Audiobooks narrated by Max Hastings

From Max Hastings comes a collection of talks and lectures exploring the wars of the 20th century with the verve, insight and originality that has made him a number one bestselling historian. What is war like to live through, for civilian victims, especially women, as well as soldiers, sailors and fliers? Hastings has been a life-long student of warfare, a ‘chronicler of conflict’, working first as a foreign correspondent on battlefields, then as a prolific prize-winning historian of the 20th century’s greatest struggles. He has now been studying warfare for over fifty years, published thirty books, and given hundreds of talks and lectures. Here are thirteen of the best. Addressing questions of truth versus myth and revisiting many last-generation narratives, Hastings leads us through the most important conflicts in recent times. Listen as he explores D-Day, the Dambusters raid, Churchill’s character and achievement as war leader, Vietnam, and – in his most recent book, published in 2022, the Cuban missile crisis – 13 days when we came closest to annihilation and which stands as a mirror to the grave threats the world faces today.

Max Hastings (Author), Max Hastings (Narrator)

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The Falklands War: Recordings from the Archive: A landmark BBC radio collection

1982 was a historic year, a year in which the battle for a small group of islands in the South Atlantic dominated the news. From the initial broadcasts of the growing Argentine threat and Mrs Thatcher's speech to the Commons informing them that a Task Force will sail, to the battles for Goose Green and Port Stanley, the Argentine surrender and the controversial sinking of the Belgrano - all these historic moments, together with all the other important events of the Falklands War, are recorded here, in live BBC Radio News coverage. Released to mark the 40th anniversary of the conflict, this collection of recordings from the BBC Radio News team brings to life the events of the Falklands War and includes speeches and statements from journalists and survivors, as well as key political figures such as Margaret Thatcher and former President of Argentina Leopoldo Galtieri. © 2022 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd. (P) 2022 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd.

Various (Author), Alexander Haig, Anthony Parsons, Brian Hanrahan, Harold Briley, John Nott, Leopoldo Galtieri, Margaret Thatcher, Max Hastings, Rex Hunt, Various (Narrator)

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Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975

An absorbing and definitive modern history of the Vietnam War from the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of The Secret War. 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, to create an epic narrative of an epic struggle. 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. Many writers treat the war as a US tragedy, yet Hastings sees it as overwhelmingly that of the Vietnamese people, of whom forty died for every American. US blunders and atrocities were matched by those committed by their enemies. While all the world has seen the image of a screaming, naked girl seared by napalm, it forgets countless eviscerations, beheadings, and murders carried out by the communists. The people of both former Vietnams paid a bitter price for the Northerners’ victory in privation and oppression. Here is testimony from Vietcong guerrillas, Southern paratroopers, Saigon bargirls, and Hanoi students alongside that of infantrymen from South Dakota, Marines from North Carolina, and Huey pilots from Arkansas. No past volume has blended a political and military narrative of the entire conflict with heart-stopping personal experiences, in the fashion that Max Hastings’ readers know so well. The author suggests that neither side deserved to win this struggle with so many lessons for the twenty-first century about the misuse of military might to confront intractable political and cultural challenges. He marshals testimony from warlords and peasants, statesmen and soldiers, to create an extraordinary record.

Max Hastings (Author), Max Hastings (Narrator)

Audiobook

Catastrophe

The Amazon History Book of the Year 2013 is a magisterial chronicle of the calamity that befell Europe in 1914 as the continent shifted from the glamour of the Edwardian era to the tragedy of total war.1914: a year of unparalleled change. The year that diplomacy failed, Imperial Europe was thrown into its first modernised warfare and white-gloved soldiers rode in their masses across pastoral landscapes into the blaze of machine-guns. What followed were the costliest days of the entire War. But how had it happened?In Catastrophe: 1914 Max Hastings, best-selling author of the acclaimed All Hell Let Loose, answers at last how World War I could ever have begun. Ranging across Europe, from Paris to St. Petersberg, from Kings to corporals, Catastrophe 1914 traces how tensions across the continent kindled into a blaze of battles; not the stalemates of later trench-warfare but battles of movement and dash where Napoleonic tactics met with weapons from a newly industrialised age. A searing analysis of the power-brokering, vanity and bluff in the diplomatic maelstrom reveals who was responsible for the birth of this catastrophic world in arms. Mingling the experiences of humbler folk with the statesmen on whom their lives depended, Hastings asks: whose actions were justified?From the out-break of war through to its terrible making, and the bloody gambles in Sarajevo and Mons, Le Cateau, Marne and Tannenberg, this is the international story of World War I in its most severe and influential period. Published to coincide with its 100th Anniversary, Catastrophe: 1914 explains how and why this war, which shattered and changed the Western world for ever, was fought.

Max Hastings (Author), Max Hastings, Max Hastings and Nigel Carrington, Nigel Carrington (Narrator)

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Catastrophe: Volume One: Europe Goes to War 1914

The Amazon History Book of the Year 2013 is a magisterial chronicle of the calamity that befell Europe in 1914 as the continent shifted from the glamour of the Edwardian era to the tragedy of total war. 1914: a year of unparalleled change. The year that diplomacy failed, Imperial Europe was thrown into its first modernised warfare and white-gloved soldiers rode in their masses across pastoral landscapes into the blaze of machine-guns. What followed were the costliest days of the entire War. But how had it happened? In Catastrophe: 1914 Max Hastings, best-selling author of the acclaimed All Hell Let Loose, answers at last how World War I could ever have begun. Ranging across Europe, from Paris to St. Petersberg, from Kings to corporals, Catastrophe 1914 traces how tensions across the continent kindled into a blaze of battles; not the stalemates of later trench-warfare but battles of movement and dash where Napoleonic tactics met with weapons from a newly industrialised age. A searing analysis of the power-brokering, vanity and bluff in the diplomatic maelstrom reveals who was responsible for the birth of this catastrophic world in arms. Mingling the experiences of humbler folk with the statesmen on whom their lives depended, Hastings asks: whose actions were justified? From the out-break of war through to its terrible making, and the bloody gambles in Sarajevo and Mons, Le Cateau, Marne and Tannenberg, this is the international story of World War I in its most severe and influential period. Published to coincide with its 100th Anniversary, Catastrophe: 1914 explains how and why this war, which shattered and changed the Western world for ever, was fought.

Max Hastings (Author), Max Hastings, Nigel Carrington (Narrator)

Audiobook

Audiobooks Narrated by Max Hastings