All Hell Let Loose (133 page)

First published in Great Britain by HarperPress in 2011

ALL HELL LET LOOSE
. Copyright © Max Hastings 2011. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Max Hastings asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-0-00-733809-2

EPub Edition © AUGUST 2011 ISBN: 978-0-00-733812-2

^*
Throughout this book, the word ‘casualties’ is used in its technical military sense, meaning men killed, missing, wounded or taken prisoner. In most ground actions in most theatres, approximately three men were wounded for each one killed.

^*
For an explanation, see chapter 14.

^*
In this text, for convenience I have referred to all Axis decrypted messages as Ultra, although the Americans used the codeword Magic to denote Japanese traffic.

^*
In this text the italicised word
front
is used as in the Red Army’s parlance, to denote an army group.

^*
The destruction of Dresden occupies such a prominent place in the popular legend of the war that it is striking to notice that the latest research suggests that 25,000 victims died there on 13–14 February, rather than the hundreds of thousands once supposed. This does not influence the controversy about whether the bombing was necessary, but indicates that it caused far fewer deaths than the 1943 bombing of Hamburg, or the 1945 Tokyo firestorm.