 Okay, good morning. The numbers seem to have stabilized. I'm very pleased to welcome you to the first session of this year's School of Security Studies Research Conference on the theme of Back to the Future, Continuity and Change in the Study of War and Conflict. And our first panel is organised by the Military and Political History Research theme on the subject of trends in the historiography, land maritime and air warfare. We have three speakers who I'll introduce individually as they give their papers and there will be an opportunity to ask questions at the end. If you have a question, please use the Zoom Q&A function. And I should let you know that the session is being recorded and live streamed if you do not wish to be included in the recording. Thank you. Our first speaker is Professor Gary Sheffield, who's a visiting professor in our Defence Studies Department at King's and has formally been land warfare historian of the higher command and staff course at the Joint Services and Command and Staff College. He's currently writing a book, Civilian Armies, the Experience of British and Dominion Soldiers in the Two World Wars, published by Yale University Press and he's an expert more generally on British Army in the era of the Two World Wars. And he will begin the conference by telling us about trends in land historiography from the Napoleonic to the 20th century. Thank you, Gary. Okay, well, thanks very much, Bill. And it's really good to be back at DSD after 19 years, albeit broadcasting from my spare bedroom. Well, when the instructions came down to cover the historiography of land warfare has changed over the last three or four decades. I was really horrified to think that that's basically the span of my academic career. And so that's actually the chance to reflect on some changes in one of my key areas of research. It's truly an enormous subject. And so I can only zoom in on some key issues. And doubly I would have missed some key books and key articles. I'm very grateful for any updates. Well, one thing I would say to start with is actually it's been remarkably little scholarly work on some key aspects of land warfare. And my only visual aid today is to plug this book by DSD colleague Chris Tuck, Understanding Land Warfare. I've just written the blurb for the second edition. It's an excellent overview, the best I've read on the subject. Let's start by looking at morale and combat motivation. In land warfare, more often than not, armies have been defeated through failures of morale or motivation, rather than being physically destroyed. The French Army at war in 1815 is a classic example. Now armies are composed obviously of individuals, organized into units, and the morale of both is important. For many years, the ideas about this was dominated by the notion of the primary group or body group, which really goes back to Schiels and Janowitz's classic article in the late 1940s about the Wehrmacht. But in recent years, there has been some challenges to this, or at least making a more nuanced picture. About 15 years ago, Hugh Strong published an article arguing for the importance of training in combat motivation and morale. Essentially, his argument was that does it matter whether you've bonded with the guy on your left and the guy on your right, providing you're both well trained, you know what to do, and actually you can rely on each other. He pointed to various units being composed of disparate individuals, but trained to a common pattern, who actually could be militarily fairly effective. I think this is actually an obvious insight, but an important one. One of the most stimulating books on the subjects I've read in recent years is Anthony King's combat soldier, which came out in 2013. He's a sociologist rather than a historian. But what he's done is at least partially rehabilitate the work of SLA Marshall, the US combat historian who famously, maybe infamously, claimed that only one in four riflemen in US units in the Second World War actually fired their weapons. Marshall has actually been attacked, but I think he's done some way to rehabilitating his ideas. And he's come up with the idea of the Marshall effect. The idea that citizen armies, essentially volunteer or conscript armies, are passive unless something is done to shake them out of their passivity. The things like appeals to their masculinity, inculcating bloodlust, things like bayonet charges, and direct and heroic, and in some cases pretty well suicidal leadership. I've written a piece on the British army at Gallipoli, which actually tended to support this. Actually, it actually works quite well as a model, but I'm far from certain that it would work as well for more experienced armies later in the First World War or for that matter in the Second World War. But I think actually King's work is important and worth engaging with. And the final thing I'll mention under this heading is the work of a DSD colleague, Jonathan Fennell, whose book Fighting the People's War, which came out in 2019, argues that in British Empire armies of the Second World War, there was a lack of understanding about why they were fighting. There was a disconnect between the People's War rhetoric and soldiers in the field. There was no great ideological zeal. There was a deficit of political legitimacy as he puts it. Basically, soldiers didn't know why they were there just fighting in order to go home. They had lacked faith in their leaders to deliver on a new Jerusalem. A very important book. And I think that