Military

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Robert Gates does the Royal Navy a favour

TNR asks defence analysts Who Won and Who Lost in Bob Gates’s realignment of Pentagon spending priorities? One party that doesn’t get a mention is the Royal Navy, yet the curtailment of the F-22 fighter programme and the allocation of increased resources to the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter must be considered good news for the Navy and the Royal Air Force. Given the (intolerable) pressures on the MoD budget the sooner (and the cheaper) the F-35 is developed past a point of no return, the better. Granted, it seems unlikely (in the present climate) that Britain will really buy as many as 150 of the aircraft, but the development of

Saturday

James Buchan

The man for the hour

At the turn of 2007, the United States was facing defeat in Baghdad. Shia and Sunni were on killing sprees, the supply line from Kuwait was under constant attack, and F-16s were in action on Haifa Street, less than a mile from the fortified US embassy. Yet commanders in Iraq, and civilians from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld downwards, clung to a bankrupt strategy: withdraw US forces to colossal operating bases outside town — Camp Victory, Camp Liberty — and leave the streets to an untrained Iraqi army, the sectarian national police and to the thieves and murderers. Meanwhile, success was measured in body count whatever the cost to the population,

Saturday

John Adamson

Order out of chaos

What got into them? For two decades in the middle of the 17th century, English- men transformed their world, overthrowing and eventually executing their king, abolishing bishops and the House of Lords, and incidentally slaughtering each other — and from time to time their Scottish and Irish neighbours — on a scale that approached the carnage of the first world war. Explaining these ‘English civil wars’ — the term Blair Worden gives to the sequence of conflicts that afflicted the country between 1640 and the Restoration in 1660 — has always been tricky. How does one make sense of the multifarious possible causes, or the bewildering, Russian-novel-like profusion of characters;

Wednesday

Raymond Carr

Behind the fighting lines

M. R. D. Foot confesses that he has always endeavoured to follow Whistler’s counsel, ‘Not a day without a line’. His written output is impressive and his judgments severe on those who do not come up to his standards. Heinz Koeppler, his boss at a Foreign Office study centre, with his fawning on his superiors and bullying of his staff, turned out not to be a gentleman. Foot makes clear in his first chapter that he himself comes of gentleman stock and is proud of it. True, his father married a Gaiety Theatre chorus girl; but his grandfather had married an heiress, retired as a general from the army to

Saturday

Alan Judd

The secrets of Room 40

‘Blinker’ Hall, Spymaster, by David Ramsay The first world war admiral, ‘Blinker’ Hall — so-called for the obvious reason — is less widely known than Jellicoe, Beatty & Co., but his contribution to victory and history was arguably greater. He was the Director of Naval Intelligence (DNI) who ensured the success of Room 40, the 1914 equivalent of Bletchley Park in 1939. Less famous than its successor, partly because radio was less used then, its ability to decrypt German naval and diplomatic ciphers was no less significant. Not the least of its achievements, enhanced by Hall’s outstanding political skill, was the decoding of the Zimmerman telegram, which effectively brought America

Wednesday

Hugh Cecil

Memoirs of the Great War

Survivors of a Kind, by Brian Bond In Survivors of a Kind, Brian Bond, one of our most distinguished modern military historians, has written an absorbing and affectionate study of the military memoirs of the first world war, bearing all the authority of a life- time’s work on the British Army. With some of the 20-odd names in this book the reader will be familiar: Siegfried Sassoon’s and Robert Graves’ sworks have stayed in print, and it is fair to say that most British people’s views of the Great War today are largely shaped by Goodbye to All That and, if not by Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man or Siegfried’s

Wednesday

David Crane

The spice of danger

From the Front Line: Family Letters & Diaries, 1900 to the Falklands & Afghanistan, by Hew Pike ‘Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier,’ reckoned Dr Johnson, and certainly every soldier thinks the less of himself for not having seen action. For four generations the extended Pike family has written movingly of the miseries of partings and of the ‘noise, violence indignity and death’ of the battlefield, but give any of them the choice between a cushy command at Catterick and the Normandy beaches and it is no contest. ‘Peace,’ writes the wonderful Reggie Tompson, back in England recovering from a bad wound on 24

Edward Harrison

Not just Hitler

The Third Reich at War, 1939-1945, by Richard L. Evans Any historian attempting a survey of Nazi Germany during the second world war confronts formidable challenges. First, the available literature is so huge that it almost defies synthesis in a single volume, however substantial. Second, the author needs to avoid writing yet another Hitler biography. Third, the most appalling and dispiriting material must be studied. As Richard J. Evans writes in his preface, the subject is ‘sometimes shocking and depressing almost beyond belief’. Nevertheless, in this book, the third of his trilogy on Nazism, Evans achieves a remarkable degree of success in meeting the demands of this most intractable subject.