A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

© 2014 HarperCollins (Reissue cover) In 1984, Simon & Schuster published the first edition of Max Hastings' Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy, a book that re-examined the Allied invasion of northern France on June 6, 1944 and the bitter campaign that lasted two-and-a-half months and culminated with the liberation of Paris on August 25, 1944. Based on extensive research, hundreds of interviews with veterans and other eyewitnesses, and benefitting from new insights gleaned from the declassification of the "Ultra secret  - the long-concealed fact that the Allies had broken the Germans' "unbreakable" Enigma cypher codes - Hastings' book sought to look beyond the legends and myths that had surrounded Operation Overlord and explain how the Allies defeated the German Wehrmacht in Normandy despite a "quality gap" in weapons (except artillery and aircraft), training, tactics, and overall soldiering skills that favored the Germans. At the ...

Dust jacket design: Eric White. © 2013 Alfred A. Knopf On September 24, 2013, 99 years and one day after Japan – in an ironic historical twist – declared war on her future Axis partner Germany, Alfred A. Knopf published Sir Max Hastings' Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War, the U.S. edition of the esteemed British historian's account of World War One's first five months. Published in Britain as Catastrophe, the book examines the diplomatic, military, and human errors in judgment that led to the outbreak of Europe in the summer of 1914 and set in motion the chain of events that caused future horrors in the 20th Century and beyond. In this nearly 700-page volume, Hastings focuses exclusively on the conflict – known then by most people as "the Great War," although some prescient German writers called it der Weltkrieg: "the World War" – in the Eastern and Western Fronts in Europe. (In his introduction, Hastings writes, "Hew Strachan, in the first...

©1987 Simon & Schuster (U.S. Edition) On November 1, 1987, Simon & Schuster published the U.S. edition of  The Korean War, a one-volume history of  a 1950-53 conflict that pitted the United States, South Korea, and 20 member-states against North Korea, the People's Republic of China, and - behind the scenes - Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union in a bloody struggle for control of the Korean Peninsula. Written by British historian Max Hastings and originally published in Great Britain by Michael Joseph, The Korean War examines the controversial clash of arms that is sometimes known in the U.S. as "the forgotten war" from a British perspective, with a sharp focus on the American, Soviet, and Chinese foreign and defense policies in the early stages of the Cold War that made the war inevitable. In retrospect, the Korean War is eclipsed by the conflict - World War II - that came before it and the one that came after it:  Vietnam. The former was a titanic struggle th...

(C) 2007 Random House/Vintage In 2007, three years after the publication of Max Hastings’ “Armageddon: The Battle for Germany 1944-1945,” the British imprint HarperPress published a companion volume about the end of World War II in the Pacific, “Nemesis: The Battle for Japan 1944-1945.” Like its predecessor set in the European Theater of Operations (ETO), “Nemesis” is an examination of the various military and political maneuvers that led to the Allied (primarily American) victory against the Japanese Empire during the war’s closing months. When Knopf, Hastings’ U.S. publisher, released the book for the American market as “Retribution: The Battle for Japan 1944-1945.” In this highly readable 688-page tome, Hastings depicts the earthshaking events that led to Japan’s defeat in the Pacific War in vivid prose and clear-eyed analysis of the various campaigns and battles that culminated with the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hastings sets up his Pacific War chessboa...

Imagine, for a moment, living in a world where, among other things, 27,000 human beings die violently every 24 hours, most of the Eurasian landmass is either a battlefield or under brutal occupation, the seas – particularly the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans – are viciously fought over by the navies of several world powers and death rains down from the skies in an almost indiscriminate manner, killing or maiming thousands of persons – most of whom have never worn a uniform or carried so much as a handgun to protect themselves.  Dystopian science fiction? The plot of the latest Tom Clancy novel?  Hardly; this is a thumbnail portrait of planet Earth as depicted in Sir Max Hastings’  Inferno: The World at War 1939-1945,  a one-volume history of the Second World War written by the author of  Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy  and (among many other history books)  The Battle for the Falklands,  which he co-wrote with Simon Jenkins.  Publi...