Annual Booklist 2021 : Daniel Whittingham
Dr Daniel Whittingham is Lecturer in the History of Warfare and Conflict at the University of Birmingham, specialising in British colonial warfare, counterinsurgency, and the two world wars. His book Charles E Callwell and the British Way in Warfare was runner-up for the 2020 SAHR Best First Book Prize.
It is a pleasure and a privilege to be asked to contribute to this exercise; but is also incredibly daunting. Reading through previous entries to this series, I am reminded of just how many great books on the history of the British army there are out there. So, for my entry I decided to divide up my selections accordingly:
- A published primary source of some kind
- A historiographical ‘classic’
- A battle study
- A biography
- A book broadly about the experience of war in some way
I also wanted to avoid picking something that has already been put forward – so no room here for excellent works by many friends and colleagues! (And indeed, no room for George MacDonald Fraser’s Quartered Safe Out Here – this has been picked a remarkable number of times, a testament to how well written it is).
A published primary source of some kind
I have decided to avoid the temptation to include anything by Charles Callwell here. Needless to say, I’ve spent a lot of time with his work. His books are an important window into understanding the British army of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (If you are interested, Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice (1896) is probably his most famous book. He also wrote one of the first studies of the Dardanelles campaign – this book is not as well known as it should be. Both works are readily available in reprint editions. To find out more about him, please read my book!).
For this topic, then, I have decided to pick T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, as it looks like no one has picked it yet! Is it a memoir? A semi-fictionalised account? Does it even matter? David Lean’s masterpiece Lawrence of Arabia (while I have the floor, this is the greatest film ever made, without question) may lack ‘historical accuracy’, but this doesn’t matter when the myth of Lawrence is just as interesting as the real Lawrence. Seven Pillars is a beautifully written account of the Arab Revolt, part of the (much) wider war against the Ottoman Empire. George Kennan called the First World War ‘the great seminal catastrophe’ of the twentieth century. Reading Seven Pillars (and watching the film), you are reminded of the vastness of the conflict, of the destruction it caused, and of the war’s uncomfortable legacies in the Middle East.
A historiographical ‘classic’
Here I am going to pick Jay Luvaas, The Education of an Army: British Military Thought, 1815–1940 (London: Cassell, 1965). Luvaas’s book was my introduction to the subject of British military thought. It is a collection of short biographical studies of some of the principal thinkers. Indeed, Luvaas’s aim was ‘to awaken interest in one or more of the personalities’ and ‘to suggest areas where further research would pay dividends’. The chapters cover Sir William Napier, John Mitchell, Sir John Fox Burgoyne, Sir Patrick Macdougall, Sir Edward Bruce Hamley, Sir John Frederick Maurice, G.F.R. Henderson, Spenser Wilkinson, Charles à Court Repington, J.F.C. Fuller and Basil Liddell Hart. Luvaas himself admitted there were some omissions, and the interest he hoped to generate has not been entirely forthcoming (on which, more below…).
A battle study
Again, this is a huge topic, but here I am going to select a book which as far as I can tell hasn’t been selected yet: Jenny Macleod, Reconsidering Gallipoli (Manchester: University Press, 2004). The events of the battle have been covered many times before, but what Macleod’s book does is unpick how the story of the battle was reshaped afterwards by the main players, in particular Ian Hamilton and Winston Churchill. It also provides a survey of how the historiography developed subsequently. It is a must for anyone seeking to understand how history is constructed. It also covers the evolution of the Anzac legend – a subject the author explores further in her book on Gallipoli for Oxford University Press’s ‘Great Battles’ series.
A biography
Having written a book that is partly a biography, it will not come as a surprise that this is a genre I particularly enjoy. When done well, biographies can not only give you an idea of their subject, but also illuminate the wider context in which the subject operated. A biography I have used a lot in my own work, and which serves as a model of how to write one, is the late Keith Jeffery’s Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson: A Political Soldier (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Jeffery managed to give us a sense of Wilson the man, but he also tells us about big themes. These include (among other things) British war planning prior to the First World War; the British army and the limits of power after 1918; and how Wilson’s Unionism was embedded in his sense of Irishness and Britishness. Jeffery combined vast knowledge of the archives (including the voluminous Wilson papers) with an easy-to-read writing style. The book is a must for anyone interested in the British army before, during, and after the First World War.
A book broadly about the experience of war in some way
A book that I find myself recommending to students a lot is Jessica Meyer’s Men of War: Masculinity and the First World War in Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Meyer’s book explores the ways in which the First World War affected understandings of masculinity, and the impact of social ideals of masculinity on the soldiers’ understandings of war. Anyone seeking to understand how the Tommy in the trenches constructed his identity and tried to come to terms with his experience should read this book. Much more research on the British army and military masculinities will follow.
One suggestion for a book that deserves to be written
I am struck reading the responses to this question from previous years that there is, thankfully, still so much more to say. From my own period of expertise, which is roughly 1815 onwards (sorry scholars of the army up to the Napoleonic War!), we still need to know more about the Victorian army (there are plenty of wars of empire that need more work to be done on them). It is striking how the First and Second World War attract so much great scholarship, perhaps to the detriment of the years in between. Finally, we still need to know more about how the British army thought about war. I hope my modest contribution fills part of the gap here, but there is plenty more to say.