War Starts At Midnight!

REVIEW: Robin Neillands, The Dieppe Raid: The Story of the Disastrous 1942 Expedition

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-War@h-net.msu.edu (July 2008)

Robin Neillands. _The Dieppe Raid: The Story of the Disastrous 1942 Expedition_. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. 292 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0253-34781-7.

Reviewed for H-War by Jean Morin, Independent Scholar

A Flawed Plan from the Start

Robin Neillands is a prolific author who has made many names for himself in many genres and whose output defies boldly the confines of time.  As well as having written perhaps ninety books under various _noms de plume_, he has become one of the most popular military historians in the book market of the last decade.  His study _Bomber War_ (2001), was outstanding.  Sadly, Robin Neillands died last year at the age of 70, not quite finished with a biography of Montgomery.

His book on Dieppe was among his last.  It is one for which he was well qualified, having been a Royal Marines commando himself and having befriended such luminaries in the field of _coups de main_ as generals R. D. "Titch" Houghton and Peter Young (DSO [Distinguished Service Order] in
Dieppe), who shared memories with him of their own involvement in cross-Channel raids during the Second World War, including that of Dieppe. Neillands has obviously had personal experience in learning to plan such operations or walk the talk of the commando, and his book is professional
and sensible.  The British commandos did well on the periphery of Operation Jubilee and one gets the impression that this Dieppe study wants to make them shine ...

REVIEW: Anthony Clayton, The British Officer: Leading the Army from 1660 to the Present

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Albion@h-net.msu.edu (February 2008)

Anthony Clayton. _The British Officer: Leading the Army from 1660 to the Present_. Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2007. xiv + 335 pp. Illustrations, notes, appendices, index. £9.99 (paper), ISBN 978-1-4058-5901-1.

Reviewed for H-Albion by Keith Surridge, Independent Scholar

The British Army is now constantly in the news owing to its involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. This has generated much interest in the troops themselves and recently the army has been the subject of several television documentaries. One that will air soon features a former soap opera actor embedded with a particular unit. The involvement of Princes William and Harry in the army, both of whom have successfully trained as junior officers, keeps its media profile high. Moreover, retired senior officers have been publishing their memoirs; the most recent, and perhaps outspoken, is that by General Sir Mike Jackson, _Soldier: the Autobiography_ (2007). His trenchant views on operations in Kosovo, and especially the 2003 invasion of Iraq, caused much comment in the press. Thus, a book that seeks to explore the British army officer from earliest times to the modern era is timely.

With recent events in mind, Anthony Clayton, a former lecturer at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, in line with a lot of press opinion, points out that most politicians have no experience of army life. And, consequently, they have no understanding of the stresses and strains placed upon officers who have to meld individuals into fighting units and command them in combat situations. His book, therefore, seeks to give some idea of how officers have coped over the centuries with leading men in peace and war. Examining the role of the officer from the modern army's foundation in 1660 to the twenty-first century, Clayton discusses the social background of officers; their training and motivation; and how they have interacted with their men. Influencing all these is the peculiar nature of the British regiment, a "mutual obligation society" (p. 7), with its ancient traditions, that has no counterpart elsewhere ...

REVIEWS: Raymond Callahan, Churchill and His Generals & Nigel Hamilton, Montgomery: D-Day Commander

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Albion@h-net.msu.edu (November 2007)

Raymond Callahan. _Churchill and His Generals_. Modern War Studies Series. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007. x + 310 pp. Photographs, notes, bibliography, index. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN
0-7006-1512-1.

Nigel Hamilton. _Montgomery: D-Day Commander_. Military Profiles Series. Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2007. xiv + 142 pp. Photographs, maps, chronology, notes, bibliography, index. $21.95 (cloth), ISBN 1-5748-8903-6; $13.95 (paper), ISBN 1-5748-8904-4.

Reviewed for H-Albion by Antoine Capet, Department of British Studies, University of Rouen

Battles of Egos

Just as devotees of "Monty" will be familiar with Nigel Hamilton's copious output on the great soldier (he was Bernard Montgomery's official biographer, with three comprehensive volumes published between 1981 and 1986), specialists of Churchill studies will remember Raymond Callahan's older book on Winston Churchill, _Churchill: Retreat from Empire_ (1984). This year, Dennis E. Showalter's handy series, Military Profiles, offers a short biography of Montgomery as military commander, while the University Press of Kansas publishes a monograph on what is arguably (and incredibly) a new topic. In contrast to John Keegan's well-known edited collection, _Churchill's Generals_ (1991), which concentrates on individual generals, Callahan's new book, _Churchill and His Generals_, examines relations between Churchill and the men who worked under him. _Churchill and His Generals_ must not have been an easy book to write, is not an easy book to read, and therefore not an easy book to review.

