Armageddon cover art

Armageddon

 Preview
LIMITED TIME OFFER

3 months free
Try for £0.00
£8.99/mo thereafter. Renews automatically. Terms apply. Offer ends 31 July 2025 at 23:59 GMT.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.

Armageddon

By: Max Hastings
Narrated by: John Sessions
Try for £0.00

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Offer ends 31 July 2025 23:59 GMT. Cancel monthly.

Buy Now for £9.99

Buy Now for £9.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

About this listen

 Armageddon tells the story of the climatic months of the Second World War and the destruction of Hitler's Germany.

In this compelling study, the author addresses the big human and military questions. Why did the Allies not win the war in 1944, when they were vastly stronger than the Germans? Why did the Russians produce the best generals? What was it like to fight the British, American, German, and Soviet armies?

This book embraces the fates of more than a hundred million people, from the tragic teenage fanatics who died in the ruins of Hitler's Reich to the British "Tommies" who simply yearned to finish a painful job and go home. Few books on the Second World War have so vividly brought together the story of the battlefields, east and west, with the decisions of the generals and the impact of great events upon ordinary soldiers and civilians.

©2005 Max Hastings (P)2005 Macmillan Digital Audio 20th Century Europe Germany Military Modern War Western Europe Soviet Union Russia Imperialism Submarine Holocaust Middle Ages Interwar Period

Listeners also enjoyed...

 Soldiers cover art
Max Hastings on War cover art
Meat Grinder cover art
A Short History of World War 2 cover art
Dünkirchen 1940 cover art
The Nuremberg Interviews cover art
Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the East cover art
Kokoda cover art
Total War cover art
Passchendaele cover art
The Retreat cover art
No Greater Ally cover art
Shanghai 1937 cover art
This Kind of War cover art
Desert Fox cover art
Leningrad cover art
All stars
Most relevant  
Well read, and researched. I did not realise that Montgomery had managed to alienate the Americans to such a large extent. With hindsight that was rather stupid, given that 2 out of 3 soldiers on the western front were American. I'm unsure if this was an oversight, but there was no mention that Churchill instructed the British army to allow captured Wehrmacht troops to retain their personal weapons in case Uncle Joe decided to take the whole of western Europe. That was what my father claimed, after serving in Germany during the Winter and Spring of 1945.

Dissension

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I enjoyed the audio version of this analytical and well written history of the period covering late 1944 through to the end of the war and the consequences for a Germany that until then had been largely untouched within her borders apart from aerial bombing. However, having read the book when it first came out this seemed light on all the detail and statistics that are an essential part of the full story. Regardless, very enjoyable.

Well written history but short compared to the written version

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Concise and excellent guide to the ending of the second world war . .

Superb

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Absolutely stunning. Hastings takes the closing chapter of the war and shows it for all its complexity and horror. It’s easy to listen to and engaging even for a history buff like myself. Well done. I would recommend this work to anyone and is one of the best audio’s I have chosen in 6 years !! (I started with .com)

Masterful history. Story telling at its best.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Yet another Max Hastings WW2 book has just kept me spellbound for the last couple of days. As usual the author highlights certain themes which may not be very palatable to anyone brought up on jingoistic history lessons and Hollywood movies, with plucky Brits and dashing Americans. Namely, that the Germans were darned good fighters; that the Western Allies were often slow or seemingly reluctant to get stuck in; that Montgomery was a vain man who got up the noses of all his peers and superiors; that Eisenhower was no military strategist but generous-spirited to the point of saintliness in his diplomacy and forbearance in his dealings with the likes of Monty; that Roosevelt was as slippery as an eel but totally hoodwinked by Stalin while being decidedly bitchy to Churchill; that the Western Allies were blind to the threat that Stalin would simply replace one tyranny in Eastern Europe with another, equally brutal; that the RAF was often reluctant to offer airborne support, their commanders’ preference being to bomb civilians in German cities.
But Sir Max is not antagonistic, axe-grinding or finger-pointing in revealing these truths. He is always fair, and prepared to find another side to every coin. Montgomery, he emphasises, was loved and revered by his men and a meticulous planner. The wickedness and duplicity of a Stalin were unimaginable to most Western leaders and peoples (with the exception of Churchill). So why hurry to Berlin first? The Germans had been re-arming, training and brainwashing for a decade, so little wonder their soldiers were more competent. And so on.
Where Max Hastings leaves no quarter is in his treatment of the Wehrmacht. Again, the prevailing myth seems to be that the “traditional” army were upright officers and men just doing their job relatively humanely (as opposed to the SS divisions, composed of brutal fanatics) but the author can find few if any redeeming features in their behaviour: he cites example after example of atrocities, and cravenness on the part of the generals, from the Wehrmacht as well as the SS. Likewise he gives short shrift to claims that ordinary people “knew nothing” about the camps or slave labour - this, in a book that is meticulously researched and evidence based. Rather, he hints at the dangers of a whole nation brainwashed, coerced and sleepwalking into total depravity.
The book takes us through the main battles on the way from the Rhine to Berlin, mentioning also the hosts of smaller ones because there was attrition and severe loss of life every step of the way, often because of botching or sluggishness on the part of the Allies. There are sections devoted to certain themes, such as the reactions of rescuers arriving at the camps, the attitudes of the Hitlerjugend, the atrocities of the Soviet soldiers, the treatment of returning Russian POWs, the mania of the Nazi upper echelons.
But a main theme, reiterated in nearly all Hastings’ books, is how futile it is to expect fighting forces from “citizens’ armies” in the democracies to perform with similar conviction to those conscripted in totalitarian and brutal regimes. In the latter you would expect execution for poor performance, even if you went in unarmed, while in the former even the generals were very careful about expending life. We in the West avoided conquest by the Nazis because we allowed the Soviets to take the brunt for 4 years and with the loss of millions. I don’t suppose our leaders at the time enquired too closely into how this was achieved, let alone the general population!
John Sessions narrates this book masterfully. Not so certain other books, alas.

Compelling narrative, thorough analysis

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
again max Hastings get below the surface of the second world war and tells a horrible truth

horrible war

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Fascinating, as ever from Hastings. However, I wish it were a longer book.

Narrator very easy to listen to too.

Very short.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I would have liked more detail on the battle for Berlin City
overall interesting book

battle for Berlin

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
an excellent overview of ww2 in Europe and it's historical and political consequences. very well read by John Sessions who used his great skill to recreate the voices of all the participants, famous or otherwise

well written and well read

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
What can you say about a Max Hasting book, it is fantastic, the research that must have gone into this book must is beyond my imagination. It really is a worthwhile read. Highly commend it.

Another Hastings success

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews