Max Hasting's recent book "Warriors" (2005) is a great read. I am passing along reviews of this book from a number of sources. Enjoy.
Editorial Reviews
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Warriors seem to have fallen out of fashion. We prefer victims. Who, after all, has heard of Army Sgt. 1st Class Paul R. Smith, who won a posthumous Medal of Honor for repelling an Iraqi counterattack on Baghdad International Airport and killing some 50 enemy soldiers during the invasion of Iraq in 2003? Yet Pfc. Jessica Lynch remains a celebrity.
Max Hastings wants to return attention to the warrior virtues, but without succumbing to the temptation to write hagiography. A retired British newspaperman who has fashioned a second career as a military historian focusing on World War II, Hastings calls Warriors "an old-fashioned book" because it focuses on "remarkable characters," not on weapons.
He wrote it, he explains, because after reading his previous outing, Armageddon (2004), a well-received account of the fall of Germany in 1944-45, his wife urged him "to write something a trifle less relentlessly bleak." Warriors definitely lacks the bleakness of Armageddon. It also lacks its painstaking research, provocative argumentation and epic narration. It is, in every way, a slighter effort -- but a no less readable one, if accepted on its own modest terms as "an entertainment rather than an academic study."
Warriors is broken up into 15 chapters, each one a portrait of a different soldier from the past 200 years. Hastings's selection is admittedly "whimsical" and heavily weighted toward Britons and Americans who left memoirs of their exploits.
He begins with a couple of Napoleonic War heroes, one British (Harry Smith), the other French (Baron Marcellin de Marbot). Next come a well-known figure from the U.S. Civil War, Joshua Chamberlain (of Gettysburg fame), and two lesser-known figures (at least to American readers) from Britain's colonial wars: Lt. John Chard, who won a Victoria Cross for the defense of Rorke's Drift (1879) in the wars with South Africa's Zulus, and Col. Frederick Burnaby, a reckless explorer killed in the Sudan in 1885. Three chapters are given over to World War I, featuring the gentlemanly German Capt. Karl Friedrich Max von Müller, whose light cruiser terrorized Allied shipping in the Indian Ocean in 1914; the ruthless American fighter ace Eddie Rickenbacker; and a no-account British private named Frederic Manning, who served a few months on the Western Front in 1916 and is the least accomplished soldier featured here.
Not surprisingly, given Hastings's interest in World War II, fully a third of the book is given over to veterans of that conflict. They are John Masters, a highly competent British officer who fought with the "Chindit" commandos (named after a mythical local monster) against Japanese troops in Burma; Guy Gibson, an unpleasant if dedicated British bomber pilot who led a famous 1943 raid on two dams in Germany's Ruhr region; Audie Murphy, "the most decorated American soldier" of the war (and "a psychological mess of epic proportions"); James "Slim Jim" Gavin, the ultra-aggressive commander of America's 82nd Airborne Division; and Nancy Wake, a fearless and fun-loving British secret agent in occupied France.
The book is rounded out with two post-1945 chapters featuring John Paul Vann, the famous pacification expert in Vietnam, and Avigdor Kahalani, an Israeli tank commander on the Golan Heights in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
Of course, numerous military historians, from J.F.C. Fuller to John Keegan, have used a similar approach to make larger historical arguments. So did Lytton Strachey, who revolutionized the art of biography with his scathing Eminent Victorians. But Hastings is not interested here in overturning conventional interpretations. He limits himself to a few commonsensical, if hardly revelatory, generalizations, such as noting that good commanders need wisdom to go along with courage, that many heroes are not well liked by their comrades and that "some eager warriors are exhibitionists of an extreme kind, prepared to risk their lives to gain attention." The strength of Warriors does not lie in these throat-clearing observations but in its rip-roaring anecdotes. Hastings is an expert literary craftsman who makes the most out of stories that, however often repeated, are never less than gripping.
