Customer Reviews

The Last 100 Days

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The last 100 days of the Nazi regime have long remained clouded by the fact that it was the Soviet armies that reached Berlin first and afterwards controlled the information surrounding the end of it all. Until things had settled down, and let's not forget that they only ever partially settled down (Patton's cry of "Let's push on to Moscow," still rings in one's ears), little or no information was available to the Western press about the successful Russian attack against the German capital. John Toland's "The Last 100 Days," first published in 1966, was therefore a welcome addition to the growing literature on the end of the regime. Perhaps the most interesting sections of the book deal with the taking of Berlin and the stubborn defence offered by the citizenry (both old men and boys were killed at the barricades). For American readers, there is no doubt that the race for Berlin is of greater interest still. With the fastidious Bernard Montgomery apparently holding up the progress of U.S. army corps, it was a time of grand confusion. No one wanted to be restrained from the final fruits of victory. Impatient army commanders resented every delay, while at home, political leaders tried to balance the final thrust to victory against the prospect of further warfare in Europe, once the Germans were beaten. And of course, beyond the first difficulties in East/West relations, there remained Japan to be beaten in the Pacific.

All the main characters have their turn on Toland's stage, whether they be American and Russian generals calculating the mileage separating them from their goal, or high-ranking Nazis twisting and turning in the net that is slowly closing around them. A fast-paced book, matching the tempo of the times, "The Last 100 Days" is one of the best books about the end of the Second World War to be published so far.

This book is a delight to read for any confirmed WWII history buff. It uses a combination of oversight narrative as well as individual recollections and reconstructions from diaries and other historical documents to provide a highly readable, entertaining and informative look at the final momentous crush of battle between the western and eastern fronts of the war against Germany. It is often highly novel, with a seemingly endless number of humorous and informative anecdotes about the prosecution of the war.

For example, author John Toland describes Churchill deliberately taking time, along with Generals Montgomery, Brookes, and Simpson, to publically urinate on a concrete bridge abutment that comprised part of the frontiers of the so-called Western Wall dividing Holland from Germany. He also details, with first person reports, the systematic murderous rampages of the Soviet soldiers, who, unchecked by their officers, raped and pillaged their way toward Berlin and the final victory over Germany.

The main saving grace of the book is its tone, which delivers the mountain of information concerning this final coordinated assault at every level in a very simple, straightforward, and excellently written expository fashion, and he seldom bores the reader. Instead, by bringing it down to the level of the individual participants, he anticipates a whole new wave of later WWII books by highly regarded authors such as Stephen Ambrose et al that also employ this "first person recollection" approach to thread together interesting narratives about various aspects of the war.

Toland's narrative helps us to better understand the long- debated issues surrounding the curious slow-down of American, British and other Allied forces on the western front, which allowed the Soviets to enter Berlin first, but also forced the Soviets to suffer the brunt of the extremely high casualty rates at the hands of the fanatically inspired German soldier fighting to save the "Fatherland" from the barbarian Russian hordes. It also helps the reader to appreciate the extent to which the Soviets were, in fact, doing the lion's share of tough fighting for a number of years, as the casualty figures tend to support. The numbers of Russians lost dwarfs the losses of Brits, Australians, Americans, Canadians, French, or any other combatants.

This is a wonderful book, which, although out of print, should be back-ordered, or sought out as a used book, or lent from the library. It is an easy read, and well-written and scholarly tome, and yet was light enough to slide through without any of the ponderous language and endless details of other books on the war. I recommend it for any serious student of the second world war, and especially for those that want a wide-ranging narrative regarding the final days and collapse of the ignominious Third Reich. Enjoy!

I read this book when it first came out in paperback in the 1960s, when I was a middle school student. It made a profound impact on me at the time. I recently saw it in basically the same Bantam mass market paperback edition I'd bought in the '60s (though without the photos and map contained in the '60s version, even though the price had increased five-fold in the interim). I re-read it again primarily out of curiosity, simply to see what I thought of it forty years later.

