The truth about war.

Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944-1945, by Max Hastings (Knopf, 584 pp., $30)

SOME bold genius of the cinema--a director with Oliver Stone-sized ambitions minus Stone's trashy ideas-needs to make a movie based on Max Hastings's Armageddon. And should that improbable but keenly desirable project ever be realized, the film absolutely must include a scene that comes near the very end of Hastings's narrative, after General Erich von Straube has surrendered his forces in Holland to the First Canadian Army. Von Straube is taken back to German lines by a Canadian counterpart, Brigadier James Roberts. So we are to imagine them onscreen, the German general sitting erect and tight-lipped:

   After driving for some twenty minutes
   in silence, von Straube's aide tapped
   Roberts on the shoulder and said that his
   commander wished to know what the
   brigadier had done before the war:
   "Were you a professional soldier?"
   Roberts was momentarily bemused by
   the question. He had been a soldier for
   so long that his other life seemed impossibly
   remote. Then he realized that the
   German was seeking some crumb of
   solace for his defeat. He answered von
   Straube: "No, I wasn't a regular soldier.
   Very few Canadians were. In civilian
   life I made ice cream."

By the time the reader comes to this exchange, on page 498 of a book packed with incident, the seemingly trivial question and its answer are luminous with meaning. Behind von Straube's words is the professionalism that allowed Germany to fight on with astonishing effectiveness against impossible odds-and the perverse, obdurate pride that led the German officer class to prolong the war at a staggering cost to their own people. And behind Roberts's reply are the values the Western Allies were fighting for, the blessed ordinariness of peace--and the unfittedness for all-out war that made them excessively cautious, even when they clearly had the upper hand.

At the beginning of September 1944, Hastings notes, three months after D-Day, the consensus in Washington and London (Churchill notably dissenting) was that the war in Europe would be over by the end of the year. Caught between the Allied push in the west and the relentless Soviet advance from the east, Germany was clearly in a hopeless position. How much longer would the Germans fight with nothing to gain, no expectation of ultimate victory? Yet even by the end of that September, many in the Allied command were reluctantly beginning to recognize that their optimism had been unfounded. The last stage of the European war dragged on into May 1945. It included some of the bloodiest fighting in the entire conflict and took a fearsome toll in civilian lives.

In Armageddon, a sequel of sorts to his acclaimed book Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy, 1944, published 20 years ago, Hastings recounts this final act in the drama set in motion when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939. He covers not only the Western Allies' side of the story but also the much less familiar and far more brutal Soviet side of the battle for Germany. He offers penetrating assessments of the principal leaders-Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, and Hitler-and of their foremost generals, but at the same time he draws on interviews and other records of the experience of ordinary soldiers and civilians. The result is an exceptionally rich and balanced work of military history that will be widely read for years to come.

At the heart of Armageddon is a summing up that exemplifies Hastings's moral realism. "The Germans and Russians in the Second World War," he writes, "showed themselves better warriors, but worse human beings. This is not a cultural conceit, but a moral truth of the utmost importance to understanding what took place on the battlefield." Throughout the book Hastings is unsparing in his recognition of the profound evil not only of Hitler's Nazi regime but also of the Soviet Union, "where Josef Stalin had created ... the greatest edifice of repression, mass murder, and human suffering the world has ever seen." This uncompromising judgment does not prevent Hastings from concluding that Stalin "showed himself the most effective warlord in the Second World War," yet he emphasizes that this effectiveness depended on a profligate disregard for human life "unimaginable in the democracies." And he stresses as well the power of terror to enforce discipline at every level of the Soviet system. (On this point and many others, a valuable supplement to Armageddon is another book published this season, Stephen G. Fritz's Endkampf: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Death of the Third Reich, from the University Press of Kentucky, which focuses on the last months of the war in a particular region of Germany, Franconia. Fritz shows how German civilians who were weary of bloodshed and ready for peace were terrorized and in some cases executed by Nazi diehards, right to the very end of the war.)

There is no hint of moral equivalence in Hastings's reckoning, even when he is assessing both the military ineffectiveness and the inhumanity of British and American "area bombing" of civilians. But while he has scant patience for revisionism of the kind lately fashionable in Germany, Hastings equally avoids history-as-cheerleading. Indeed, to "dissuade the democracies from celebrating their own humanity too extravagantly," he insists on acknowledging the moral complexity of the conflict: "Western allied scruples made the Americans and British dependent upon the ferocity of their Soviet allies to do the main business of destroying Hitler's armies."

At a time when new translations of Gilgamesh and Sophocles' Antigone become occasions for speechifying about the war in Iraq, it is hardly surprising that critics of the Bush administration have seized on Armageddon for their purposes. In a review for the London Times, for example, the historian Hew Strachan had the effrontery to describe Hastings's work as "an anti-war book." This is pure cant. Hastings is on record as a critic of American policy in Iraq, but not because he is "anti-war." Indeed, he has said he fears the mess in Iraq will make it harder to muster support for an intervention that might be more necessary.

In itself Armageddon has nothing to offer one way or another about the wisdom of invading Iraq. But it has a great deal to offer on the larger subject of how we think about war. Like Tolstoy, Hastings does full justice to the messiness of war, the inevitable mistakes and misjudgments. He has a keen eye as well for the bitter rivalries between allies, especially between the British and the Americans. (No sensible person, after reading Hastings, will have any patience for handwringing about American "unilateralism" today. What's new?) In short, Hastings's book is a reminder of simple truths, a primer of reasonable expectations, the absence of which is likely to be starkly apparent in any report from Iraq randomly selected from the network news broadcasts. Should we deplore the torture of Iraqi prisoners? Absolutely, just as the killing of German prisoners by American and British soldiers-by no means a rare event, as Hastings makes clear-was to be deplored, without thereby suggesting that those actions were adequate to symbolize the Allied cause or that it would have therefore been better to simply let Hitler have his way. We appear to be desperately in need of the sort of reality therapy that Hastings supplies.

Mr. Wilson is the editor of Books & Culture, a bimonthly review.