Sword Beach: D-Day Baptism by Fire - Hardcover

by Max Hastings (Author)

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's Sword Beach tells the story of a handful of British soldiers and their critical role in D-Day's parachute and seaborne offensive. On Sword, the codename of one of the two beaches assaulted by the British, scores of soldiers were killed by the first shots that they ever heard fired in anger. One British corporal insisted on apologizing to his enemy prisoners, and the Free French troops, 120-men strong, suffered 60 percent losses in the first days of fighting. With his signature blend of drama and detail, Hastings shows how the men who landed on Sword played a critical role in Britain's preeminent landmark victory and the most spectacular battlefield event of World War II in the West.

Sword Beach fills in many of the missing pieces and human stories that have long been left out of the sweeping macro-stories of the Normandy invasion. Based on published memoirs, interviews with D-Day veterans, and rigorous research, Hastings lends color and shade to the climactic action of the Western Front's most famous battle. Sword Beach describes the lives of a small number of men, on a single day, who faced the immediate transition from make-believe battle to the war's most violent circumstances.

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Praise for Max Hastings

Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975

"We've seen a shelf-load of histories, analyses, memoirs, and novels on Vietnam. But what Hastings does in Vietnam is pull all these genres together in a highly readable and vivid narrative that, I think, will become the standard on the war for many years to come."
-- Tom Bowman, NPR.org

The Secret War: Spies, Ciphers, and Guerrillas, 1939-1945

"Monumental. . . . [The Secret War] embodies a herculean research effort [and] a real page turner."
-- Josef Joffe, New York Times Book Review

"[Max Hastings] brilliantly depicts the byzantine world of intelligence agencies, with dry humor and perception."
-- Antony Beevor, New York Review of Books

Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

"A new, original, necessary history, in many ways the crowning of a life's work. A professional war correspondent who has personally witnessed armed conflict in Vietnam, the Falkland Islands and other danger zones, Hastings has a sober, unromantic and realistic view of battle that puts him into a different category from the armchair generals whose gung-ho, schoolboy attitude to war fills the pages of a great majority of military histories. He writes with grace, fluency and authority. . . . Inferno is superb."
-- Richard J. Evans, New York Times Book Review

"If there is a contemporary British historian who is the chronicler of World War II, it would be Max Hastings. . . . [Inferno] is a true distillation of everything this historian has learned from a lifetime of scholarship--and more important, of real thought--on what he calls 'the greatest and most terrible event in human history.'"
-- Martin Rubin, San Francisco Chronicle