Despite having read many dozens of books on WWII in the intervening years, I was wowed by Toland's account all over again. Toland was a master storyteller, not an academic or military historian as such, and had a novelist's understanding of the illuminating detail, the minor tragedy emblematic of the whole, and the reader's fascination with the character of people acting under the most extreme duress imaginable.

Toland weaves together numerous narrative threads of the highest diplomacy (FDR, Churchill, and Stalin at Yalta), the lowest farce (the goings on of Hitler and his bizarre entourage in Hitler's underground bunker), and endless violent encounters -- between enemy forces, and between military forces and the incredible masses of civilians fleeing the fighting or trapped in cities under ferocious bombardment.

While the book is populated with the brave and noble, at high levels and low, it is also frequented by monsters, knaves, cowards, innocent victims, and thugs on all sides (though the Germans, of course, were peerless in the scope and cruelty of their barbarities). This is not the place to go if you are looking for "the good war." This book gave me my first deep insight into why my uncle (now deceased, but at the time I first read this book younger than I am now), who had served as a rifleman in the 8th Infantry Division in Europe, seldom could be persuaded to talk about the war.

Toland's work was also somewhat unusual, when first published, in its lack of triumphalism. The atmosphere which permeates The Last 100 Days is not that of the impending victory of the good, or the impending defeat of the evil -- although the end of the war in Europe was certainly both -- but of immense tragedy and the dawning awareness that at the end of the war, the world was going to remain an exceedingly dangerous place, as the unnatural marriage of necessity between the Western powers and Stalin's Soviet Union came to an end.

Toland's narrative method has been adopted and adapted in other's subsequent works (Toland doubtless borrowed elements of it from others before him as well), but few have been his equal. And having read all of John Toland's several excellent books at one time or another, I am convinced that this book was his best. On the mountain of books on WWII, The Last 100 Days belongs near the top. This book should remain in print for a long time to come because it is great history, powerfully told.

Here is a significant piece of history, which is re-created with all the workings of a play. The last 100 days of the second world war in Europe will be long remembered after you have read this book. Here we have Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill at the Yalta conference, the bombing of Dresden, Himmler's attempt to "save" the Jews in the Nazi death camps, Benito Mussolini murdered by vengeful Italians with the faithful Clara Petacci, and the suicide and ghastly cremation of Adolf Hitler, the "vilest tormentor of mankind." Read it, sit back, and enjoy it!

I have read this book quite a number of times, having it in my possession all these years. I cannot conceive of a better account of the fall of Nazi Germany than this book.
John Toland writes with a verve and immediacy that grips the reader. The viewpoint is varied, always changing with all the various participants, their hopes, raised, then dashed.
Hitler's waning grip on reality and power is searingly told thru these pages, his henchmen and their gradual realisation of the situation and quiet abandonment of the madman in the last days.
Amazing stuff. It cannot be bettered!

can be consider as one of the best book about the last days of the gov't of hitler, in this book you can find how himmler,a high ranking Hitler general who was consider as the one responsible for the death of thousand of jews was strangely trying to saved them from extermination. most of the information you find in this book are quiet new.

I just finished reading this book, and wanted to order it for my son. It provides a perspective from many places and people often overlooked. It presents vividly the statements and recorded conversations of top German, American and British leaders. It also provides perspective from Italians, Poles, Czechs, Danes and Hungarians. However, it is very weak on Russian, Swiss and French views. Perhaps now that Russian archives from the Soviet era have opened an historian will write a book that will fill that gap. The illustrations and maps are helpful, but all too few.

The savagery of that era comes through all too well. To read this book is a reminder to pray that it will never happen again.

This is an excellent account of the last 100 days of the Third Reich, including the murderous fight between the Russians and Germans for Berlin. It also chronicles the desperate situation for the Germans in the closing months of the war and its immediate aftermath. A comment frequently heard by Germans at this time was, "Enjoy the war. The peace will be terrible." For those living in the Russian zone, it was.