Endgame, 1945: The Missing Final Chapter of World War II | David Stafford

Endgame, 1945: The Missing Final Chapter of World War II | David Stafford | Small stories from a big war

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Endgame, 1945: The...

	Endgame, 1945: The Missing Final Chapter of World War II David Stafford Little, Brown and Company, 2007 - 608 pages average customer review:based on 8 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

To end a history of World War II at VE Day is to leave the tale half told. While the war may have seemed all but over by Hitler's final birthday (April 20), Stafford's chronicle of the three months that followed tells a different, and much richer, story.

ENDGAME 1945 highlights the gripping personal stories of nine men and women, ranging from soldiers to POWs to war correspondents, who witnessed firsthand the Allied struggle to finish the terrible game at last. Through their ground-level movements, Stafford traces the elaborate web of events that led to the war's real resolution: the deaths of Hitler and Mussolini, the liberation of Buchenwald and Dachau, and the Allies' race with the Red Army to establish a victors' foothold in Europe, to name a few. From Hitler's April decision never to surrender to the start of the Potsdam Conference, Stafford brings an unprecedented focus to the war's "final chapter."

Narrative history at its most compelling, ENDGAME 1945 is the riveting story of three turbulent months that truly shaped the modern world.

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Excellent history of an overlooked period

As the author notes, many know the war in Europe ended with the surrender of Germany on 7 May, but in reality the shear inertia of the war meant the dying and some of the fighting continued. On top of that, the problems created by the war only began. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of displaced persons, former concentration camp survivors, and the administration of a collapsed nation had to be dealt with in the final days of the war. And, in the area of Trieste, Italy, the Cold War could be claimed to have begun as allied divisions and naval forces deployed to prevent Tito's army from grabbing Italian territory and to force it back into Yugoslavia.

The book is also written well. The method Stafford uses to tell this history is to weave into the historical narrative the lives of several people -- allies and others. This leads to an almost novel-like quality as you follow their lives through the last weeks of the war, while at the same time maintaining historical context.

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Small stories from a big war

Most educated Americans know, in general, what happened on the battlefields of WWII from Normandy to V-E Day. This extremely excellent book, while giving a broad overview of thr "big" events, tells us a multitude of "little" stories about different people caught up in living during the last months of the war. They are fascinating tales, and even more so for being true. We go along the roads of Germany with troops, see the opening of the concentration camps, spend time imprisoned, and in general wait out the war itself. This book is an effort to show the triumph of the human will to survive, even though surrounded by tragedy. I'm extremely glad that I read it, and I hope that it reaches a very wide audience!

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Descriptive end of the Nazi regime...

I've found many similarities between this book and Antony Beevor's haunting tome "The Fall of Berlin 1945". Although "Endgame 1945" ups the ante and surpasses Beevor with its far richer character development. I've found it to be profoundly moving and an accurate witness to the unimaginable horrors created in the death throes of the Third Reich.

Endgame, 1945: David Stafford brutal portrait of a Europe in hell during the last days of World War II

In the beginning of this outstanding account of the last days of World War II there is a gripping quotation from General William Tecumseh Sherman:
"I am sick and tired of war. It's glory is all moonshine...War is Hell."
If you still doubt that lesson then you should read this book. Stafford focuses on nine individuals, their stories and how their personal biographies were intertwined with larger events as the war in Europe drew to an end in the spring of 1945.
We see Robert Ellis an American soldier undergoing the horrific final battles in Northern Italy. British commando Bryan Samain goes through Germany in a journey bearing an affinity to Dante's travels in the lower reaches of hell. Francesa Wilson was a British woman who worked in several refugee camps in Europe. She ministered to countless Jewish victims of the holocaust . New Zealander Geoffrey Cox participated in the battle between Tito's communist and the allies over Trieste on the Adriatic. This is a little known event to most Americans proving most illuminating.British BBC reporter Robert Reid was married with children. His letters home are filled with insight on his adventures with George S. Patton's Third Army. American soldier Leonard Linton was present at the Postdam conference giving us a good insight on postwar Berlin which was a city of grey death and despair. Fey von Hassel was a German aristocrat who married a rich Italian. She was imprisoned at Dachau following the Nazi execution of her father who had been involved in the plot to murder Hitler in July, 1944. She is separated from her children by the Nazis. At the end of the book we see her happily reunited with them and her husband.
This is a book running with blood, murder, starvation and cruel death.
Millions died in the unspeakable cruel concentration camps. We hear German women who were among the approximately two million who were raped by Soviet forces. The Nazis were worse than barbarians who looted killed and destroyed even past the official surrender of their forces on May 8. 1945.
War is an horrific experience which ruins peoples and civilization. This book is a brilliant retelling of terrible times in European and world history. Stafford draws good pictures of the big men: Churchill, Stalin, FDR and Truman but it is the stories of the ordinary people changed in unexpected ways that makes this a memorable story. This book is destined to become a classic of World War II reportage.

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