Armageddon: An Interview with Sir Max Hastings

March/April 2005 · Historically Speaking15 Armageddon: An Interview with Sir Max Hastings Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa Can there be anything new to say about the collapse of the Third Reich? Sir Max Hastings, one of Great Britain's most respected military writers, convincingly shows that there is much more to the end ofthe Third Reich than speculations about mystery weapons and accounts ofthose murkyfinal days in Hitler's Berlin bunker. Hastings's Armageddon (Knopf, 2004) is an impressive and disturbing account ofthe defeat ofGermanyfrom September 1944 to May 1945. This was nothing short ofa cataclysm , and Hastings recounts some ofthe "extraordinary things that happened to ordinary people" on bothfronts. What emerges is apicture ofsuffering, degradation, dignity, andprofound moral complexity. Hastings was an award-winning foreign correspondent for manyyears, reportingfrom more than sixty countriesfor BBC TV and the London Evening Standard. He has presented historical documentaries for BBC TV, including most recently (2003) on Churchill and his generals. He has written eighteen books on military history and current events, including Bomber Command (which won the Somerset Maugham Prize for nonfiction), The Battle for the Falklands, and Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy. He was editor-in-chiefofthe British Daily Telegraph and Evening Standard, from which he retired in 2002. Donald A. Yerxa, editor o/Historically Speaking interviewedHastings in the Boston offices ofthe Historical Society on December 1, 2004. Yerxa: What drew you to the write an account of the battle for Germany? Hastings: It was a bit ofunfinished business. Twenty years ago, I wrote Overload: D-Day and the Battlefor Normandy which ended in September 1944. 1 have always had a nagging fascination with what happened afterward, in particular with why the Allies didn't win in 1944. At the beginning of September 1944, most of the Allied leadership, with the notable exception of Winston Churchill, was completely convinced that the war was going to be over by the end ofthe year. In the West, the Germans seemed completely beaten. The Western Allies had overwhelming superiority in tanks, aircraft, everything—you name it. So I wanted to look at this question of why we didn't end the war in 1944. Second, and almost as important, virtually all the books that have been written about this period look at either the Eastern or the Western fronts. And I wanted to set the two in context: to see what happened to the Western Allies in the context of what happened with the Soviets. This nearly overwhelmed me because it is such a huge subject. (My wife, by the way, warned me not to write books that people can't hold up in bed.) One has to remember that the last months of the Second World War witnessed the greatest human cataclysm of the 20th century, and trying to cover all that ground did prove to be a big task. But, I must add, it became utterly fascinating. Yerxa: Could you comment on your claims that the Germans and Russians in World War II were better warriors, but worse human beings? Hastings: This is a very important truth. When I wrote Overlord, I caused quite a lot of controversy by saying flatly that man for man, the German army was the best in the Second World War. This claim is generally accepted now, but when I first made it in 1984, it wasn't. British and American veterans took umbrage. When I was writing Armageddon, my assessment of the German army was confirmed. The evidence is so clear: again and again small numbers of Germans managed to hold up for hours, days, weeks much larger numbers of Allied soldiers . But I also realized that there was an important corollary: ifwe wanted British and American soldiers to fight like the WaffenSS , they would have needed to become people like the Waffen-SS. And then, of course, the very values for which the whole war was fought would have been out the window. We have good grounds today to be enormously grateful that American and British veterans mostly preserved all the inhibitions and decencies of citizen-soldiers. In the main, these veterans never thought ofthemselves as warriors. They were bank clerks, laborers...