Armageddon; The Battle for Germany, 1944-1945
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. First American Edition [stated]. Presumed first printing. No price on DJ but no book club indentation on rear cover. Hardcover. xxiii,[1]. 584, [2] pages. Includes 32 pages of photographs ad 19 maps. Introduction. The Principal Commanders and Their Forces. Acknowledgments. Sources and References. Index. Sir Max Hugh Macdonald Hastings FRSL FRHistS (born 28 December 1945) is a British journalist and military historian, who has worked as a foreign correspondent for the BBC, editor-in-chief of The Daily Telegraph, and editor of the Evening Standard. He is also the author of numerous books, chiefly on defence matters, which have won several major awards. Hastings spent a year (1967–68) as a Fellow of the World Press Institute, following which he published his first book, America, 1968: The Fire This Time, an account of the US in its tumultuous election year. He reported from more than sixty countries and eleven wars for BBC and for the Evening Standard in London. Hastings was the first journalist to enter Port Stanley during the 1982 Falklands War. He is the author of many books, including Bomber Command, which earned the Somerset Maugham Award for non-fiction in 1980. Both Overlord and The Battle for the Falklands won the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year prize. He was named Journalist of the Year at the 1982 British Press Awards, and Editor of the Year in 1988. In 2010 he received the Royal United Services Institute's Westminster Medal for his "lifelong contribution to military literature". In 2012, he was awarded the US$100,000 Pritzker Military Library Literature Award, a lifetime achievement award for military writing, which includes an honorarium, citation and medallion. This is the epic story of the last eight months of World War II in Europe by Max Hastings, one of Britain's most highly regarded military historians. The author has scoured the archives of the major combatants and has interviewed many survivors to create an unprecedented understanding of the events and their impact for the crucial final 18 months of the 20th-century's greatest global conflict, World War II.
This huge and splendid volume tells the grim tale of the final collapse of the Third Reich. It does so from the viewpoints of the upper millstone (the Western Allies), the lower millstone (the Russians) and the grain being ground in between (the Germans). The research includes previously untapped Russian archives (particularly in the accounts of Soviet veterans) and leads to a gripping and horrifying story that serious students of military history will find almost impossible to put down. The blunders recounted are numerous, from the Allied failure to open Antwerp in the fall of 1944 to the Russian frontal assault on Berlin, and the Wehrmacht is depicted as the best army of the war and also the most atrocious in its treatment of civilians. Indeed, the treatment of civilians is a major theme, since they were slaughtered on a scale unheard of since the Thirty Years' War, and not only the Nazi camp inmates but also the inhabitants of Poland and East Prussia were numbered among the victims. The author hands out praise and blame with his usual edged aplomb (Anglophile readers may be happy to see a partial rehabilitation of Montgomery) and willingness to engender controversy, and also with his usual thorough research and clear writing (along with 24 pages of photos) to sustain every case he makes. His book ranks among the very best military history volumes of the year. Condition: Very good / Very good.
Keywords: Ardennes, Battle of the Bulge, Omar Bradley, Lawton Collins, William Deedes, David Fraser, James Gavin, Guderian, Arthur Harris, Courtney Hodges, Keitel, Henry Kissinger, Klemperer, Ivan Konev, Operation Market Garden, Walter Model, George Patton, Fo
ISBN: 9780375414336
[Book #79951]
Price: $30.00