An evening with Max Hastings

The last weeks of World War II on the Western Front in Europe witnessed extraordinary scenes of heroism, horror, melodrama and pathos.

 In PLUNDER, Max Hastings presents a cast of fascinating characters – British, American and German – in a series of extraordinary events in which some distinguished themselves through wonderful deeds, others through the basest crimes.

The book takes its title from Montgomery’s ‘Operation Plunder’, the 23 March 1945 crossing of the Rhine, witnessed by Winston Churchill and embracing huge amphibious and airborne landings. Hastings describes the American coup in capturing Remagen bridge and the ‘battles of the breakout’ which followed; stories of Nazi Werewolves; of US General George Patton’s reckless and doomed dispatch of an armoured column fifty miles behind German lines to liberate his son-in-law from a prison camp; the heartbreaking liberation of Belsen concentration camp; the extraordinary achievement of Ian Liddell of the Coldstream Guards, among the last VC winners of the war and surely one of the most deserving; the last big SAS operation of the war.

Finally come accounts of the tortuous succession of German surrenders, and the weeks of Admiral Karl Donitz’s posturing as the Third Reich’s last Fuhrer.

With his signature narrative of blending personal experiences into the ‘big picture’, Max Hastings mingles accounts of the battles with stories of people – warlords, soldiers, slave labourers, prisoners, fugitives, victims – who played many and various roles in the last European act of history’s most terrible war.