16th Annual Lecture: An Evening with Sir Max Hastings

The Trustees of the Staffordshire Yeomanry (QORR) Museum are delighted to host an evening with leading British journalist and esteemed war chronicler, Sir Max Hastings.

On 6 June 1944 when the allied armies landed on D-Day, the Second World War had already lasted almost five years. Yet many of the British and American troops who invaded Normandy were virgin soldiers, never before committed to battle. They quit summer England to face within hours a storm of machine-gun and mortar fire. They witnessed scenes, above all of sudden death, such as no exercise had prepared them for. In Sword, veteran chronicler of war Max Hastings explores with extraordinary vividness the experiences of the Commando brigade, Montgomery’s 3rd Infantry and 6th Airborne divisions on and around a single British beach. He describes their frustrations, hopes, loves and fears through the apparently interminable years training and preparing at home, then their triumphs and tragedies on the coast and beyond. Here are the airborne assaults on the Caen Canal bridge and Merville Battery, the battles on the shoreline and against the German strongpoints inland, narrated and explained with all the insights that Hastings’ decades of study, veterans’ interviews and new archive research empower him to deploy. The book offers a searching analysis of why British troops did not reach Caen on 6 June, as Montgomery had promised Churchill that they would- and the story of the brigadier who was sacked for that failure. There are personal portraits of invaders from commando leader Lord Lovat, famously brave but supremely arrogant, to tank colonel Jim Eadie, whose tanks of the Staffordshire Yeomanry repulsed a panzer division, and many humbler participants to whom extraordinary things happened. This is D-Day as you have never read the story told before, with the blend of narrative, analysis and human insight that made Max Hastings’ last book Operation Biting, like many of his earlier works, a Sunday Times No.1 bestseller.

Max Hastings is the author of more than thirty books, many of them about 20th Century wars, including All Hell Let Loose, Catastrophe, Vietnam and Abyss. In his early years as a correspondent, he reported for BBC TV and newspapers on eleven conflicts including Vietnam, the 1973 Yom Kippur and 1982 Falklands wars. A former editor-in-chief of The Daily Telegraph, he has won many awards including Journalist of the Year, Reporter of the Year, Editor of the Year, together with a Somerset Maugham Prize and two RUSI Westminster Medals. He contributes to The Times, reviews books for the Sunday Times and writes a column for Bloomberg Inc. He and his wife Penny live in West Berkshire where they garden enthusiastically. He has two very grown-up children and two grandchildren.