What follows is almost five hundred pages worth of war as seen through the eyes of the little guy. A tank driver, a pilot, an infantryman, a U-boat commander, a family of German Jews, and an American woman trapped behind enemy lines, plus half a dozen others. Some of the time this works, especially when Turtledove is describing life under the Nazi and Soviet regimes, or how the average person just wants to survive, no matter what uniform he is wearing. However, the approach is just as often irritating and too tightly focussed on the minutiae. Just because men in the field do not have a view of the big picture, is no excuse for keeping readers in the dark. I frequently found myself bored with reading tales of life in war that I felt I'd read a thousand times before. The author tries to present nationalities from an authentic perspective, but comes up short on several occasions. For example, a member of the British Expeditionary Force is described as possibly discovering that his fiancée was "having it on" with the local greengrocer, when the correct expression would be "having it off." In another sequence, a U-boat commander uses the word "skedaddle," which is very much an Americanism. Such basic failings in research and attention to detail detract from the realism Turtledove is trying to create, and frankly should never have made it to the final edit.

The book is called Hitler's War, yet the Führer only appears right at the beginning, and again while on a surprise visit to his front line troops. It is then that we finally learn something interesting about what is happening above eye-level. The author's preference for generic cut-out characters, as opposed to a genuine lead or two, makes it hard to care much about any of them. One character, a mouthy American woman, even had me wishing that a Nazi would shoot her, so that someone more interesting might emerge. Ultimately, Hitler's War is a rather long, distinctly mediocre opening sequence, where not enough happens. Harry Turtledove has written several highly entertaining novels, but this one is disappointing.