Volume 52, Number 7 · April 28, 2005
The Bitter End
By Freeman Dyson
Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944–1945
by Max Hastings
Knopf, 584 pp., $30.00
The End: Hamburg 1943
by Hans Erich Nossack, translated from the German and with a foreword by Joel Agee, and with photographs by Erich Andres
University of Chicago Press,85 pp., $20.00
Armageddon is a mosaic composed of hundreds of brightly colored fragments, each one a story told by an eye-witness. Most of the fragments occupy less than a page. The mosaic is a panorama of the last eight months of World War II in Europe, between September 1944 and May 1945. These were the months in which British and American armies in the West and Russian armies in the East fought their way across the frontiers of Germany and finally defeated German armies on German soil. The panorama is remarkable in many ways. The toll of death and destruction and misery during these eight months was unequaled by any similar period in the long history of human misfortunes, wars, and persecutions. The German armies fought with extraordinary skill and bravery to defend their shrinking territory, long after any realistic hope of victory had disappeared. The invading armies, in spite of profound political and cultural differences, succeeded in working together until their job was done. Each of these aspects of the panorama is illuminated by personal experiences described in the individual fragments.
Review, 4920 words
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