The Guns of Navarone

The Guns of Navarone
Alistair MacLean

The classic World War II thriller from the acclaimed master of action and suspense. Now issued for the first time as an e-book.Twelve hundred British soldiers isolated on the small island of Kheros off the Turkish coast, waiting to die. Twelve hundred lives in jeopardy, lives that could be saved if only the guns could be silenced. The guns of Navarone, vigilant, savage and catastrophically accurate. Navarone itself, grim bastion of narrow straits manned by a mixed garrison of Germans and Italians, an apparently impregnable iron fortress. To Captain Keith Mallory, skilled saboteur, trained mountaineer, fell the task of leading the small party detailed to scale the vast, impossible precipice of Navarone and to blow up the guns. The Guns of Navarone is the story of that mission, the tale of a calculated risk taken in the time of war…

The Guns of Navarone

Alistair MacLean

Copyright (#ulink_8bfc7a49-c7e8-5dac-a267-c0d414c4c9ec)

Harper

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First published in Great Britain by Collins 1957

Copyright © HarperCollinsPublishers 1957

Alistair MacLean asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780006172475

Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2014 ISBN: 9780007289349

Version: 2018-05-08

Contents

Cover Page (#u314f14f6-c7c1-54c5-9d8d-2e2d0bf11462)

Title Page (#u71f37a9b-7751-504b-bb3e-ab47561e5dbb)

Copyright (#u614ec51f-b294-5479-91da-44726e1854d6)

Introduction (#u3fa767d3-8d65-56e9-9413-ecd4e248b67a)

Dedication (#u1c5aef07-a9e8-5239-943c-d44afd9087f0)

ONE Prelude: Sunday 0100–0900 (#ua8167f45-f679-5352-9a45-c1b16fb9af84)

TWO Sunday Night 1900–0200 (#u9ced0b0b-fdb1-5971-a9a1-69f503719a41)

THREE Monday 0700–1700 (#u35235be2-9e46-584e-b25f-6aa3bd9c7d98)

FOUR Monday Evening 1700–2330 (#ue69470d2-77b0-5bbc-9f5f-ab974ec69ad0)

FIVE Monday Night 0100–0200 (#litres_trial_promo)

SIX Monday Night 0200–0600 (#litres_trial_promo)

SEVEN Tuesday 1500-1900 (#litres_trial_promo)

EIGHT Tuesday 1900-0015 (#litres_trial_promo)

NINE Tuesday Night 0015-0200 (#litres_trial_promo)

TEN Tuesday Night 0400–0600 (#litres_trial_promo)

ELEVEN Wednesday 1400–1600 (#litres_trial_promo)

TWELVE Wednesday 1600–1800 (#litres_trial_promo)

THIRTEEN Wednesday Evening 1800–1915 (#litres_trial_promo)

FOURTEEN Wednesday Night 1915–2000 (#litres_trial_promo)

FIFTEEN Wednesday Night 2000–2115 (#litres_trial_promo)

SIXTEEN Wednesday Night 2115–2345 (#litres_trial_promo)

SEVENTEEN Wednesday Night Midnight (#litres_trial_promo)

Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by Alistair MacLean (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

Introduction (#ulink_c09496b6-14ec-50ce-a0a7-f65a8d841d95)

I wanted to write a war story – with the accent on the story. Only a fool would pretend that there is anything noble or splendid about modern warfare but there is no denying that it provides a great abundance of material for a writer, provided no attempt is made either to glorify it or exploit its worst aspects. I think war is a perfectly legitimate territory for a story-teller. Personal experience, I suppose, helped to play some part in the location of this story. I spent some wartime months in and around Greece and the Aegean islands, although at no time, I must add, did I run the risk of anything worse than a severe case of sunburn, far less find myself exposed to circumstances such as those in which the book’s characters find themselves.

But I did come across and hear about, both in the Aegean and in Egypt, men to whom danger and the ever-present possibility of capture and death were the very stuff of existence: these were the highly trained specialists of Earl Jellicoe’s Special Boat Service and the men of the Long Range Desert Group, who had turned their attention to the Aegean islands after the fall of North Africa. Regularly these men were parachuted into enemy-held islands or came there by sea in the stormy darkness of a wind- and rain-filled night and operated, sometimes for months on end, as spies, saboteurs and liaison officers with local resistance groups. Some even had their own boats, based on German islands, and operated throughout the Aegean with conspicuous success and an almost miraculous immunity to capture and sinking.

Here, obviously, was excellent material for a story and it had the added advantage for the writer that it was set in an archipelago: I had the best of both worlds, the land and the sea, always ready to hand. But the determining factor in the choice of location and plot was neither material nor the islands themselves: that lay in the highly complicated political situation that existed in the islands at the time, and in the nature of Navarone itself.

There is no such island as Navarone – but there were one or two islands remarkably like it, inasmuch as they were (a) German-held, (b) had large guns that dominated important channels and (c) had these guns so located as to be almost immune to destruction by the enemy. Again the situation in the Dodecanese islands was dangerous and perplexing in the extreme, as it was difficult to know from one month to another whether Germans, Greeks, British or Italians were in power there – an excellent setting for a story. So I moved a Navarone-type island from the middle of the Aegean to the Dodecanese, close in to the coast of Turkey, placed another island, filled with trapped and apparently doomed British soldiers, just to the north of it, and took as much advantage as I could of what I had seen, what I had heard, the fictitious geographical situation I had arranged for my own benefit, and the very real political and military state of affairs that existed in the Dodecanese at that time.