The Secret War
In The Secret War’, Max Hastings examines the espionage and intelligence machines of all sides in World War II, and the impact of spies, code-breakers and partisan operations on events. Written on a global scale, the book brings together accounts from British, American, German, Russian and Japanese sources to tell the story of a secret war waged unceasingly by men and women often far from the battlefields but whose actions profoundly influenced the outcome.
Returning to the Second World War for the first time since his best-selling All Hell Let Loose’, Hastings weaves into a big picture’ framework, the human stories of spies and intelligence officers who served their respective masters. Told through a series of snapshots of key moments, the book looks closely at Soviet espionage operations which dwarfed those of every other belligerent in scale, as well as the code-breaking operation at Bletchley Park the greatest intelligence achievement of the conflict with many more surprising and unfamiliar tales of treachery, deception, betrayal and incompetence by spies of Axis, Allied or indeterminate loyalty.
Reviews
‘As gripping as any spy thriller. Hastings understands, better than any previous historian, that this is as much a story about human nature as it is about the mechanics of code-breaking or spycraft … he has produced the best single volume yet written on the subject’
Lawrence Rees, Sunday Times
‘A total thriller with a full cast of killers, swashbucklers and beautiful adventuresses. The best history of war intelligence yet’
Simon Sebag Montefiore
‘This is his war and he writes with an easy assurance, scatter-gunning opinions … Hastings is on form. He has set out to provide thought and discussion and, with his familiar robustness, shotgun at side, he has succeeded’
The Times
Details
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Critical acclaim for The Secret War
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Introducing The Secret War: Spies, Codes and Guerrillas 1939-45
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Max’s Book Extracts
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RUSI 2012 Duke of Westminster’s Medal for Military Literature
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Pritzker Military Library Literature Award
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Thanks to all my readers in Britain who have so far bought over 250,000 copies of All Hell Let Loose and many more worldwide. Read More
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The wrong war in the wrong place. Every day we linger there means more lives wasted.
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Max introduces All Hell Let Loose
Max Hastings introduces his new book, All Hell Let Loose. Read More
Max’s Lecture on All Hell Let Loose
I have written All Hell Let Loose (published in US as Inferno) with two ideas in mind: first, to try to offer some of my own thoughts about great issues which I haven’t discussed in earlier books, and about which I hope that I may have something new to bring to the party- to complete my personal cycle about the Second World War, if you like. Read More
Critical acclaim for Going to the Wars
Max Hastings grew up with romantic dreams of a life amongst warriors. But after his failure as a parachute soldier in Cyprus in 1963, he became a journalist instead. Before he was 30 he had reported conflicts in Northern Ireland, Biafra, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Middle East, Cyprus, Rhodesia, India and a string of other trouble spots. His final effort was as a war correspondent during the Falklands War. Going to the Wars is a story of his experiences reporting from these battlefields. It is also the story of a self-confessed coward: a writer with heroic ambitions who found himself recording the acts of heroes. Read More
Max’s Lecture on The Media and Modern Warfare
Professional soldiers through the past century and a half have seldom thought much of the journalists who have accompanied them to war. William Howard Russell of The Times, father of modern war corresponding, was sometimes feared by the generals of the Crimea, but never admired by them. In the early days of the American Civil War, an idealistic Union general named Irvin McDowell said that he had arranged for correspondents to take the field with the army, “and I have suggested to them that they should wear white uniforms to indicate their purity of their characters.” It was not long before any delusions of that sort were shattered. By 1898, when General Kitchener started his expeditionary force up the Nile to defeat the Mahdi, he was best remembered among the accompanying journalists for his answer when they besieged his tent one morning in search of news: “Out of my way, you drunken swabs!” Read More
Max’s Lecture on State of The Union
A lecture on 'The State of The Union' given in 2006 for the Scottish National Trust.
