Hastings, Max 1945- (Macdonald Max Hastings)

PERSONAL:

Born December 28, 1945, in London, England; son of Macdonald (a writer) and Anne (a writer) Hastings; married Patricia Mary Edmondson, May 27, 1972 (marriage ended, 1994); married; wife's name Penny; children: (first marriage) Charles, Charlotte, Harry. Education: Attended Oxford University, 1964-65. Religion: Church of England. Hobbies and other interests: Shooting, fishing, gardening.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Hungerford, Berkshire, England. Agent—Peters Fraser & Dunlop, Drury House, 34-43 Russell St., London SC2B 5HA, England.

CAREER:

British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC), London, England, researcher for television historical documentaries, 1963-64; Evening Standard, London, reporter, 1965-67, foreign correspondent, 1968-70; BBC, current affairs commentator for television program Twenty-Four Hours (covering southeast Asia, the Middle East, southern Africa, China, and India), 1970-73; freelance foreign correspondent for television and newspapers, 1973-86; Daily Telegraph, editor, 1986-89, director, 1989-c. 1992, editor in chief, 1990-c. 1996. Game Conservancy, trustee, 1987—, Liddell-Hart Archives, trustee, 1988—; Press Complaints Commission, member, 1991—. Military service: British Army, Parachute Regiment, 1963.

MEMBER:

Beefsteak Club, Brooks's Club, Saintsbury Club.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Fellowship from World Press Institute, 1967; British Press Award, 1973, for coverage of "Yom Kippur War," and 1980, 1982; Somerset Maugham Prize for nonfiction, 1980, for Bomber Command: The British Bombing of Germany in World War II; named journalist of the year, 1982; named reporter of the year, Granada Television, 1982, for coverage of the Falklands War; book of the year awards, Yorkshire Post, 1983, for The Battle for the Falklands, and 1989, for Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy; named editor of the year, 1988.

WRITINGS:

The Fire This Time: America in 1968, Taplinger (New York, NY), 1968.

Barricades in Belfast: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Northern Ireland, Taplinger (New York, NY), 1970.

Montrose: The King's Champion, Gollancz (London, England), 1977.

Yoni: The Hero of Entebbe, Dial (New York, NY), 1979.

Bomber Command: The British Bombing of Germany in World War II, Dial (New York, NY), 1979.

Game Book: Sporting around the World, M. Joseph (London, England), 1979.

(With Len Deighton) The Battle of Britain, Rainbird (London, England), 1980.

Das Reich: Resistance and the March of the 2nd Panzer Division through France, June 1944, M. Joseph (London, England), 1981, Holt (New York, NY), 1991.

The Shotgun, David & Charles (Newton Abbot, England), 1981.

(With Simon Jenkins) The Battle for the Falklands, Norton (New York, NY), 1983.

Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1984, reprinted, Vintage Books (New York, NY), 2006.

(Editor) The Oxford Book of Military Anecdotes, Oxford University Press (Oxford, England), 1985 reprinted, 2002.

Victory in Europe: D-Day to V-E Day, photographs by George Stevens, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1985.

The Korean War, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1987.

(Editor) Robert Churchill's Game Shooting: The Definitive Book on the Churchill Method of Instinctive Wingshooting for Game and Sporting Clays, revised edition, Countrysport Press (Traverse City, MI), 1990.

Going to the Wars, Macmillan (New York, NY), 2000.

(Editor) Editor: An Inside Story of Newspapers, Macmillan (London, England), 2002.

Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944-45, A.A. Knopf (New York, NY), 2004.

Warriors: Portraits from the Battlefield, A.A. Knopf (New York, NY), 2005.

Author of scripts for television reports and special programs, including The Korean War, BBC-TV, 1988. Contributor to books, including The Daily Telegraph Record of the Second World War: Month by Month from 1939 to 1945, Sidgwick & Jackson (London, England), 1989. Former columnist, London Standard, 1970s, and Daily Express, 1980s. Contributor to magazines, including Field, Spectator, DNB, Country Life, Shooting Times, and Economist.

