War than to read any more books about it written by me. To them all I offer deep gratitude, for I know that my labours would swiftly plough into sand without such sympathy, guidance and support.
Notes and References
References below to my own earlier works relate to material now lodged in the Liddell Hart Archive at King’s College, London, here abbreviated as LHA. AI signifies Author Interview, meaning an eyewitness with whom I held conversations at some time over the past thirty-five years. IWM refers to manuscripts in the collections of the Imperial War Museum; BNA to the British National Archive; USNA to the United States National Archive; USMHI to the United States Military History Institute at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania. References to Potsdam denote the magnificent multivolume history Germany and the Second World War, published by the Research Institute for Military History in Potsdam, and translated by Oxford University Press. For this work, I have consulted a manuscript narrative and some papers of Air Vice-Marshal Sir Ralph Cochrane held by his son John. I have not provided references for statements by prominent figures which have been