The Last 100 Days

I read "The Last 100 Days" shortly after it came out when I was still in my mid-teens. I was fascinated with the many stories that were strewn together within the events that were the final days of the Third Reich. It was a real page-turner for me and I enjoyed the mutliple perspectives; Russian, German, Western Allied. Over the years I have read other books that dealt in part with this subject. However, I always looked back on "The Last 100 Days" as the real authority on the subject. Much of what happened over the next 50 years had its' beginnings in these last 100 days and John Toland does an excellent job of explaining that. Anyone interested in either WWII or the Cold War should read this book.

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 huge 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.

Amid the literal landslide of books written to date on the single subject of the final fateful overthrow of the Third Reich by Allied forces advancing both from the east and west simultaneously, this early effort by famed author John Toland is easily the single best nugget in all that ore, a single volume effort that is a literal treasure trove of both anecdotal eye-witness testimony and exhaustive historical research. As in most of his terrific book, Toland threads an integrating narrative that plies us with a battery of both useful and entertaining information, with amusing nuggets of historical facts such as the fact that a visiting Winston Churchill halted the caravan in which he was being escorted for security reasons to very publicly urinate on the bridge, quipping that Hitler could "take that". Indeed, in January of 1945, the Allied forces were poised to smash through the remnants of the Wehrmacht even as Hitler, convinced he could still win the war by dividing the two Allied armies and soliciting the western Allied phalanx to join him in an unholy war against the godless Bolsheviks. It is no exaggeration that it is unlikely that any other three-month period in modern history had the monumental impact of these three months as the evil empire of the Nazi regime was smashed into smithereens. Indeed, the ninety-day period saw historical events ranging from the conference at Yalta to the controversial and merciless bombing of Dresden, from the crucial crossing of the final bridge over the Rhine at Remagen to the brutal extermination of the German army at the hands of the Russians. And all of these, and many more, are described, discussed, and placed in historical context by an author who is a master of the trade of writing substantial popular works of history. Toland's focus here is with the individuals involved, both those, who like Eisenhower, Churchill, Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini, shaped the evens even as they transpired, and also with the soldiers, civilians, and observers who provide the human angle of what living on the ground in the midst of what sometimes was an endless cycle of carnage, murder, and devastation was like to experience. It is all here, from Hitler's suicide to Eisenhower's original plans for the Nazi war criminals (he wanted them shot without benefit of trial). Toland's narrative is tight, informative, and exciting to read. He does not so much provide an overall interpretation of what happened and why so much as he fully immerses the reader in the particulars and gives the contexts in which these specifics occur, letting the reader make his or her own decisions about what that means. This is popular history at its best, delivered by a master of the trade. Enjoy!

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!

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.