Alistair MacLean: The Complete Navarone 4-Book Collection: The Guns of Navarone, Force Ten From Navarone, Storm Force from Navarone, Thunderbolt from Navarone

The Guns of Navarone • Force 10 from Navarone • Storm Force from Navarone • Thunderbolt from Navarone

Cover

Title Page ALISTAIR MACLEAN SAM LLEWELLYN The Complete Navarone The Guns of Navarone • Force 10 from Navarone • Storm Force from Navarone • Thunderbolt from Navarone

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

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

To my mother

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