A 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 TIMES

On 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.

A 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 TIMES

Operation 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 Biting tells 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.

Yet many of the British and American troops who invaded Normandy were virgin soldiers, never before committed to battle. They quit summer England 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, Montgomery’s 3rd Infantry and 6th Airborne divisions on and around a single British 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 tank 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 D-Day as you have never read the story told 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.

‘An unmissable read’ Sunday Times

Soldiers is a very personal gathering of sparkling, gripping tales by many writers, about men and women who have borne arms, reflecting bestselling historian Max Hastings’s lifetime of studying war. It rings the changes through the centuries, between the heroic, tragic and comic; the famous and the humble. The nearly 350 stories illustrate vividly what it is like to fight in wars, to live and die as a warrior, from Greek and Roman times through to recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Here you will meet Jewish heroes of the Bible, Rome’s captain of the gate, Queen Boudicca, Joan of Arc, Cromwell, Wellington, Napoleon’s marshals, Ulysses S. Grant, George S. Patton and the modern SAS. There are tales of great writers who served in uniform including Cobbett and Tolstoy, Edward Gibbon and Siegfried Sassoon, Marcel Proust and Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell and George MacDonald Fraser. Here are also stories of the female ‘abosi‘ fighters of Dahomey and heroic ambulance drivers of World War I, together with the new-age women soldiers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. The stories reflect a change of mood towards warfare through the ages: though nations and movements continue to inflict terrible violence upon each other, most of humankind has retreated from the old notion of war as a sport or pastime, to acknowledge it as the supreme tragedy.

This is a book to inspire in turn fascination, excitement, horror, amazement, occasionally laughter. Max Hastings mingles respect for the courage of those who fight with compassion for those who become their victims, above all civilians, and especially in the twenty-first century, which some are already calling ‘the Post-Heroic Age’.

‘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 TIMES

Operation 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 Biting tells 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.

Written from the perspective of the French Resistance, British SOE and SAS, and the German SS, Das Reich is bestselling historian Max Hastings’s gripping and powerful examination of wartime brutality in the aftermath of D-Day.

Within days of the D-Day landings in June 1944, the elite 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich marched north through France to reinforce the front-line defenders of Hitler’s Fortress Europe. Veterans of the bloodiest fighting of the Russian Front, 15,000 men with their tanks and artillery, they were hounded for every mile of their march by saboteurs of the Resistance and agents of the Allied Special Forces.

Along their route they took reprisals so savage they will live for ever in the chronicles of the most appalling atrocities of war, including the massacre of 642 men, women and children from Ordour-sur-Glane. Even-handed and insightful, Das Reich vividly brings to life a dark period of the Second World War, revealing stories of cruelty on both sides as well as stories of heroism and sacrifice.

'Max Hastings stands in the first rank of writers on modern war' – Financial Times

On 6 June 1944 – D-Day – British, Canadian and American troops staged the greatest amphibious landing in history. It was the start of Operation Overlord, the battle to take Normandy from the Third Reich. Over ten gruelling weeks, the Allies fought the entrenched German army, some infantry units suffering an almost 100 per cent casualty rate.

In Overlord, acclaimed historian Max Hastings has drawn on eyewitness accounts of survivors from both sides, plus a wealth of previously untapped World War 2 sources and documents, to write a gripping and authoritative account of the devastating fighting that paved the way for the liberation of north-west Europe.

'A book which combines serious historical and critical comment with brilliant reportage. He brings both the arguments between higher commanders and the fighting on the battlefield itself to life' – Times Literary Supplement

From the #1 bestselling historian Max Hastings ‘the heart-stopping story of the missile crisis’ Daily Telegraph

The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis was the most perilous event in history, when mankind faced a looming nuclear collision between the United States and Soviet Union. During those weeks, the world gazed into the abyss of potential annihilation.

Max Hastings’s graphic new history tells the story from the viewpoints of national leaders, Russian officers, Cuban peasants, American pilots and British disarmers. Max Hastings deploys his accustomed blend of eye-witness interviews, archive documents and diaries, White House tape recordings, top-down analysis, first to paint word-portraits of the Cold War experiences of Fidel Castro’s Cuba, Nikita Khrushchev’s Russia and Kennedy’s America; then to describe the nail-biting Thirteen Days in which Armageddon beckoned.

Hastings began researching this book believing that he was exploring a past event from twentieth century history. He is as shocked as are millions of us around the world, to discover that the rape of Ukraine gives this narrative a hitherto unimaginable twenty-first century immediacy. We may be witnessing the onset of a new Cold War between nuclear-armed superpowers.

To contend with today’s threat, which Hastings fears will prove enduring, it is critical to understand how, sixty years ago, the world survived its last glimpse into the abyss. Only by fearing the worst, he argues, can our leaders hope to secure the survival of the planet.

From the #1 bestselling historian Max Hastings ‘the heart-stopping story of the missile crisis’ Daily Telegraph

The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis was the most perilous event in history, when mankind faced a looming nuclear collision between the United States and Soviet Union. During those weeks, the world gazed into the abyss of potential annihilation.

Max Hastings’s graphic new history tells the story from the viewpoints of national leaders, Russian officers, Cuban peasants, American pilots and British disarmers. Max Hastings deploys his accustomed blend of eye-witness interviews, archive documents and diaries, White House tape recordings, top-down analysis, first to paint word-portraits of the Cold War experiences of Fidel Castro’s Cuba, Nikita Khrushchev’s Russia and Kennedy’s America; then to describe the nail-biting Thirteen Days in which Armageddon beckoned.

Hastings began researching this book believing that he was exploring a past event from twentieth century history. He is as shocked as are millions of us around the world, to discover that the rape of Ukraine gives this narrative a hitherto unimaginable twenty-first century immediacy. We may be witnessing the onset of a new Cold War between nuclear-armed superpowers.

To contend with today’s threat, which Hastings fears will prove enduring, it is critical to understand how, sixty years ago, the world survived its last glimpse into the abyss. Only by fearing the worst, he argues, can our leaders hope to secure the survival of the planet.