The subject is an extremely complex one (which may explain why nobody had tackled it before), since it draws on highly technical military considerations. The military in modern times involves intricate economic, industrial, technological, diplomatic, geopolitical, electoral, cultural, and psychological elements. These elements are often mutually incompatible, frequently resulting in an intractable situation for war leaders, let alone historians and commentators who try to recapture the mental process of the times in top government circles or in battlefield headquarters and assess the merits of warlords and the decisions that they made. Callahan strives to concentrate on his stated subject--the relations between Churchill and his generals--but to examine these relationships in depth, he also provides the ins and outs of the generals' strategies and tactics as well as the way they tried (or not) to justify them before a highly critical Churchill ("the first prime minister since Wellington in 1829 to have been a regular soldier") (p. 235), whose perception of them, as stated to his entourage and in his memoirs, is also given in detail ...

REVIEW: Thomas Kühne, Kameradschaft: Die Soldaten des nationalsozialistischen Krieges und das 20. Jahrhundert

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-German@h-net.msu.edu (April, 2007)

Thomas Kühne. _Kameradschaft: Die Soldaten des nationalsozialistischen Krieges und das 20. Jahrhundert_. Kritische Studien zur Geschichtswissenschaft. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2006. 327 pp. . EUR 39.90 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-525-35154-3.

Reviewed for H-German by Dirk Bönker, Department of History, Duke University.

German Soldiers, Comradeship, and the Pursuit of War

The complicity of the _Wehrmacht_ and its personnel in the National Socialist pursuit of war, racial empire, and genocide has become the subject of an ever-proliferating body of scholarship. Historians disagree about the exact shape and extent of this participation, that is, the ways and extent to which most _Wehrmacht_ soldiers became actively involved in the Nazi _Vernichtungskrieg_ and lent shape to it as killers and willing bystanders. Historians also struggle to offer convincing explanations for the mass involvement of "ordinary" German soldiers in racial war and their willingness to fight until the bitter end of catastrophic defeat. Existing explanations range from the pervasiveness of a collective, deep-seated racist nationalism to wartime Nazi ideological mobilization, from the dictates of organizational cultures to social pressure to conform within primary groups.

In this outstanding book on notions of comradeship and German soldiers of World War II, Thomas Kühne stakes out new interpretive ground beyond such explanations. Exploring _Kameradschaft_ (the literal English translation is "camaraderie," which has a significantly more light-hearted connotation than the German term) as both a mythical construct and social practice, Kühne argues that it helped to mold the ideas, deeds, and experiences of the more than seventeen million German men who fought as _Wehrmacht_ soldiers and that it engendered social life and community in the midst of mass killing and genocidal warfare. These soldiers carried out genocidal and total war, argues Kühne, because their participation ensured an "enormous intensification of social life (and not physical survival)" (p. 21). In other words, the ideal of _Kameradschaft_ and its appropriation by millions of Germans explains both the murderous deeds and the cohesion of the _Wehrmacht_, and the Nazi _Volksgemeinschaft_ (people's community) at large, during the war. If we believe Kühne, _Kameradschaft_ could acquire this centrality precisely because it was neither simply the product of Nazi policy, war, and military socialization, nor was it endowed with fixed meanings. Rather, _Kameradschaft_ had gained its potency as a mythical construct well before the formation of the Nazi regime. This highly malleable construct originated from within German society in the 1920s and drew its strength from its openness towards different appropriations by multiple social actors; it expressed a collective yearning for national unity and social belonging prevalent among diverse political camps in a deeply divided society coming to terms with the traumas of total war and defeat ...

REVIEW: Ute Frevert, A Nation in Barracks: Modern Germany, Military Conscription and Civil Society

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by: H-German (September, 2005)

Ute Frevert, A Nation in Barracks: Modern Germany, Military Conscription and Civil Society. Trans. Andrew Boreham and Daniel Brückenhaus. Oxford: Berg, 2004. 322 pp. Index. $79.95 (cloth), ISBN 1-8597-3881-8; $26.95 (paper), ISBN 1-8597-3886-9.

Reviewed by: Kevin Cramer, Department of History, Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis.

Every Soldier a Citizen, Every Citizen a Soldier?

