Twilight of the Gods

On 4 June 1944, Allied soldiers fought their way into Rome and captured the first of the Axis capitals. ‘One up,’ declared US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, ‘and two to go!’

Two days later – D-Day – the Western Allies launched the greatest amphibious invasion in history. Operation Overlord: 11,000 aircraft, 7,000 ships and landing craft, 150,000 soldiers and 1,500 tanks striking five Normandy beaches in a single, brutal day. By nightfall, 4,400 Allied soldiers were dead. None of the day’s final objectives had been achieved. But the Allies were ashore, and there to stay.

Before the month was out, the Red Army delivered another blow to Hitler’s Reich, shattering the German Army Group Centre in Belorussia and capturing vast swathes of territory. Optimists whispered the war might be over by Christmas. Yet it took another 11 months to break a German resistance that grew, if anything, more fanatical as defeat became inevitable.

In Twilight of the Gods, Saul David reconstructs those final 338 days from the perspective of all three fronts: Western, Eastern and Italian. We follow the bloody trail of combat from the bocage of Normandy and the freezing Ardennes to the Apennines and the killing grounds of Poland, Hungry and Berlin. We eavesdrop on the bickering and jealousy between the senior commanders and politicians – Eisenhower, Monty, Bradley and Patton clashing over strategy; Churchill fighting to limit Soviet influence in Europe; Stalin willing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of his own men to reach Berlin first. And we witness the brutal destruction of countless cities: Warsaw razed block by block; Budapest besieged for fifty days; Dresden consumed in a single terrible night.

The price of victory was staggering. The Western Allies advanced more than 700 miles, liberated tens of millions of people, captured over four million prisoners and killed or badly wounded at least a million enemy soldiers – at a cost of 800,000 Allied casualties. Yet these figures pale beside the slaughter in the East, where three-quarters of all German military deaths occurred, and where the Red Army’s advance left a trail of mass rape, pillage and destruction that drove seven million refugees to flee west.

The last year of the Second World War was, by any measure, the...read more...