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The Complete Navarone 4-Book Collection: The Guns of Navarone, Force Ten From Navarone, Storm Force from Navarone, Thunderbolt from Navarone
ALISTAIR MACLEAN
SAM LLEWELLYN
The Complete Navarone
The Guns of Navarone • Force 10 from Navarone • Storm Force from Navarone • Thunderbolt from Navarone
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Introduction
The Guns of Navarone
DEDICATION
MAP
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
Force 10 from Navarone
DEDICATION
MAP
ONE: Prelude: Thursday 0000–0600
TWO: Thursday 1400–2330
THREE: Friday 0030–0200
FOUR: Friday 0200–0330
FIVE: Friday 0330–0500
SIX: Friday 0800–1000
SEVEN: Friday 1000–1200
EIGHT: Friday 1500–2115
NINE: Friday 2115–Saturday 0040
TEN: Saturday 0040–0120
ELEVEN: Saturday 0120–0135
TWELVE: Saturday 0135–0200
THIRTEEN: Saturday 0200–0215
EPILOGUE
Storm Force from Navarone
DEDICATION
PROLOGUE: March 1944
ONE: Sunday 1000–1900
TWO: Sunday 1900–Monday 0900
THREE: Monday 0900–1900
FOUR: Monday 1900–Tuesday 0500
FIVE: Tuesday 0500–2300
SIX: Tuesday 2300–Wednesday 0400
SEVEN: Wednesday 0400–0500
EPILOGUE: Wednesday 1400
Thunderbolt from Navarone
DEDICATION
PROLOGUE
ONE: Monday 1800–Tuesday 1000
TWO: Tuesday 1000–Wednesday 0200
THREE: Wednesday 0200–0600
FOUR: Wednesday 0600–1800
FIVE: Wednesday 1800–Thursday 0300
SIX: Thursday 0300–1200
SEVEN: Thursday 1200–2000
EIGHT: Thursday 2000–2300
NINE: Thursday 2300–Friday 0300
TEN: Friday 0300–Saturday 0030
EPILOGUE
About the Authors
Other Works
Copyright
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, (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.
ALISTAIR MACLEAN
Glasgow, 1958
DEDICATION
To my mother
MAP
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