Description

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

A Times and Waterstones Book of the Year

‘The messy, dirty, bloody reality of Operation Overlord comes alive in Sword, Hastings’s portrait of the individual soldiers who risked their lives on the beaches of Normandy. He brings these men to life with sensitivity and beautiful prose’ THE TIMES

On 6 June 1944 when the Allied armies landed on D-Day, the Second World War had already lasted almost five years. Yet many of the British and American troops who invaded Normandy were virgin soldiers, never before committed to battle. They quit England in summertime to face within hours a storm of machine-gun and mortar fire. They witnessed scenes, above all of sudden death, such as no exercise had prepared them for.

In Sword, veteran chronicler of war Max Hastings explores with extraordinary vividness the actions of the Commando brigade and Montgomery’s 3rd Infantry and 6th Airborne divisions on and around a single beach. He describes their frustrations, hopes, loves and fears through the apparently interminable years training and preparing in England, then their triumphs and tragedies on the beach and beyond. Here are the airborne assaults on the Caen Canal bridge and Merville Battery, the battles on the shoreline and against the German strongpoints inland, narrated and explained with all the insights that Hastings’ decades of study, veterans’ interviews and new archive research enable him to deploy.

The book offers a searching analysis of why British troops did not reach Caen on 6 June, as Montgomery had promised Churchill that they would – and the story of the brigadier who was sacked for that failure. There is also a host of personal portraits of key figures from Commando leader Lord Lovat, famously brave but supremely arrogant, to Colonel Jim Eadie, whose tanks of the Staffordshire Yeomanry repulsed a panzer division in the last hours of 6 June, and some of the humbler participants to whom extraordinary things happened.

This is the story of D-Day as you have never read it before, with the blend of narrative, analysis and human insight that made Max Hastings’ last book Operation Biting, like many of his earlier works, a Sunday Times No. 1 bestseller.

Publisher Review

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

‘The messy, dirty, bloody reality of Operation Overlord comes alive in Sword, Hastings’s portrait of the individual soldiers who risked their lives on the beaches of Normandy. He brings these men to life with sensitivity and beautiful prose’

The Times

‘The transporting of 150,000 troops across the Channel in total secrecy and the feats they did that day is a story we never tire of – and Max Hastings tells it exceedingly well. His is one of the most reliable brands in popular history and Sword meets his usual standards. A cracking tale in the hands of a practised storyteller’

Spectator

‘D-Day was one of the British army’s finest hours, perhaps the finest. The author has matched that hour admirably’

Country Life

‘The publication of a book by Sir Max Hastings is an event. Hastings’s new book makes gripping reading. He combines comments from men who were there (drawn from an impressive array of primary sources) with pungent analysis’

TLS

‘Enthralling detail… The landings themselves unfold in glorious Technicolor, with even the better-known stories made to feel fresh and immediate. Just when you think there’s nothing new to say about D-Day, Max Hastings proves you wrong with this gripping, insightful and extraordinarily vivid retelling of the pivotal moment of the Second Front’

BBC History Magazine

‘The best kind of history books draw on compelling, richly textured human stories in order to chronicle wider events – and Hasting does this with aplomb’

Independent