The Daily Telegraph record of the Second World War: Month by month from 1939 to 1945

by Max Hastings

From the pages of Britain's most popular newspaper is the first-hand story of the Second World War. The items selected are presented in chronological sequence so that the narrative unfolds with the immediacy and suspense it generated at the time. Contemporary headlines and photographs combine to convey the atmosphere of a newspaper seeking to cover "total war". Besides eye-witness accounts of the action in the various theatres of war by the Daily Telegraph's own war correspondents such as Christopher Buckley, Richard Capell, L. Marsland Gander, Douglas Williams and Cornelius Ryan, the book also contains many stories culled from the "Home Front". Alongside reports of such stirring occurences as the Battle of the River Plate, Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, Pearl Harbour, the Fall of Singapore, the Battle of Alamein, the Dambuster Raid, D_Day, Arnhem and the Atomic Bomb will be found evocative vignettes of the black-out, evacuees, rationing, land girls, the Home Guard and attempts at continuing everyday life. The trivial, touching and often hilarious detail is deliberately juxtaposed, as in the war itself, with profound and cataclysmic events.

208 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1989

About the author

Sir Max Hugh Macdonald Hastings, FRSL, FRHistS is a British journalist, editor, historian and author. His parents were Macdonald Hastings, a journalist and war correspondent, and Anne Scott-James, sometime editor of Harper's Bazaar.

Hastings was educated at Charterhouse School and University College, Oxford, which he left after a year.After leaving Oxford University, Max Hastings became a foreign correspondent, and reported from more than sixty countries and eleven wars for BBC TV and the London Evening Standard.

Among his bestselling books Bomber Command won the Somerset Maugham Prize, and both Overlord and The Battle for the Falklands won the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Prize.

After ten years as editor and then editor-in-chief of The Daily Telegraph, he became editor of the Evening Standard in 1996. He has won many awards for his journalism, including Journalist of The Year and What the Papers Say Reporter of the Year for his work in the South Atlantic in 1982, and Editor of the Year in 1988.

He stood down as editor of the Evening Standard in 2001 and was knighted in 2002. His monumental work of military history, Armageddon: The Battle for Germany 1944-1945 was published in 2005.

He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Sir Max Hastings honoured with the $100,000 2012 Pritzker Military Library Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing.