Soldiers

THE SUNDAY TIMES #1 BESTSELLERA Times Best History Book of the Year; A Waterstones Best Book of the Year'Reads like a thriller... I couldn't put Max Hastings's new book down' DAILY MAIL'Hastings is a master of drama, a writer intimately familiar with the mind of the soldier' THE TIMESOperation Biting was one of the most thrilling British commando raids of World War II, and probably the most successful. In February 1942 RAF intelligence was baffled by a newly-identified radar network on the coast of Nazi-occupied Europe, codenamed Würzburg. The brilliant scientist Dr RV Jones proposed an assault to capture key components. The nearest accessible enemy set stood upon a steep cliff at Bruneval in Normandy. Winston Churchill enthused, as did Lord Louis Mountbatten, chief of Combined Operations. A company of the newly-formed Airborne Forces was committed to the operation, which took place on the night of 27/28 February. Amid heavy snow 120 men landed, some of whom were misdropped almost two miles from their objective. They nonetheless launched the assault, dismantled the German radar, and after three nail-biting hours in France and a fierce battle with Wehrmacht defenders, escaped in the nick of time by landing-craft across stormy seas to Portsmouth.Max Hastings recounts this cliffhanging tale in a wealth of previously unchronicled detail. He portrays its remarkable personalities: the 'boffin' RV Jones; the peacock Mountbatten; the troubled husband of Daphne Du Maurier, Gen. 'Boy' Browning, who commanded the Airborne Division; 'Colonel Remy', the French secret agent whose men reconnoitered Bruneval at mortal risk; Major John Frost, who led the paras into action; Charlie Cox, the little RAF technician who stripped the Würzburg and became an unexpected hero; Wing-Commander Charles Pickard, a legendary bomber pilot who led the drop squadron. Seldom have so many fascinating personalities been brought together to fulfil a mission that became a front-page triumph in a season of British defeats.Recounted in Hastings' familiar best-selling blend of top-down and bottom-up action detail, Operation Bitingtells a story that has become almost forgotten yet deserves to rank among the epic tales of courage and daring that took place in the greatest conflict in history.

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERA Times and Waterstones Book of the Year'The messy, dirty, bloody reality of Operation Overlord comes alive in Sword, Hastings's portrait of the individual soldiers who risked their lives on the beaches of Normandy. He brings these men to life with sensitivity and beautiful prose' THE TIMESOn 6 June 1944 when the Allied armies landed on D-Day, the Second World War had already lasted almost five years. Yet many of the British and American troops who invaded Normandy were virgin soldiers, never before committed to battle. They quit England in summertime to face within hours a storm of machine-gun and mortar fire. They witnessed scenes, above all of sudden death, such as no exercise had prepared them for.In Sword, veteran chronicler of war Max Hastings explores with extraordinary vividness the actions of the Commando brigade and Montgomery's 3rd Infantry and 6th Airborne divisions on and around a single beach. He describes their frustrations, hopes, loves and fears through the apparently interminable years training and preparing in England, then their triumphs and tragedies on the beach and beyond. Here are the airborne assaults on the Caen Canal bridge and Merville Battery, the battles on the shoreline and against the German strongpoints inland, narrated and explained with all the insights that Hastings' decades of study, veterans' interviews and new archive research enable him to deploy.The book offers a searching analysis of why British troops did not reach Caen on 6 June, as Montgomery had promised Churchill that they would - and the story of the brigadier who was sacked for that failure. There is also a host of personal portraits of key figures from Commando leader Lord Lovat, famously brave but supremely arrogant, to Colonel Jim Eadie, whose tanks of the Staffordshire Yeomanry repulsed a panzer division in the last hours of 6 June, and some of the humbler participants to whom extraordinary things happened.This is the story of D-Day as you have never read it before, with the blend of narrative, analysis and human insight that made Max Hastings' last book Operation Biting, like many of his earlier works, a Sunday Times No. 1 bestseller.

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER'His masterpiece' Antony Beevor, Spectator'A masterful performance' Sunday Times'By far the best book on the Vietnam War' Gerald Degroot, The Times, Book of the YearVietnam became the Western world's most divisive modern conflict, precipitating a battlefield humiliation for France in 1954, then a vastly greater one for the United States in 1975. Max Hastings has spent the past three years interviewing scores of participants on both sides, as well as researching a multitude of American and Vietnamese documents and memoirs, to create an epic narrative of an epic struggle. He portrays the set pieces of Dienbienphu, the Tet offensive, the air blitz of North Vietnam, and less familiar battles such as the bloodbath at Daido, where a US Marine battalion was almost wiped out, together with extraordinary recollections of Ho Chi Minh's warriors. Here are the vivid realities of strife amid jungle and paddies that killed 2 million people.Many writers treat the war as a US tragedy, yet Hastings sees it as overwhelmingly that of the Vietnamese people, of whom forty died for every American. US blunders and atrocities were matched by those committed by their enemies. While all the world has seen the image of a screaming, naked girl seared by napalm, it forgets countless eviscerations, beheadings and murders carried out by the communists. The people of both former Vietnams paid a bitter price for the Northerners' victory in privation and oppression. Here is testimony from Vietcong guerrillas, Southern paratroopers, Saigon bargirls and Hanoi students alongside that of infantrymen from South Dakota, Marines from North Carolina, Huey pilots from Arkansas.No past volume has blended a political and military narrative of the entire conflict with heart-stopping personal experiences, in the fashion that Max Hastings' readers know so well. The author suggests that neither side deserved to win this struggle with so many lessons for the 21st century about the misuse of military might to confront intractable political and cultural challenges. He marshals testimony from warlords and peasants, statesmen and soldiers, to create an extraordinary record.

A vivid and incisive portrait of Winston Churchill during wartime from acclaimed historian Max Hastings, Winston's War captures the full range of Churchill's endlessly fascinating character. At once brilliant and infuriating, self-important and courageous, Hastings's Churchill comes brashly to life as never before. Beginning in 1940, when popular demand elevated Churchill to the role of prime minister, and concluding with the end of the war, Hastings shows us Churchill at his most intrepid and essential, when, by sheer force of will, he kept Britain from collapsing in the face of what looked like certain defeat. Later, we see his significance ebb as the United States enters the war and the Soviets turn the tide on the Eastern Front. But Churchill, Hastings reminds us, knew as well as anyone that the war would be dominated by others, and he managed his relationships with the other Allied leaders strategically, so as to maintain Britain's influence and limit Stalin's gains. At the same time, Churchill faced political peril at home, a situation for which he himself was largely to blame. Hastings shows how Churchill nearly squandered the miraculous escape of the British troops at Dunkirk and failed to address fundamental flaws in the British Army. His tactical inaptitude and departmental meddling won him few friends in the military, and by 1942, many were calling for him to cede operational control. Nevertheless, Churchill managed to exude a public confidence that brought the nation through the bitter war. Hastings rejects the traditional Churchill hagiography while still managing to capture what he calls Churchill's "appetite for the fray." Certain to be a classic, Winston's War is a riveting profile of one of the greatest leaders of the twentieth century.

'The best single-volume history of the war ever written' DOMINIC SANDBOOK, SUNDAY TIMES'A masterly account of that epic conflict' ROBERT HARRISThe anniversary edition of multi-million copy bestselling author Max Hastings's seminal one-volume history of World War Two, published for the 80th anniversary of the end of the war.This is a study of the greatest and most terrible event in history, which shows its impact upon hundreds of millions of people around the world - soldiers, sailors and airmen; British housewives and Indian peasants; SS killers and the citizens of Leningrad; Japanese suicide pilots and American carrier crews. This is the 'everyman's story'. It is an attempt to answer the question: 'What was the Second World War like?''This global history of the Second World War is the best there is'NIGEL JONES, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH'No other general history of the war amalgamates so successfully the gut-wrenching personal details and the essential strategic arguments. Hastings has triumphed' HEW STRACHAN, THE TIMES'No one could be better qualified than Max Hastings to write a single-volume history that covers every aspect of the Second World War... You will love this splendid book'ANDREW ROBERTS, FINANCIAL TIMES