All Hell Let Loose

All Hell Let Loose is Max Hastings’s global history of the Second World War, built around the experiences of the people who fought, endured occupation, worked, starved and survived between 1939 and 1945. It ranges across Europe, the Soviet Union, Asia and the Pacific while connecting battles and grand strategy to the vastly larger civilian experience of mobilisation, displacement and mass death.

Rather than attempting a day-by-day operational chronicle, Hastings asks why some societies and armed forces performed more effectively than others and how individuals understood a conflict whose scale exceeded their own view of events. Leaders including Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin and Hitler appear within that wider human history. The work is nonfiction and uses testimony alongside military and political analysis.