Inferno

“This war has no relation with the last one, so far as symbols and civilians are concerned. You must understand that a world is dying, that old values, the old prejudices, and the old bases of power and prestige are going.” Murrow recognised what some of Britain’s ruling caste still did not; they deluded themselves that the struggle was being waged to sustain their familiar old society. The privileged elite among whom Evelyn Waugh lived saw the war, the novelist wrote, as “a malevolent suspension of normality

Germany, contrary to widespread perceptions, was not an advanced industrial state by comparison with the United States, which it lagged by perhaps thirty years; it still had a large peasant agricultural sector such as Britain had shed. Its prestige, and the fear it inspired in the hearts of its enemies, derived from the combat efficiency of the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe, the latter being much weaker than the Allies knew.

It seems flippant to suggest that Hitler determined to invade Russia because he could not think what else to do, but there is something in this, as Ian Kershaw has observed

It was a striking characteristic of Axis behaviour until 1945 that while there was some limited consultation between Germany, Italy and Japan, there was no attempt to join in creating a coherent common strategy for defeating the Allies

Only late in the war did the Allies grasp the severity of their enemy’s fuel problems: petrol was so short that novice Wehrmacht drivers could be given only meagre tuition, resulting in a heavy military-vehicle accident rate

The German economy was much less strong than its enemies supposed—only slightly larger than that of Britain, which enjoyed a higher per capita income. It could not indefinitely be sustained on a war footing, and was stretched to the limits to feed the population and arm the Wehrmacht

while the Wehrmacht often fought its battles brilliantly, the Nazis made war with startling ineptitude. The Luftwaffe, instead of terrorising Churchill’s people into bowing to Hitler’s will, merely roused them to acquiesce in defiance

scoundrels as well as heroes played their parts in the blitz, and some people were a tangle of both

In a narrow sense, this woman’s response to relatively slight peril was unimpressive; but human beings measure risk and privation within the compass of their personal knowledge. It was meaningless to assert to an English suburban housewife that Poles, Jews, French refugees and, later, soldiers on the Eastern Front suffered much worse things than she had. She knew only that what was happening to her was dreadful in comparison with all her previous experience of life.

: a London vicar once asked a fellow occupant of his basement shelter whether she prayed when she heard a bomb falling. “Yes,” she answered, “I pray, Oh God! Don’t let it fall here.” The vicar said, “But it’s a bit rough on other people, if your prayer is granted and the thing drops, not on you, but on them.” The woman replied, “I can’t help that. They must say their prayers and push it off further.”