...is now available at The Objective Standard. I've praised Hastings many times before, and his latest book is no exception to his usual excellence. Excerpt:
Hastings details the violence and valor of that week with all the elegance for which he is famous. As the author of a dozen books on World War II, as well as volumes on World War I and the Korean, Vietnam, and Falklands wars, Hastings has earned a reputation as a master of concise and dramatic prose, whose trademark is a seamless blend of scholarly analysis and vivid details drawn from interviews from those who experienced the conflict firsthand. The result is a history at once objective and sympathetic, written with a profound respect for the men—many of them civilians—who faced such immense peril. Consider his description of one of the most horrific moments of the journey, when the merchant vessel Waimarama, the convoy’s largest ship, was struck by Italian and German planes on August 13, 1942:
The first aircraft, facing a storm of flak, bombed wide. The second, however, hit the hapless cargo-liner four times. . . . A stupendous explosion followed, as Waimarama’s eleven thousand tons of munitions and fuel blew up with a force that destroyed the next attacking aircraft, killed eighty-three men on the ship and sent debris soaring hundreds of feet into the air and across the sea—fragments caused casualties and superficial damage on Rochester Castle, half a mile away. . . . [Another ship, Melbourne Star,] was just four hundred yards astern when the explosion came. A great shower of debris, some of it flaming and including shards of steel plating five feet long, rained down, hammering and clattering on decking and superstructure. The base of a ventilator smashed into a machine-gun position, wrecking the weapon and shocking its gunner. Next day [Captain] David MacFarlane discovered an unexploded six-inch shell, blown from the lost ship, embedded in a bulkhead above his own cabin. . . . As Melbourne Star bore down on the stretch of fiery sea, from his post high on the monkey island the Master ordered hard aport, but the ship could not change course swiftly enough to escape. MacFarlane then embraced his only other expedient—to make the vessel’s ordeal by fire as brief as possible. He called to Second Officer Bill Richards in the wheelhouse for full speed. . . . Wooden lifeboats, hanging out from both sides of the ship, were scorched and charred; much of Melbourne Star’s paint was blistered away. . . .Then yet another German aircraft descended.
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