Annual Booklist 2021 : Nicholas P. Perry
Nick Perry read History at Trinity College Dublin and spent 37 years as a civil servant, mainly in the Ministry of Defence and Northern Ireland Office, retiring in 2018. He was also a reserve officer in the Royal Irish Rangers. He is currently undertaking a PhD at the University of Kent on the Irish landed class and the British Army and is the author of Major General Oliver Nugent: The Irishman who led the Ulster Division in the Great War (Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation 1920), winner of the SAHR Templer Best First Book Prize for 2020.
Choosing my best five books on the British Army is an almost impossible task, so to make the challenge semi-manageable I’ve confined myself to those relating to the Army and Ireland in the 20th century.
My first ‘category’ is biography. Outstanding studies of 20th-century Irish soldiers include the much-missed Keith Jeffery’s brilliant Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson: A Political Soldier, David Fraser’s perceptive Alanbrooke and Nigel Hamilton's monumental three-volume life of Montgomery (even though some may feel the field-marshal, great soldier though he was, gets off a little lightly in places). My selection, however, is Richard Holmes’s The Little Field Marshal: Sir John French (London: Jonathan Cape 1981). Not everyone would regard French as Irish, but Sir John himself did, and this beautifully-written, empathetic yet not uncritical biography is a fine example of ‘setting a portrait within a landscape’ and using the life of an individual to illustrate broader themes.
My second category relates to operational/organisational aspects of Ireland's involvement in the Great War. Cyril Falls’s History of the 36th (Ulster) Division, which celebrates its own centenary in 2022, has aged remarkably well. More recently we have Terence Denman’s groundbreaking study of the 16th Irish Division, Ireland’s Unknown Soldiers, and Stephen Sandford’s examination of the 10th Irish Division, Neither Unionist Nor Nationalist. But my selection here is Timothy Bowman's The Irish Regiments in the Great War (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2003), a sophisticated analysis of morale, discipline and the interconnections with nationality, politics and operations, and a major contribution to our understanding of Irish military performance in the First World War.
My third category involves an elastic interpretation of my own guidelines, by using the presence of Irish officers in senior positions in the Second World War to bring in broader studies of British Army leadership/performance. Niall Barr’s Pendulum of War, Doug Delaney's Corps Commanders and David French’s Raising Churchill's Army have transformed our understanding of the dynamics of the Army’s operational performance in World War 2 (Daniel Marston, Tim Moreman and Alan Jeffreys have produced similar work for the Indian Army). My choice here, though, is Raymond Callahan's superb Churchill and His Generals (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas 2007), a penetrating, humane and elegant study of the Army's senior leadership. An Indian Army expert, Ray particularly admires Slim (as do I), but his fair-minded assessment of Alexander is a reminder that a modern scholarly analysis of Alex as a coalition commander is badly needed, undistorted by Monty’s spite and Mark Clark’s selfishness.
The fourth category is memoirs. From the Great War we have two classics, John Lucy’s There's a Devil in the Drum for the Royal Irish Rifles and Frank Hitchcock's Stand To: A Diary of the Trenches for the Leinsters. For more recent conflicts I enjoyed Patrick Cordingley's In the Eye of the Storm from the first Gulf War (the author being a 5th Inniskilling), and from the Royal Irish Regiment’s experiences in Afghanistan, Doug Beattie’s An Ordinary Soldier and Patrick Bury’s Callsign Hades. But pride of place goes to John Horsfall’s trilogy of his service with the Royal Irish Fusiliers and London Irish Rifles in World War 2, including The Wild Geese are Flighting (Kineton: Roundwood Press 1976), a powerfully evocative account of a rifle company officer’s experience fighting German paratroops in the Tunisian hills (the other volumes are Say Not The Struggle and Fling Our Banner to the Wind).
My final category is British Army operations in Ireland in the 20th century. For the early part of the century, Charles Townshend's The British Campaign in Ireland 1919-21 remains unsurpassed, while Ian Beckett's Army Records Society edition, The Army and the Current Incident 1914, explores the political impact of the home rule crisis. More generally, our understanding of British counterinsurgency in the 20th century has been greatly enhanced by David French, Matthew Hughes, Huw Bennett and others, but the Northern Ireland Troubles remain sensitive territory: what happened 50 years ago is unfinished business. Which is why Edward Burke’s An Army of Tribes (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press 2018), a study of two Scottish regiments in Ulster in the early 1970s, is a brave as well as an impressive piece of scholarship. Ed’s careful, even-handed analysis does not always make comfortable reading, particularly for those of us who’ve had some part, even if minor ones, in Northern Ireland’s affairs in recent decades and for whom the ‘historicising’ of our experience can be unsettling. But credit to the regiments concerned for cooperating with the project. Other accounts have been/are being written about the Army in the Province that make no attempt at fairness or understanding, so assisting (through providing factual information and a military perspective) those reputable scholars who, as Ed has done here, can combine rigorous academic independence and objectivity with balance and appropriate empathy has much to commend it.
Finally, the book I’d like to see written. Correlli Barnett’s classic Britain and Her Army 1509-1970, setting the story of Britain's land forces in the wider context of the country’s political and economic development, is now dated and a new attempt, perhaps along the lines of Nicholas Rodger’s magisterial multi-volume history of British naval power, would be timely. Jonathan Fennell’s magnificent Fighting the People's War, which focuses on the British Army and Dominion forces in World War 2, might provide a template as well as setting a high benchmark.