The Guns of Navarone. Alistair MacLean

      

      The Guns of Navarone

      Alistair MacLean

       Copyright

       Harper

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      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

       Cover Page

       Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

       Dedication

ONE Prelude: Sunday 0100–0900

TWO Sunday Night 1900–0200

THREE Monday 0700–1700

       FOUR Monday Evening 1700–2330

       FIVE Monday Night 0100–0200

       SIX Monday Night 0200–0600

       SEVEN Tuesday 1500-1900

       EIGHT Tuesday 1900-0015

       NINE Tuesday Night 0015-0200

       TEN Tuesday Night 0400–0600

       ELEVEN Wednesday 1400–1600

       TWELVE Wednesday 1600–1800

       THIRTEEN Wednesday Evening 1800–1915

       FOURTEEN Wednesday Night 1915–2000

       FIFTEEN Wednesday Night 2000–2115

       SIXTEEN Wednesday Night 2115–2345

       SEVENTEEN Wednesday Night Midnight

       Keep Reading

       About the Author

       Also by Alistair MacLean

       About the Publisher

       Introduction

      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,