Max Hastings is an author, journalist and broadcaster whose work has appeared in every British national newspaper.
His newest book is
Operation Biting: The 1942 Parachute Assault to Capture Hitler's Radar.
At the Waterstones blog he tagged
five of his favorite historians of war, including:
John Keegan
It is scary how quickly even many outstanding writers get forgotten, once they are no longer with us. My old friend John Keegan died in 2012. Too few modern readers visit even his finest work The Face of Battle, first published in 1976. This was a study of three great death-grapples: Agincourt in 1415; Waterloo in 1815; the Somme in 1916. It is hard to overstate the influence of the book on all 
those of us historians of conflict who have followed. Once upon a time, military history was about which division went this way or that on the battlefield; the thoughts and deeds of generals. John instead explored combat as human experience – its sights, smells and sounds. At Waterloo he noted the noise made by bullets rattling on bayonets and swords, the deafness that afflicted many men for days after the struggle ended. He understood, as some people do not, that it is absurd to imagine that wars in ancient times – wounds inflicted by spears, swords and arrows – were somehow less awful than those created by modern bombs, guns and missiles. John was a romantic about warriors as I am not, partly because he himself was crippled by childhood polio. He was thus unable to live among soldiers at war, though for many years he taught at Sandhurst. Some of his later books are frankly disappointing, because his physical circumstances worsened and he lived with constant pain. But nobody interested in conflict should miss The Face of Battle, and also his 1982 Six Armies in Normandy.
Read about
the other entries on the list.
--Marshal Zeringue
Max Hastings is an author, journalist and broadcaster whose work has appeared in every British national newspaper.
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