Max Hastings

"Vietnam 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,...

An examination of one of the most important yet underexplored aspects of World War II--intelligence--shows how espionage successes and failures by the United States, Britain, Russia, Germany, and Japan influenced the course of the war and its final outcome.

In this enthralling history, internationally bestselling author Max Hastings recounts the odds-defying Operation Biting, a 1942 parachute commando raid on Northern France to steal vital components of German intelligence—one of the most thrilling British commando raids of World War II, and one of the most successful. In February 1942, RAF intelligence was baffled by a newly identified radar network on the coast of Nazi-occupied Europe, codenamed...

It was the first war we could not win. At no other time since World War II have two superpowers met in battle. In this extensive history, preeminent military historian Max Hastings takes us back to the bloody, bitter struggle to restore South Korean independence after the Communist invasion of June 1950. Using personal accounts from interviews with more than two hundred vets-including the Chinese-Hastings follows real officers and soldiers through...

A stunning anthology of great stories of war and peace collected and edited by Max Hastings. 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...

World-renowned British historian Sir Max Hastings recounts one of the most horrific months of World War II. June 1944, the month of the D-Day landings carried out by Allied forces in Normandy, France. Germany's 2nd SS Panzer Division, one of Adolf Hitler's most elite armor units, had recently been pulled from the Eastern Front and relocated to France in order to regroup, recruit more troops, and restock equipment. With Allied forces suddenly on European...

Best-selling author Max Hastings offers a welcome reevaluation of one of the most gripping and tense international events in modern history - the Cuban Missile Crisis - providing a people-focused narrative that explores the attitudes and conduct of Russians, Cubans, Americans, and a terrified world that followed each moment as it unfolded. In The Abyss, Max Hastings turns his focus to one of the most terrifying events of the mid-20th century - the...

Churchill got many little things wrong, but he was right, crucially so, on major points of Allied strategy. When the Americans joined the war, they were hot to invade France. Churchill dissuaded Roosevelt from mounting what, in 1942 or 1943, would have been a suicide mission, and redirected Allied attention to North Africa and Italy. The Mediterranean campaign bore mixed results, but Churchill's instincts were correct. There is a poignant ambiguity...