After the end of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars in 1815, the "German Question" was whether or not there could (or should) be a nation-state called Germany. After this question was decided with unification in 1871, the "German Question" soon evolved into the "German Problem," which was widely viewed by contemporaries and posterity as the root cause of two world wars. For many historians and other observers of German political and cultural life, the essential characteristic of Germany's historical development, which explained this nation's de-stabilizing pursuit of continental hegemony, was the prominent role "militarism" played in German society. Another name for this trait was "Prussianism," a convenient label that summoned up images of Hohenzollern authoritarianism and saber-rattling, goose-stepping soldiers, and monocled Junker generals in spiked helmets. After the defeat of the Third Reich in 1945, "Prussia" was deliberately erased from the map of a partitioned Germany, as if a virus of war somehow lay dormant in the soil itself.

Ute Frevert's book is an original and insightful re-examination of the role the military has played in shaping the German civil, political, and cultural landscape. She sees this aspect of German life evolving out of the French revolutionary concept of "the nation in arms," that is, conscription, which established a new kind of link between the state and civil society. Frevert believes that conscription, as a European and "modern" phenomenon, created the possibility of what she calls the "peacetime military socialization" of the citizen (p. 3). Conscription also broke down the assumption that the "civil" was the antithesis of the "military" and in so doing gave the state a powerful means of building the nation around new definitions of citizenship, patriotic values, and social order. In other words,conscription allowed the state to infiltrate civil society effectively by creating what Hermann Broch, in his novel The Sleepwalkers, called "the cult of the uniform ... the man who wears the uniform is content to feel he is fulfilling the most essential function of his age and therefore guaranteeing the security of his own life" ...

REVIEW: David French, Military Identities: The Regimental System, the British Army, and the British People, c. 1870-2000

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Albion@h-net.msu.edu (July 2006)

David French. _Military Identities: The Regimental System,  the British Army, and the British People, c. 1870-2000_. Oxford: Oxford  University Press, Oxford, 2005. x + 404 pp. $74.00 (cloth), ISBN  0-19-925803-1.

Reviewed for H-Albion by John Ferris, University of  Calgary, Canada

Regimental Rhetoric

David French ranks high  among military historians in Britain, and beyond. His previous books have  examined British grand strategy in the First World War, and the command and  doctrine of its army in the second. His present work examines what usually  is regarded as a (or the) central component of that army, the regimental  system. French assesses the role of the British regiment from the reforms  of 1870-81, to the evolution of the "post-modern regimental system" between  1945-70, although he also refers to contemporary events. _Military  Identities_ is one of the strongest studies in the social history of any  army, or in British military history as a whole. It is informed by standard  influences in social history, including cultural anthropology; Michel  Foucault's _Discipline and Punish_ (1977); Benedict Anderson's _Imagined  Communities_(1983); and ideas about the Victorian invention of tradition,  proving that military history can engage politically correct topics in more  than a one-night stand. _Military Identities_ rests on extraordinary  research, and unparalleled knowledge of the breadth and depth of the topic.  It analyses this material through a series of linked thematic chapters,  each pursued, more or less, in a chronological fashion. These themes  include training, recruitment, barrack life, officers and non-commissioned  officers (NCOs), deviance and discipline, "the construction of the idea of  the Regiment," the army and the people, the regiment at war, and others.  These narratives provide elegant architecture for a structure built on  bricks of telling details and wry anecdotes, drawn from a ninety-year  period ...

NEWS: MP asks for WWII Scottish pardons

An MP is asking the UK Government to investigate pardoning soldiers who took part in the biggest mutiny of WWII ...

Transcript from the 2000 Commons debate on the Mutiny.

REVIEW: Helen B. McCartney, Citizen Soldiers: The Liverpool Territorials in the First World War.

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Albion@h-net.msu.edu (August 2006)

Helen B. McCartney. _Citizen Soldiers: The Liverpool Territorials in the First World War_. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. xv + 275 pp. Notes, bibliography, tables, illustrations, index. $90.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-521-84800-8.

Reviewed for H-Albion by Bonnie White, Department of History, McMaster University

Between Home and Front: Citizen Soldiers in the First World War

At its core, this is a local study of two battalions of the King's Liverpool Regiment--the Liverpool Rifles and the Liverpool Scottish--that focuses primarily on middle-class volunteer enlistees. Successfully integrating the secondary literature with personal narratives, letters, diaries and memoirs, Helen McCartney investigates what motivated citizen soldiers to join Britain's armed forces and what sustained them throughout the First World War. Stressing continuity from the pre-war period, McCartney contends that it was a reliance on the familiar as well as the soldiers' connection to home that helped them to survive. This book employs a holistic perspective on societies at war and makes a valuable contribution to both military and social histories of the period ...