Only a reader with a heart of stone could fail to be captivated by the tale of Baron Marbot jumping into an icy lake after the battle of Austerlitz to save a wounded enemy soldier, at considerable risk to his own life. Or by the unabashedly enthusiastic reaction of Maj. Smith to the news that his enemy, Napoleon, had escaped from Elba in 1815: "Smith, ever the career soldier, tossed his hat to the sky and cried out in exultation: 'I'll be a lieutenant-colonel yet, before the year's out!' "
Most of the warriors depicted here shared Smith's zeal for war, as well as his skill in waging it. (He compiled an exemplary record serving under the Duke of Wellington.) But not all did. John Chard, an engineering officer, was deemed "hopelessly slow and slack" by his superiors. "Absolutely nothing of professional interest is known to have happened to Chard in the eighteen years of service which followed his hour of glory at Rorke's Drift," Hastings writes. Fred Burnaby, the Sudan hero, had plenty of interesting experiences, but they mostly involved hot-air ballooning and other larks unconnected to his day job in Queen Victoria's army. The only time he commanded troops in battle he made a critical mistake that led to his own death.
As these examples suggest, Hastings does not turn his heroes into plaster saints. He depicts them as flawed human beings who often drank too much, philandered too wantonly and schemed too crassly for promotion. Whether there is a larger truth here about soldiers and soldiering remains for others to determine. Hastings, for his part, has succeeded in his ambition of crafting a first-rate piece of entertainment.
Reviewed by Max Boot
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Bookmarks Magazine
English historian and journalist Max Hastings knows something of courage from his many years covering wars for the BBC. He is also accustomed to literary success: his books have been consistent award winners in the UK (where he was knighted in 2002), and his previous book, Armageddon (**** Mar/Apr 2005), was an acclaimed study of the final year of World War II. In Warriors his stated aim is to "amuse as much as inform," and reviewers report that he's up to the task. Though Warriors shouldn't be judged against his more scholarly work, reviewers still find plenty of thematic resonance in his balanced portraits of these 15 men-of-arms.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Booklist
A highly popular British military historian (Armageddon, 2004), Hastings selects memoirs and biographies about 15 combatants (one of them a woman) and distills accounts of their lives and trenchant observations about their personalities. He makes many striking contrasts between public renown and the private regard in which these figures were held; comrades, who were more realistic about the risk of war and anxious to survive it, tended to be wary of the recklessly courageous warrior. Possessed of the killer instinct vital in battle, most members of Hastings' gallery were also cautiously appreciated by higher command. Brains must supersede fearlessness for the intelligent conduct of war, an exigency of military organization Hastings works into all his portraits. These are uniformly fascinating and encompass a flamboyant aide-de-camp to Napoleon, a languidly egotistical officer of Victoria's household guard, the ascetic German captain of WWI's Emden, Britain's World War II "Dambuster" Guy Gibson, and America's own Audie Murphy. Filled with poignant psychological insight, Hastings' remarkable sketches will provoke greater-than-average demand from the military affairs readership. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Review
"Fantastically entertaining. . . . [Hastings] acts as a sort of Plutarch to the modern warrior. His 'lives' are splendidly done, full of compelling narrative and telling detail." —The Wall Street Journal
"Hastings is an expert literary craftsman who makes the most out of stories that, however often repeated, are never less than gripping.... a first-rate piece of entertainment."—The Washington Post Book World
"Clever, absorbing and vividly written. . . Max Hasting is very good on the matter of courage."—The New York Review of Books
"Hastings has written a marvelous book. Wry, perceptive and engaging, it lays bare the curious mix of character traits - good and bad - that a successful warrior requires."—The Sunday Telegraph
Book Description
Heroism in battle has been celebrated throughout history, yet it is one of the least understood virtues. What makes some men and women perform extraordinary deeds on the battlefield? What makes them risk their lives in the pursuit of victory?
Max Hastings, one of our foremost military historians, has seen combat up close and written about it for decades. In Warriors, he brings us the experiences of fourteen soldiers who fought in the wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From an exuberant cavalry officer in Napoleon's army to an abused orphan who in World War II became America's youngest general since Custer, to an Israeli officer who recovered from a devastating injury to save his country, each portrait depicts a unique and remarkable story. A tribute to soldierly valor and a deeply insightful study of combat, this is an essential book for anyone who wishes to understand what it means to be at war.
About the Author
Max Hastings was a foreign correspondent and the editor of Britain's Evening Standard and The Daily Telegraph. He has presented historical documentaries for BBC TV, and is the author of eighteen books, including Bomber Command, which earned the Somerset Maugham Award for nonfiction, The Korean War, and Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy, 1944. He is also the author of the recently published Armageddon: the Battle for Germany, 1944-1945 . He is recipient of numerous British Press Awards, including Journalist of the Year (1982), Editor of the Year (1988). He lives outside of London.
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