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The Guns of Navarone
Alistair MacLean
Harper
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by Collins 1957
Copyright © HarperCollinsPublishers 1957
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019 Cover photograph © Stephen Mulcahey
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: 2020-09-03
Contents
THIRTEEN Wednesday Evening 1800–1915
FOURTEEN Wednesday Night 1915–2000
FIFTEEN Wednesday Night 2000–2115
SIXTEEN Wednesday Night 2115–2345
SEVENTEEN Wednesday Night Midnight
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
