Max Hastings

1. Max Hastings is a newspaperman, son of a journalist and a writer.

2. I picked up his biographical "Going to the Wars" in the Aberystwyth public library. It is a description of his involvement in conflict, first as a part-time soldier, then as a war correspondent. He was in Biafra, Vietnam, Rhodesia and, famously, first man into Stanley.

3. Personally, I found great comfort in his explanation that he enjoys the company of soldiers, although he himself could not be one.

Overlord

4. Having learnt something about the man, I then read "Overlord", his book about the famous 1944 invasion of Europe. The back-cover blurb said something about 'heavy in judgement', and I have to agree. Almost every aspect is commented on with the full weight of forty years of hindsight. He asks questions that I would like to know the answers to: Was Mulberry really worth the cost in manpower? Why was there never a straight copy of the German 88mm anti-tank gun?

5. He does put stuff in perspectives I've not see before. For example, he mentions that there was only a month between the Falaise Gap and Market-Garden.

6. Monty (Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery) gets full attention, and while there is admiration for him as soldier, there is also a sharp knife that cuts away the aura the man built around himself.

Bomber Command

7. Next I read "Bomber Command", essentially a review of the British strategic bombing campaign against Germany in WWII. Here is another book that uses all the benefits of hindsight to judge questions that were controversial in its day, but came to be viewed as inevitable. My favourite quote in the book is in the foreword, where he thanks the aircrew he interviewed, and mentions that "their memories have gained in frankness what it had lost in detail."

8. The most surprising thing I learnt was that the casualty rate in Bomber Command was second only to U-boat crews.

9. Many of the well-known bombing raids are hardly mentioned (Dresden, Hamburg, the Dams), but he includes a description of a firestorm in Darmstadt.

10. Also covered in fair detail, is cases of LMF (lack of moral fibre), where aircrew refused to fly.

11. He also assesses the amount of damage caused. Although the damage was serious, he shows that it hardly hampered the German war effort until near the end. Intelligence about the effectiveness of the bombing seems to be mostly fiction, endless extrapolations and estimates produced to reinforce the belief that the air war was being won.

12. 'Bomber' Harris is of course the central figure in the story, for it was he that insisted on this campaign. Hastings shows that Harris was essentially out of control by the end of the war.

13. My favourite Nevil Shute novel, "Pastoral", is set on a bomber station. Every thing that Hastings describe seems to be in the novel.

14. Hastings comes to the interesting conclusion that the bombing campaign served to keep the Russians fighting, while the invasion of Europe was postponed. The loss of life in aircrew and the cost of aircraft and manpower was repaid by not weakly invading in 1943, but overwhelmingly in 1944.