SIDELIGHTS:

In Bomber Command: The British Bombing of Germany in World War II Max Hastings examines the British campaign of "area bombing" against Ger- man cities during World War II. Begun in 1940 when British intelligence saw no other way of defeating the quickly-advancing German forces, the Bomber Command's five-year air offensive resulted not only in the destruction of many German cities and the killing of some 600,000 German civilians, but also left over 50,000 British aircrew dead. Such casualties caused Geoffrey Wheatcroft in a Spectator review of Bomber Command to call the bombings "the greatest war crime of the Second World War." Although C.M. Woodhouse of the Times Literary Supplement faulted Hastings for what he termed "sometimes inadequate and sometimes misleading references," he called Bomber Command "a brilliant tour de force for a man born after the events he describes." Michael Howard in the New Republic offered similar praise, calling the work "careful without being dull, vivid without being overwritten," and "popular history at its best."

Hastings's historical account Das Reich: Resistance and the March of the 2nd Panzer Division through France, June 1944 also evoked admiration from Woodhouse, who judged the "well-documented combination of oral history with documentary records" even "maturer than [Bomber Command]" because its author is "less passionately concerned to prove a thesis." In the Spectator, Richard Cobb noted that "some questions do remain unanswered in this crisp and enjoyable narrative," but Hastings displays a "skillful use of a series of personal case histories," by which he reduces "Hitler's corps d'elite" to "feasible persons rather than abstract machines."

Sometimes described as the best source to date written about the Falklands War, The Battle for the Falklands brought Hastings and coauthor Jenkins a prestigious award and generally favorable reviews. In Christopher Wain's assessment for the Listener, the account is "outstanding" in that it "pulls together the complex strands of the history of the dispute … and weaves them into a pattern which has few obvious flaws." According to New York Times reviewer Drew Middleton, who called the account "war correspondence in the great tradition of Bill Stoneman and Ernie Pyle," The Battle for the Falklands "probably will endure as the standard history of the campaign because of the happy combination of two authors, each a master in his field."

Neal Ascherson's opinion in the Observer was less glowing. He dubbed The Battle for the Falklands "a meticulous war history," but thought the book lacked Hastings's "natural bounce." In the consideration of Charles Carter in the Los Angeles Times, "the book is crammed with facts, coherently told and immensely aided by maps," but "the writing declines to merely competent." Carter noted that an "inherent weakness of such a book is its form, a journalistic effort relying partly on the statements of anonymous interviewees," but also wrote that "the strength of this one is that the narrative is plausible and the conclusions are intelligent."

As for the interviews that Carter labeled a weakness, Robert Fox writing in the Times Educational Supplement believed that the Hastings and Simon report represents "the weightiest of the new books [on the Falklands War] in content and reputation." Specifically, Fox observed that Hastings "has carried out a tour de force in interviewing nearly every key commander from all three services" involved in the war. Time reviewer Donald Morrison described The Battle for the Falklands, as "a poignant memorial," while Reid Beddow writing in the Washington Post Book World called it "a small gem of military and naval history."

In his review of Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy, Michael Carver wrote in the Times Literary Supplement that Hastings's book "combines serious historical and critical comment with brilliant reportage," bringing "both the arguments between higher commanders and the fighting on the battlefield itself to life more vividly than any previous books." Middleton, again writing in the New York Times, explained that the central theme of the book is "that whenever Allied troops met Germans on anything like equal terms, the Germans nearly always prevailed." Hastings explains that the German army represented one of the finest military forces the world has ever known. He warns that any future defense of Europe will need to look not to the Allied invasion of Normandy for a model, but to the resourceful defensive tactics of the German forces who fought "in the face of all the odds against them and in spite of their own demented Fuehrer." Such a no-nonsense approach led Detroit News reviewer Al Stark to conclude: "I began to see [Hastings's treatment of Normandy] for what it is, an unvarnished look at one of the greatest military missions of all time…. It is refreshing to find [a book] that describes Normandy straight up, with all the human failure, and still does not diminish the achievement."

Hastings told CA: "I am a journalist and military historian, writing mostly about the Second World War. Both my parents and both grandfathers were writers, so I didn't have much choice about how to make a living. As a teenager I thought of being a soldier, but a brief spell with the British Army's Parachute Regiment convinced me that I was too undisciplined to ‘hack it.’ I dropped out of Oxford University when offered a job on the London Evening Standard, and thereafter spent most of my twenties as a foreign correspondent, reporting a lot of wars, including Yom Kippur, Vietnam, the Falklands, Angola, and Cyprus, and living for almost two years, 1967-68, in the United States.

