Annual Booklist 2022 : Professor Raymond A. Callahan
Professor Raymond Callahan is an Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Delaware, where he taught for 38 years. He has written several distinguished books on the East India Company, the British Indian Army and the Second World War. His latest book, entitled The 1945 Burma Campaign and the Transformation of the British Indian Army and co-authored with Professor Daniel Marston, was awarded the Templer Medal for 2021.
In 1960 Correlli Barnett published, in The Desert Generals, a vindication of Claude Auchinleck’s time as Commander in Chief, Middle East and, at critical moments, commander of the much tried Eighth Army. The book also featured a root and branch deconstruction of the Montgomery legend in a chapter titled “Military Messiah”. A very readable polemic, it remains in print after sixty-two years. It was first in a flood of books on the Desert War which made that campaign perhaps the most thoroughly examined part of the British Army’s World War II story. But there are still gaps to be plugged, and Claude Auchinleck’s career is one of them. A year before Barnett’s book, the British author John Cornell published an official biography based on Auchinleck’s papers (later deposited in the John Rylands Library). It focused on his time in the Middle East to the near exclusion of his second tour as Command-in-Chief, India, 1943-47. There have been several books on “the Auk” since Cornell’s biography but none really the study he deserves. Now an essential tool has been made available for those seeking a rounded picture of the man who twice played a critical role at a fraught moment – in the Desert in July 1942; and then in steering the Indian Army through its World War II “defeat into victory” epic and then in guiding it through the trauma of Partition and separation into two new national armies (and the horrors of 1947 would have immeasurably worsened if he had failed). Timothy Bowman’s excellent edition of the first of two volumes of Auchinleck’s papers - The Military Papers of Field Marshall Sir Claude Auchinleck, Volume I: 1940-42 (2021) - adds a very important dimension to our understanding of the great crisis of the Desert War in July 1942. The impending second volume will be even more important – Barnett began the “rehabilitation” of Auchinleck’s desert years; no one has yet looked in depth at his massive contribution after he resumed the leadership of the Indian Army he loved.
John Masters' classic Bugles And A Tiger (1956) has often, and rightly, been praised by contributors to these booklists but Masters’ follow on, The Road Past Mandalay (1961) is fully as important in my view. From the (almost) opera bouffe campaign in Iraq in 1941 to “Sea of Bust” in 1945, Masters was a witness to the Indian Army’s trajectory in World War II. Of particular interest in his account of the second Chindit expedition (Operation Thursday) in which, as acting commander of 111th Brigade, he conducted the defense of the Chindit “stronghold” known as Blackpool. His Indian Army view of Major-General Orde Wingate and the Chindit enterprise is a useful counterpoint to the well know accounts by Wingate admirers like Bernard Fergusson and Michael Calvert. Like Slim’s Defeat Into Victory, Masters’ titles remain in print, a tribute both to his story telling skills and the remarkable story he had to tell.
Slim was also a talented storyteller, a skill on display in his Unofficial History (1959). During the interwar years, when promotion moved at a glacial pace while he had a growing family to support, Slim, writing as “Anthony Mills”, had sold short stories to a variety of magazines. Some of these he gathered together and published during his time as Governor General of Australia. While not quite as polished a writer as Masters, they are quite readable and, often, amusing. Two, in particular, provide important insights into his growth as a commander: “Counsel of Fears” recounts the failure of his brigade to take a position just inside the frontier of Italian occupied Ethiopia in November 1940. The story concludes “When two courses of action were open to me I had not chosen, as a good commander should, the bolder” (p.148). The immediately following chapter, “It Pays To Be Bold” describes how he took Deir-ez-Zor the following year, as a new divisional commander, during the brief but bitter campaign to take Vichy controlled Syria. It is not fanciful to see in these two chapters the germ of what Robert Lyman has labelled “the Masterstroke” – the Mandalay-Merktila campaign.
The Raj came to an end seventy-five years ago and a great deal of scholarship – and not a little polemic – has since been devoted to examining various aspects of it. Recently the army, originally created by the East India Company, has become the focus of some first-rate historical writing. But, rather remarkably, we still do not have a comprehensive general history of the institution that underpinned not only the power of the Raj but made possible force projection across the huge sphere of British influence and control “east of Suez” – and in the world wars of the twentieth century well to its west as well. Until we have that much needed book, Philip Mason’s A Matter of Honour: An Account of the Indian Army, its Officers & Men (1974) will continue to serve as a fine introductory survey. Mason, a twenty-year veteran of the Indian Civil Service knew the Army well in its final years, when he served as Secretary to the Indian Chiefs of Staff Committee. He had a fine writing style and, although the book is impressionistic rather than systematic, it is deeply empathetic and does paint a fine picture of the most remarkable institution created by the British during their long imperial era.
One of the turning points in that story was the loss of the 13 Atlantic seaboard colonies in North America following a rebellion that there that grew into a world-wide conflict. That loss in turn precipitated what Vincent Harlow christened “the swing to the east”, the reorientation of imperial concerns to the world “east of Suez” (and the route to that world). The best book yet written about the war that led to Britain’s loss of its North American colonies (except, of course, Canada) is Piers Mackesy’s War For America 1775-1783. Originally published in 1964 and still in print it is, among other things, a useful corrective to the myths that still enshroud that event (especially of course in the United States).
Finally, a book that ought to be written but hasn’t been – yet. In 1868 Lt. General Sir Robert Napier led a division size force drawn from the Bombay Army to rescue a handful of hostages being held by the Emperor of Ethiopia, Tewodros II, in his fortress capital of Magdala, deep in the Ethiopian highlands. It was the most remarkable exercise in force projection (made possible by the Indian Army) of the entire Victorian era – 14,000 troops, 26,000 “followers”, about 40,000 animals (including 44 elephants) supported by an astounding line of communications, built from scratch. Apart from a chapter in Alan Morehead’s The Blue Nile (and George Macdonald Fraser’s edition of Sir Harry Paget Flashman’s memoir, published as Flashman on the March) there is no accessible modern account and there really should be!