Army, Empire, and Cold War

Until now, one of the critical missing parts of post-1945 history has been an up-to-date and substantial account of the British Army, based on how the Army viewed itself, as well as how critics assessed it. David French comprehensively fills this gap with command of detail and a balanced treatment of what he describes as a ‘military dinosaur’. This book should, however, be read hand in hand with the same author’s The British Way in Counter-Insurgency, 1945–1967 (2011; rev. supra, 731–3). The books overlap, with considerable repetition; it would have made sense to publish them as a single volume. The two should be read together because they reinforce and complement each other—though not without causing the reader who attempts to follow simultaneously two complicated books with full footnotes and bibliographies a certain astigmatism—especially if that reader is searching for missing sources. One of the aims of this book is to correct the view of historians of the British Empire, who apparently have too gentle a view of the police and Army. This is a curious aspiration, since British Documents on the End of the Empire is not cited in the extensive bibliography. Nevertheless, the systematic account of counter-insurgency methods adds to the historical literature of the colonial empire as well as to that of the Army. Many archival files in the book will be familiar to historians of war and empire, but they have seldom been so deftly and fully exploited. They include above all the Ministry of Defence files (the DEFE series) and the War Office files (the WO series) at The National Archives, and extensive use of the private papers at Churchill College, Cambridge, the Imperial War Museum, and the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at King’s College London

Ancient history · Archaeology · Colonialism · Empire · Military history · Political science · Classics · History · Law · Military History and Strategy · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies