Annual Booklist 2020 : Matthew Hughes
Professor Matthew Hughes JP is a chair in military history at Brunel University London. Prior to that, he was Reader in History at Brunel University, having lectured at the universities of Northampton and Salford. He held the Maj-Gen Matthew C. Horner Distinguished Chair in Military History at the US Marine Corps University, 2008-10. He has served or is serving as a Councillor and Chair of Council for the Army Records Society, as the editor of the Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, and as a judge for the Society for Army Historical Research’s Templer Medal and the Elie Kedourie prize awarded by Middle Eastern Studies. Educated at the School of Oriental and African Studies, the London School of Economics and Cardiff University, he completed his PhD on General Allenby’s Palestine campaign in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London.
My first choice is a gazetteer that is essential for any proper understanding of the complicated history of the varied units of the British Army, and a tome that is a fascinating, informative read: Arthur Swinson’s A Register of the Regiments and Corps of the British Army (London: Archive Press, 1972). John Keegan – of whom more below – completed the introduction for this volume on the organisation of the British Army up to 1972. He was writing after the regimental contractions of the late 1960s; how much has changed since then, the Army getting even smaller. Swinson makes structural sense of a force than has, since its inception in the seventeenth century, evolved organically in diverse, fascinating, and intricate ways to become the force that spearheaded imperial conquest and continental war with Germany. Swinson’s volume lays out the historical foundation of the Army without which deeper analysis is impossible; it tracks the changes in regimental titles that connect together the Army across time; it embeds the wider history of Britain from which regiments and corps emerged and faded; it gives life to each regiment with its rich detail of nicknames, mottos, battle honours.
The mention of John Keegan turns me to the book that first opened the door for me to military history and the British Army: his seminal 1976 Face of Battle book that built on John Ellis’s The Social History of the Machine Gun published a year earlier. As a schoolboy coming up to O-Levels, the Face of Battle was like nothing I had read before. Keegan’s history of soldiers’ experience of combat from Agincourt to Waterloo to the Somme was radically new military history of combat that left behind the generalship of ‘who won and who lost by moving this unit here and this unit there’ to examine what it was like to be there. It is rich as a text as it is inquisitorial rather than adversarial history. It is a social-cultural history, from below, but applied to battle. It deserves re-reading today and did much to establish military history as a credible sub-discipline of history. It also tells the story of what it was like to fight in the English and British armies across a six-hundred year spread of time.
George McDonald Fraser is the author of my third and fourth recommended books on the British Army. First, his memoir of service in the Border Regiment in the Second World, Quartered Safe Out Here: A Recollection of the War in Burma (1992) and, second, his 1973 Flashman at the Charge novel (one of a multi-volumed series) set during the Crimean War. Quartered Safe out Here is a memoir to stand alongside William Manchester’s Goodbye Darkness, Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel or George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. The book is frank, it brings to life the reality of combat, and with the speech written in the border vernacular around Carlisle (echoes here of Kipling) it feels as if you are there. It connects the strategy of General William Slim’s great sweep of operations down to Rangoon at the end of the war with the tactical experience of soldiers executing plans made far away in a map room. Fraser later wrote excellent histories, such as his account of the Anglo-Scottish border conflict, Steel Bonnets, and this attention to historical detail is manifest in his Flashman novels (that some American readers thought were real). They are great romps, fun to read, but they also tell the history of the British imperial campaigns of the nineteenth century, warts and all. Flashman at the Charge makes perfect sense of, for instance, the charge of the light brigade, in a way that most conventional histories fail to do. Fraser is a historian as he is a novelist and the abundant historical scholarship is evident in all his Flashman novels. They are a history of the British soldier in the nineteenth century at the height of empire.
For my fifth book, I would recommend anything by J. F. C. Fuller. His decisive battles series or his history of, say, the Second World War (or armaments and war, or studies of Lee and Grant) comprehend and bring complicated operations to life, ones in which British soldiers usually fought, to which Fuller adds his own useful insights. If Keegan and Fraser wrote soldiers’ accounts of battle, Fuller is the master of operations set within the grand strategy of war. He is a better writer than Basil Liddell Hart. His books are ‘how the war was won’ examinations, with wars the sum of their campaigns, in which Fuller paints a broad brush across the canvas, linking modern campaigning to classical ones, highlighting the timeless quality to good field command. Considering the focus here on books on the British Army, my recommendation is: Tanks in the Great War, 1914-18 (1920).
As to the book not written on the Army, I would like to read more critical histories of the post-1945 British Army through the regimental lens in the mould of Edward Burke’s excellent An Army of Tribes (2018). Our regimental museums – often of units no longer extant – are a rich source of (largely untapped) archival material that tells soldiers’ stories from the unit level and how section to platoon to battalion differences shaped how soldiers fought, related to local peoples, and how they experienced military service. How did regiments make their soldiers, in a post-1945 world of societal revolution and imperial retrenchment? The Army was a variegated conglomerate of regiments and corps, none of which was the same and so none behaved the same. We need more critical histories of the Army at the end of empire as regiments disbanded or morphed into new formations and national service ended, but through the regimental prism using local archives, to feel the texture of the more recent ‘face of battle.’