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Max’s Ruttenberg Lecture
David Cameron and Barack Obama said in a joint statement at the end of the president’s recent state visit to London that the relationship between our two countries is not merely special, but essential. This was a pleasantly emollient assertion, characteristic of the things statesmen say in such circumstances. But this evening I want to discuss how far it seems justified by realities, past and present, with special reference to defence, which is my own field; and what we, the British, as ever the lesser player and often suppliant, might do to strengthen our side of the affiliation. I use the word affiliation, rather than partnership, advisedly, for it seems to me that many of the difficulties and disappointments that landmark our exchanges with the United States result from exaggerated hopes of what Britain may realistically expect from its relationship with the most powerful nation on earth. Read More
Max’s Lecture on The Falklands
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CPRE Lecture
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Cameron Lecture
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Max introduces Warriors: Extraordinary Tales From The Battlefield
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Max introduces Nemesis: The Battle For Japan 1944-45
Why do people like me go on writing books about the Second World War ? 62 years after it ended, what new can there possibly be to be said, about the most exhaustively chronicled event in human history ? On the odd occasions when a new book is published which claims to have uncovered revelations- that Winston Churchill secretly plotted De Gaulle’s assassination or that allied troops murdered thousands of German prisoners in Europe in 1945, they always turn out to be nonsense. Read More
Max introduces Did You Really Shoot The Television: A Family Fable
Almost all of us are intrigued by our own heredity. In this book, I’ve recounted the picaresque little saga of mine. The Hastingses weren’t at all important people, but they did some extraordinary and sometimes pretty weird things. And because they were writers for three generations, they wrote them down. When I did BBC’s Desert Island Discs back in 1986, I was pretty discreet about our tumultuous rows and my admittedly pretty awful childhood behaviour. But when my mother, Anne Scott-James, was DID’s guest at the age of 90 in 2003, to the audience’s delight and my toe-curling embarrassment, she regaled Sue Lawley with some horror stories, not least about my doings. For weeks afterwards, people came up to me in petrol stations and other unlikely places, asking: ‘Ere- did you really shoot the television ?’. It’s because people seemed intrigued by that question that I made it the title of this book. I’ll explain it in due course, but I want to make plain immediately that the victim was not a big set. Read More
Max’s Lecture on Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940-45
To a remarkable degree, even in 2010 the period of Winston Churchill’s war leadership continues to define many British people’s view of our own country. We have been told more about him than any other human being. Thousands of people of many nations have recorded encounters. The most vivid wartime memory of a British Eighth Army veteran whom I once met derived from a day in August 1942 when he found the prime minister his neighbour in a North African desert latrine. Read More
Max’s Lecture on Armageddon: The Battle For Germany 1944-45
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Forty-something years ago, when I was a teenager, even then avidly preoccupied with the Second World War, the study of its history was still dominated by fiercely nationalistic perceptions. Americans wildly overrated their battlefield contribution to victory, and perhaps underestimated their decisive industrial one. The British, astonishingly enough, still perceived themselves as the inhabitants of middle earth. The Russians barely acknowledged that the western allies had participated in the war at all. Read More
Max reviews The White War by Mark Thompson
The White War by Mark Thompson (Basic Books)
Many Anglo-Saxons perceive Italy’s role in modern history as marginal and verging upon absurdity. Few American or British people contrived to hate Mussolini and his nation in the Second World War as they hated Hitler and his, because they did not fear Italians in the same way. There were those ponderous jokes which pleased stupid men with large moustaches in English pubs in the 1950s, about Italian tanks lavishly equipped with reverse gears. The day after Italy entered World War I in May 1915, a Slovene child in the Hapsburg Alpine village of Caporetto contributed something to the same legend by exclaiming as he saw Bersaglieri troops cycling towards him in their exotic plumed hats: ‘Daddy, daddy, look at all the ladies coming here on bikes !’ (p.71). Read More
Max reviews The Crimean War
The Crimean War by Orlando Figes (Metropolitan Books)
The Crimean War In The British Imagination by Stefanie Markovits (Cambridge)
Considering the depth of mutual suspicion and animosity between Britain and Russia after 1815, it is astonishing that the lion and bear have fought each other only twice. At Winston Churchill’s behest, British forces played a desultory role supporting the White interest in the 1919-21 Civil War. The nations clashed much more fiercely between 1854 and 1856, when the Crimean War made a flagellatory impact on British society: it set a benchmark for political and military bungling, and public recrimination about it, which endures today. Read More
Critical acclaim for All Hell Let Loose
(Published as INFERNO in the US) From the New York Times: “Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945” sums up and surpasses all his previous publications: a new, original and necessary history, in many ways the crowning of a life’s work Read More
Max’s 2011 Ruttenberg Lecture
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A Glimpse of a Work in Progress
Max's next book is to be a study of 1914- the approach to the First World War, its outbreak and early campaigns up to December, when the vast European battles of movement ended, and the trench stalemate became acknowledged on both the Eastern and Western fronts.
1914: Europe's Tragedy will feature Max's usual blend of top-down analysis and bottom-up human experience, mostly based on research in archives around Europe. Below is a snapshot, a random sample, of a few of the hundreds of pages of notes the author has already assembled, before starting to write the epic narrative that will be published for the centenary in 2014. Read More
