"Why does Max Hastings have such a hatred for ..." Topic

….the British military?

"One of the great problems for any historian writing of 1914 and the slide into conflict is that everyone knows the causes of the first world war and those of us who don't still imagine that we do. It is clear that no historian can simply ignore the causes and get straight down to the fighting, but with the best will in the world it is hard not to feel like some poor Easyjet passenger, stranded on a Gatwick runway and sadly watching the precious take-off slot slipping further into the distance while the cabin crew go though the familiar old pre-flight safety instructions that they know perfectly well nobody is listening to.

Serbian ambition, the internal incoherence of the Hapsburg empire, the Kaiser, Alsace-Lorraine , the ‘first blank cheque', the ‘second blank cheque,' Pan-Slavism, Ulster, mobilisation, uncertainty over Britain's intentions, fear of decadence, fear of Russia, fear of socialism — none of them can be any more dodged than can the emergency doors or the oxygen mask. But when half the world seems to be writing about what happened in 1914, or should have happened and didn't, it is an uphill struggle to make it fresh or interesting. It is immensely to Max Hastings's credit that he manages to dispose of it all as economically as he does; but this huge, compelling, argumentative bully of a book only really hits its stride when the fighting starts, and the full catastrophe that the ‘absurdly amateurish' 19-year-old Gavrilo Princip unleashed with the assassination of the unloved and unlovable Archduke Franz Ferdinand begins to unfold…"
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Amicalement
Armadn

You mean Max 'Hitler' Hastings. I think he's just bitter that he was only a part time Para for 5 minutes, and the real soldiers ripped into him during the Falklands. I did have his Bio but threw it away when he started to get into his "the Germans were supermen and my country's soldiers were rubbish" groove.

Max Hastings felt much the same about the British Army in WW2: link

Not popular among fellow newsmen in the Falklands either. I read that only one of them could get a seat on the helo back to Fearless to take 'copy' for transmission about the fall of Stanley. He got the seat, and agreed to take everyone else's copy for onward transmission. However when he got there, he only sent his own.

Oh, and he apparently thinks Allied victory in Normandy was 'fluke' , the plan was poor, and the Allies were lucky.

Strange, I have never read a historian that I totally agreed with, nor one I totally disagreed with….. well maybe David Irving…., Hastings falls into that wide bandwidth, and he is very readable.

I haven't read a ton of Max, but oddly he lacks the objectivity to be a newsman or a historian. Interesting, pointed, but certainly not to be trusted as the most authoritative source.

the Allies were lucky.

They were. The weather could just as easily have turned bad during the landings.

Really? I've always thought that his books were biased towards the British. Regardless, I've enjoyed most of his books.

No the allies were not lucky on D Day, it was the strength and depth of the plan that made it succeed despite the odds, the weather and the fortunes of war.

Max Hastings lacks the clarity to be a good historian, or the equanimity to be a good journalist, so he writes potboilers.

The weather did turn to crap, a week or so later and the Allies though d it out. If it had gone bad on D-day proper the airborne units might have been screwed but the invasion proper would have been called off at the last minute. German intelligence being what it was they probably would have obsessed on Pas de Cali's even.more…

Might be good old British reticence about blowing one's own trumpet. This is why I found Band of Brothers (the book) so hard to enjoy, the author was in love with Easy Company and saw fit criticise everyone else.

I'm currently reading the book for a second time, and while he is pretty scathing for most of the narrative, its not as if he doesn't back up these assessments with hard facts. All sides come in for much criticism.
Part of the value of his writing is that he doesn't write in the laudatory style that BoB is written in (and don't get me wrong, I still really liked that book), and he is very sceptical about the received wisdom on WW1. Its at least as valuable if not more so to have a serial complainer as a panegyrist.

Started reading his recent book on the secret war and was amazed at how he made a fascinating subject so boring. He does seem to have a love for the Soviets that I'd not noticed before.

I have this one on the shelf but haven't read it yet.

I thought his book on Korea was a pretty decent introduction and he is far harder on the Americans than the British in that one.

Hastings has a political view point and agenda which is very obvious in everything he writes. The populist press have him write articles on the "power of the unions" every time there is a major industrial dispute…..