"I wrote two pretty bad young reporter's books, then in 1976 I moved to Ireland to start writing seriously. The outcome was my first substantial success, Bomber Command, a study of the Royal Air Force strategic offensive against Germany in World War II. Thereafter I wrote Das Reich about the French Resistance, Overlord about D-Day, and had almost finished The Korean War, when suddenly and very unexpectedly I was invited to edit the British Daily Telegraph newspaper. I stayed a newspaper editor for sixteen years, then got back to proper writing with Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944-45, about the last year of the war in Europe, and its companion volume Nemesis, about the last year of the war against Japan.

"I live in the countryside about seventy miles west of London and am very keen on gardening, hunting, and fishing. I still do some journalism for the Daily Mail and Guardian, and review books for the Sunday Times. It has been en exceptionally lucky, happy life!"

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Detroit News, July 29, 1984, Al Stark, review of Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy.

Economist, November 14, 1981, review of Das Reich: Resistance and the March of the 2nd Panzer Division through France, June 1944, p. 113.

Listener, October 4, 1979, review of Bomber Command: The British Bombing of Germany in World War II, p. 463; November 12, 1981, Christopher Wain, review of The Battle for the Falklands, p. 580; March 3, 1983, review of The Battle for the Falklands, p. 20.

London Review of Books, March 4, 1982, review of Das Reich, p. 20.

Los Angeles Times, August 21, 1983, Charles Carter, review of The Battle for the Falklands, p. 3.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, December 20, 1987, review of The Korean War, p. 2.

New Republic, February 16, 1980, Michael Howard, review of Bomber Command, pp. 34-35.

New Statesman, February 21, 1969, review of The Fire This Time: America in 1968, p. 263; November 19, 1982, Anthony Barnett, review of The Battle for the Falklands, p. 25.

Newsweek, November 25, 1985, David Lehman, review of The Oxford Book of Military Anecdotes, p. 102.

New York Times, July 6, 1983, Drew Middleton, review of The Battle for the Falklands, p. C22; May 18, 1984, Drew Middleton, review of Overlord, p. 23; November 14, 1987, Drew Middleton, review of The Korean War, p. 14.

New York Times Book Review, August 1, 1982, Walter Goodman, review of Das Reich, p. 23; November 29, 1987, Rosemary Foot, review of The Korean War, p. 18.

Observer (London, England), May 20, 1979, review of Yoni: Hero of Entebbe, p. 37; February 13, 1983, Neal Ascherson, review of The Battle for the Falklands, p. 32.

Spectator, February 26, 1977, review of Montrose: The King's Champion, p. 22; September 29, 1979, Geoffrey Wheatcroft, review of Bomber Command, pp. 18-21; May 8, 1982, Richard Cobb, review of Das Reich, pp. 19-20; March 12, 1983, review of The Battle for the Falklands, p. 20.

Time, August 8, 1983, Donald Morrison, review of The Battle for the Falklands, pp. 74-75.

Times (London, England), October 17, 1985, review of The Oxford Book of Military Anecdotes, p. 11.

Times Educational Supplement, March 4, 1983, Robert Fox, review of The Battle for the Falklands.

Times Literary Supplement, January 30, 1969, review of The Fire This Time, p. 103; June 18, 1970, review of Barricades in Belfast: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Northern Ireland, p. 651; April 29, 1977, review of Montrose, p. 519; December 14, 1979, C.M. Woodhouse, review of Bomber Command, p. 136; December 25, 1981, C.M. Woodhouse, review of Das Reich, p. 1486; May 13, 1983; June 8, 1984, Michael Carver, review of Overlord, p. 634; May 17, 1985, review of Victory in Europe: D-Day to V-E Day, p. 555; December 11, 1987, review of The Korean War, p. 1367.

Washington Post Book World, July 10, 1983, Reid Beddow, review of The Battle for the Falklands, p. 4; July 10, 1984, Richard Harwood, review of Overlord, p. 1; June 9, 1985, D. Clayton James, review of The Onslaught: The German Drive to Stalingrad, p. 6; January 10, 1988, review of The Korean War, p. 4.