Between 1941 and 1944, the British army contributed relatively little to World War II. On the unremittingly bloody Eastern Front, no Russian or German soldier had experienced the luxury of having four years to prepare and train for a resumption of the European continental campaign. But on D-Day --- June 6, 1944 --- the lives of British soldiers changed. Thiry-five thousand infantrymen, airmen and special service operatives were sent headfirst into the whitest heat of war, almost overnight. Max Hastings’ SWORD BEACH tells the story of a handful of British soldiers and their critical role in D-Day’s parachute and seaborne offensive. 

In February 1942, RAF intelligence was baffled by a newly identified radar network on the coast of Nazi-occupied Europe, codenamed Würzburg. British intelligence proposed an assault to capture key components. Incredibly brave agents of the French Resistance risked their lives to probe the German defenses on the Normandy coast. Then a company of Airborne forces were dropped into France in the dead of night amid heavy snow. Launching their attack, the allied soldiers dismantled the German’s radar, and after three nail-biting hours and a fierce battle with Wehrmacht defenders, they escaped in the nick of time using landing-craft that carried them back across the stormy seas to Portsmouth. OPERATION BITING retells this dramatic operation through a gallery of amazing characters.

In THE ABYSS, Max Hastings turns his focus to one of the most terrifying events of the mid-20th century --- the 13 days in October 1962 when the world stood on the brink of nuclear war. Hastings looks at the conflict with fresh eyes, focusing on the people at the heart of the crisis --- American President John F. Kennedy, Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro, and a host of their advisors. As the action moves back and forth from Moscow to Washington, DC, to Havana, Hastings seeks to explain, as much as to describe, the attitudes and conduct of the Soviets, Cubans and Americans, and to recreate the tension and heightened fears of countless innocent bystanders whose lives hung in the balance.

In 1940, Hitler had two choices when it came to the Mediterranean region: stay out, or commit sufficient forces to expel the British from the Middle East. Against his generals’ advice, the Fuhrer committed a major strategic blunder. He ordered the Wehrmacht to seize Crete, allowing the longtime British bastion of Malta to remain in Allied hands. Over the fall of 1941, the Royal Navy and RAF, aided by British intelligence, used the island to launch a punishing campaign against the Germans. But by spring 1942, the British lost their advantage. British submarines and surface warships were withdrawn, and the remaining forces were on the brink of starvation. OPERATION PEDESTAL chronicles the ensuing British mission to save those troops.

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. He portrays the set pieces of Dienbienphu, the 1968 Tet offensive, the air blitz of North Vietnam, and also much less familiar miniatures 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 two million people.

From acclaimed military historian Max Hastings comes a new history of the outbreak of World War I: the dramatic stretch from the breakdown of diplomacy to the battles that marked the frenzied first year before the war bogged down in the trenches.

It was the first war we could not win. At no other time since World War II have two superpowers met in battle. Now Max Hastings, preeminent military historian, 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 200 vets --- including the Chinese --- Hastings follows real officers and soldiers through the battles.