An exhilarating and uplifting account of the lives of sixteen 'warriors' from the last three centuries, hand-picked for their bravery or extraordinary military experience by the eminent military historian, author and ex-editor of the Daily Telegraph, Sir Max Hastings. Over the course of forty years writing about war, Max Hastings has grown fascinated by outstanding deeds of derring-do on the battlefield (land, sea or air) -- and by their practitioners. He takes as his examples sixteen people from different nationalities in modern history -- including Napoleon's 'blessed fool' Baron Marcellin de Marbot (the model for Conan Doyle's Brigadier Gerard); Sir Harry Smith, whose Spanish wife Juana became his military companion on many a campaign in the early 19th century; Lieutenant John Chard, an unassuming engineer who became the hero of Rorke's Drift in the Zulu wars; Captain Karl von Muller of the light cruiser Emden whose predations in the South China Sea on behalf of the German Imperial Navy in World War I earned him the title of 'the gentleman of war'; the Australian-born man of letters Frederic Manning whose account of trench warfare, Her Privates We, is unrivalled; Squadron Leader Guy Gibson, the 'dam buster' whose heroism in the skies of World War II earned him the nation's admiration but few friends and various other assorted combatants. Every army, in order to prevail on the battlefield, needs a certain number of people capable of courage beyond the norm. In this book Max Hastings investigates what this norm might be -- and how it has changed over the centuries. While celebrating feats of outstanding valour, he also throws a beady eye over the awarding of medals for gallantry -- and why it is that so often the most successful warriors rarely make the grade as leaders of men.

The Warriors : Exceptional Tales from the Battlefield

Engineering & Transportation

HASTINGS, Max.

Engineering

London: Harper Collins

COUNTRY FAIR - Tales of the Countryside: Shooting and Fishing

Harper-collins Publishers

Some marking to page edges. Shipped from the U.K. All orders received before 3pm sent that weekday.

Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944–45

History

Asia

William Collins

Nemesis : The Battle for Japan, 1944-45

World

HarperCollins Publishers, Ltd

Finest Years Churchill Warlord 1940 45

Biographies & Memoirs

Leaders & Notable People

HarperPress

Did you really shoot the television?: a family fable

All Hell Let Loose: The World at War 1939-1945

HardCover. Pub Date :2011-09-29 Pages: 768 Language: English Publisher: HarperPress A magisterial history of the greatest and most terrible event in history. from one of the finest historians of the Second World War A book which shows the impact. of war upon hundreds of millions of people around the world-soldiers. sailors and airmen; housewives. farm workers and children.Reflecting Max Hastingss thirty-five years of research on World War II. All Hell Let Loose describes the course of events. but focuses chiefly upon human experience. which varied immensely from campaign to campaign. continent to continent.The author emphasises the Russian front. where more than 90% of all German soldiers who perished met their fate. He argues that. while Hitlers army often fought its battles brilliantly well. the Nazis conducted their war effort with stunning incompetence. He suggests that ...

London : HarperPress

Physical description; xvii, 628 pages, [32] pages of plates : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm. Subject; World War, 1914-1918 - Causes.

Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914

With its battlefields dispersed across the globe, the vastness of the Second World War was unparalleled. This was a time when nearly everything which civilised people took for granted in peace time was destroyed. Between 1939 and 1945, around 27,000 people died, every single day - most of them on the Eastern Front.. Many men and women who lived through this catastrophe struggled to find the words to describe what they witnessed daily. Many turned to a phrase, which although a cliche, summed things up: "All Hell's Let Loose!"In this definitive, single-volume history of a war that continues to fascinate and horrify us in equal measure, Max Hastings brings together many different human stories, and touches on almost every country in the world. Hastings stresses that it is impossible to compare the suffering of people during WWII - it would have seemed monstrous to a British soldier facing a mortar barrage, with his comrades dying around him, to be told that Russian casualties were many thousand times greater. However, there were some aspects of wartime experience that were universal: fear and grief; the conscription of young men and women sent to new lives remote from their choice, genocide and mass migration. ALL HELL LET LOOSE charts these experiences, along with the numerous battles on land, at sea and in the air, all over the world, that formed the greatest conflict in human history.Using a huge range of sources, including new material from Russia, Italy and Poland, ALL HELL LET LOOSE is not only a magnificent and movingly written book; it is arguably one of the most important books on the Second World War ever published.

All Hell Let Loose: The World at War 1939-45

Military

HarperCollins, Publishers

Examining the espionage and intelligence stories of World War II, on a global basis, bringing together the British, American, German, Russian and Japanese histories.
Spies, codes and guerrillas played critical roles in the Second World War, exploited by every nation in the struggle to gain secret knowledge of its foes, and to sow havoc behind the fronts. In ‘The Secret War’, Max Hastings presents a worldwide cast of characters and some extraordinary sagas of intelligence and Resistance, to create a new perspective on the greatest conflict in history.
Here are not only Alan Turing and the codebreaking geniuses of Bletchley Park, but also their German counterparts, who achieved their own triumphs against the Allies. Hastings plots the fabulous espionage networks created by the Soviet Union in Germany and Japan, Britain and America, and explores the puzzle of why Stalin so often spurned his agents, who reported from the heart of the Axis war machine.
The role of SOE and American’s OSS as sponsors of guerrilla war are examined, and the book tells the almost unknown story of Ronald Seth, an SOE agent who was ‘turned’ by the Germans, walked the streets of Paris in a Luftwaffe uniform, and baffled MI5, MI6 and the Abwehr as to his true loyalty. Also described is the brilliantly ruthless Russian deception operation which helped to secure the Red Army’s victory at Stalingrad, a ruse that cost 70,000 lives.
‘The Secret War’ links tales of high courage ashore, at sea and in the air to the work of the brilliant ‘boffins’ at home, battling the enemy’s technology. Most of the strivings, adventures and sacrifices of spies, Resistance, Special Forces and even of the codebreakers were wasted, Hastings says, but a fraction was so priceless that no nation grudged lives and treasure spent in the pursuit of jewels of knowledge. The book tells stories of high policy and human drama, mingled in the fashion that has made international bestsellers of Max Hastings’ previous histories, this time illuminating the fantastic machinations of secret war.

The Secret War

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