8 juin 1944. La division Das Reich, forte de 15 000 hommes, quitte Montauban en direction de la Normandie. Elle mettra quinze jours - au lieu des trois initialement prévus - pour arriver sur les lieux du Débarquement. Le temps pour la 2 e division SS de se livrer à des exactions barbares et d'acquérir une réputation sinistre. Commandée par le général Heinz Lammerding, pur produit du système nazi, la division Das Reich voit sa progression entravée par la Résistance, par des opérations de commando et par les bombardements de l'aviation alliée. Mais cette légendaire action de guérilla restera marquée par deux représailles sanglantes: les pendaisonsde Tulle et le massacred'Oradour-sur-Glane.
''A gripping new collection from Max Hastings that puts you at the heart of the battle ... Compelling'' Daily Mail
''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''.
Section - i: List of Illustrations Section - ii: Foreward Section - iii: Prologue: London and France, 5/6 June 1944 Chapter - 1: 2nd SS Panzer Division: Montauben, Tarn-et-Garonne, May 1944 Chapter - 2: SOE: Baker Street Chapter - 3: SOE: Southern France Chapter - 4: The Road Chapter - 5: Tulle: The ''Liberation'' Chapter - 6: Tulle: The Price Chapter - 7: The Jeds Chapter - 8: ''Panzer divisions are too good for this...'' Chapter - 9: ''...a rapid and lasting clean up...'': Oradour Chapter - 10: Excess of Zeal Chapter - 11: The SAS: Bulbasket Chapter - 12: Normandy Chapter - 13: Afterwards Section - iv: Appendix A: 2nd Panzer Division''s memorandum on anti-guerilla operations, issued on 9 June 1944 Section - v: Appendix B: Principal Weapons of the maquis and the 2nd Panzer Division Section - vi: Bibliography and a Note on Sources Acknowledgements - vii: Acknowledgements Section - viii: Glossary Section - ix: Notes and References Index - x: Index >
''As gripping as any spy thriller, Hastings''s achievement is especially impressive, for he has produced the best single volume yet written on the subject'' Sunday Times ''Authoritative, exciting and notably well written'' Daily Telegraph ''A serious work of rigourous and comprehensive history ... royally entertaining and readable'' Mail on Sunday In The Secret War , Max Hastings presents a worldwide cast of characters and extraordinary sagas of intelligence and Resistance to create a new perspective on the greatest conflict in history. The book links tales of high courage ashore, at sea and in the air to the work of the brilliant ''boffins'' battling the enemy''s technology. Here are not only the unheralded codebreaking geniuses of Bletchley Park, but also their German counterparts who achieved their own triumphs and the fabulous espionage networks created, and so often spurned, by the Soviet Union. With its stories of high policy and human drama, the book has been acclaimed as the best history of the secret war ever written.
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 Year 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, 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.
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER A masterly history of the Dambusters raid from bestselling and critically acclaimed Max Hastings. Operation Chastise was one of the most extraordinary episodes of the Second World War, yet it has also become one of the most misunderstood. Max Hastings tells the gripping story of the Dambusters raid, from the invention of the bouncing bomb to the moonlit cockpits of young pilots flying at treetop height through lethal enemy fire. But Hastings also challenges what we think we know about the Dambusters, bringing to light the difficult truths that have often been left out of the legend. ''Brings it to life as never before ... Hour by nerve-jangling hour'' Daily Mail ''Superb ... The heroes shine, but their achievement haunts'' Times ''A virtuoso performance from a veteran military historian. It is a white-knuckle narrative that brings clarity and insight to a much-loved tale, as well as offering a vital corrective to the drum-thumping conclusions of earlier books'' Sunday Times
From the #1 bestselling historian Max Hastings ''the heart-stopping story of the missile crisis'' Daily Telegraph ''A story that grabs from the get-go - the moments in which the world teetered on the brink of total annihilation come alive as they would if this were the very best fiction'' Justin Webb, Mail on Sunday ''The most gripping narrative of the crisis... frightening but hopelessly addictive'' Gerald DeGroot, Times 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.
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.
The Sunday Times bestseller ''One of the most dramatic forgotten chapters of the war, as told in a new book by the incomparable Max Hastings'' DAILY MAIL In August 1942, beleaguered Malta was within weeks of surrender to the Axis, because its 300,000 people could no longer be fed. Churchill made a personal decision that at all costs, the ''island fortress'' must be saved. This was not merely a matter of strategy, but of national prestige, when Britain''s fortunes and morale had fallen to their lowest ebb.
The largest fleet the Royal Navy committed to any operation of the western war was assembled to escort fourteen fast merchantmen across a thousand of miles of sea defended by six hundred German and Italian aircraft, together with packs of U-boats and torpedo craft. The Mediterranean battles that ensued between 11 and 15 August were the most brutal of Britain''s war at sea, embracing four aircraft-carriers, two battleships, seven cruisers, scores of destroyers and smaller craft. The losses were appalling: defeat seemed to beckon.
This is the saga Max Hastings unfolds in his first full length narrative of the Royal Navy, which he believes was the most successful of Britain''s wartime services. As always, he blends the ''big picture'' of statesmen and admirals with human stories of German U-boat men, Italian torpedo-plane crews, Hurricane pilots, destroyer and merchant-ship captains, ordinary but extraordinary seamen.
Operation Pedestal describes catastrophic ship sinkings, including that of the aircraft-carrier Eagle, together with struggles to rescue survivors and salvage stricken ships. Most moving of all is the story of the tanker Ohio, indispensable to Malta''s survival, victim of countless Axis attacks. In the last days of the battle, the ravaged hulk was kept under way only by two destroyers, lashed to her sides. Max Hastings describes this as one of the most extraordinary tales he has ever recounted. Until the very last hours, no participant on either side could tell what would be the outcome of an epic of wartime suspense and courage.
Within days of the D-Day landings, the Das Reich 2nd SS Panzer Division 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. Max Hastings' Das Reich is a powerful account of their progress and a true military classic.
Dans un cortège de morts et de destructions la division Das Reich, bourreau d'Oradour et de Tulle, connaît une progression sanglante, semée d'embûches par la résistance déterminée à empêcher les Allemands d'atteindre la Normandie à temps pour s'opposer au Débarquement. Mais quelle fut la véritable histoire de la division Das Reich pendant ce mois de juin 44 ? Partie de Montauban pour rejoindre la Normandie, la division Das Reich, forte de 15 000 hommes, subit bombardements alliés et opérations de commandos de la résistance. Elle mettra 15 jours au lieu de 3 pour parcourir les 725 kilomètres qui devaient la mener sur les plages de Normandie. Après les pendaisons de Tulle et le massacre d'Oradour-sur-Glane, la division déjà ralentie et fatiguée ne parviendra pas à rejoindre à temps la Normandie pour s'opposer au Débarquement. Dans quelle mesure la Résistance parvint-elle à freiner la progression de la division ? Quel rôle joua-t-elle réellement dans le déroulement de ces événements ?
A partir des témoignages alliés, des résistants, des hommes de Vichy et des Allemands, le livre suit pas à pas la progression de la division Das Reich et analyse tous les événements qui la ponctuent.
Il fait la part des responsabilités, de la cruauté et de l'héroïsme des deux camps. Cette analyse du contexte des événements décrit une réalité - dramatique - dans une phase critique des hostilités et tente de rétablir les rôles de cette épopée sanglante.