his ideas are well worth exploring in other contexts. So we've actually seen the whole idea of morale and combat motivation to the key facts in land warfare. Challenge transformed, certainly made more than you want over the last few years. Moving on to tactics, I'm going to look at the First World War. And we've gone from the idea, going back to the likes of Alan Clark in the early 60s, that there was this blind bashing towards the understanding that in armies, particularly on the Western Front, there was a learning process or rather a series of learning processes and some sophisticated methods emerged by the end. I've contributed to this. And as so many other people, and I would mention another DSD colleague, Amy Fox, has done something very important work on learning in the British army. Because not as the British as other people, including our chairman, has shown. It's also true for the French army. Michel Goyer's book, fairly recently translated into English, is very good on this. And while back in the 80s and 90s, there was, I think it's a rather uncritical view of the military excellence of the German army in the Second World War, that has changed. And so going forward from people like Timothy Lupfer and Bruce Goodman, through to another DSD colleague, Robert T. Foley today, there is an understanding that the German army got a lot right. They also got a lot wrong. And so in general, the tactical picture for the First World War is a lot more interesting and more nuanced than it was 20 or 30 years ago. And also just as an aside, I think it's in a similar translate, a similar change in the way that historians look at the taxes of the British army in the Second World War. For many years, this subject was dominated by popular historians and journalists, people like Max Hastings and Carlo Deste, who were pretty damning of British tactical methods in comparison with supposed excellence of the Germans in the Second World War. But in recent years, that's been turned around. So Neil Barr of DSD, looking at the desert campaign of my former Wolverhampton colleague, John Buckley, an awful lot to, I think, rehabilitate British tactical practice in the Second World War. So linking that back to Jonathan Fennel's work, we've got a really interesting new perspective on British army in the Second World War emerging. Well, going up to the operational level and operational arts, I think that historians now generally recognise that this was understood before Zveshin came up with the term operational level in the 1920s. In other words, people knew about this stuff before the mid 20th century, but they didn't have the vocabulary or necessarily the same vocabulary to express these ideas that we have today. Operational art, which is in big handfuls, is coping with a massively expanded battlefield dealing with entire theatres, indeed multiple theatres. Klaus Telt has traced this back to the German, sorry, the Prussian army of Frederick the Great in the 18th century. Robert M. Epstein has looked at Napoleon's 1809 campaign against the Austrians. DSD's Hugh Davis has looked at Wellington in the peninsula. Various people have looked at Mocha, the elder campaigns, particularly against France in 1870, and Brian Holden Reid of Kings are on the American Civil War. All of this suggests that people actually, commanders, these good commanders, understood these concepts. And so we need to push back the idea of the operational level of war and operational arts back into the 19th, even into the 18th century. And for what it's worth, my argument is that Haig actually had a good understanding of this, although he was not always able to put it into practice with effect during the First World War. Now linked to this is what I've used as a subheading, the rise and fall, sorry, the rise and fall of Blitzkrieg, writing in 1990 about the Soviet offensive into Germany in 1945. Christopher Duffy said it's unfortunate no one has come up with a better term than Blitzkrieg to apply to our style of war, which is familiar to every student of 20th century military history. I think he's right about that, that we all know what Blitzkrieg is, offensive fighting, combined arms, air power plays a key role, punching through, exploiting, disrupting the enemy as much as much as destroying them. Now, Blitzkrieg, if you read the popular literature of say, 30 or 40 years ago, is a German speciality. It's the way the Germans deliberately conducted their war. And the allies at the beginning of the Second World War weren't able to cope with it. Well, the arguments put forward by J.P. Harris and others in the 1980s and 90s, was that actually the Germans did not go into the campaign in France in 1940 with a Blitzkrieg doctrine as such. Rather, but as various historians and here, Colhine's freezers, the Blitzkrieg legend published in 1996, put in English in 2005, have shown Blitzkrieg thinking was the consequence, not the cause, of German success in 1940 against France. In effect, the Germans carried out a highly risky series of maneuvers, which worked for a whole series of reasons. And thereafter, it was adopted as a sort of doctrine. And it links back to the German obsession with operational art trying to reproduce Cannae, which occurred in 1870, failed to occur in 1914. And the Second World War version is basically motorizing it, otherwise adding modern transport methods to an old 100-year-old plus military concept, which of course dates back to the Roman period. Well, it nearly worked in 1941 against the Soviet Union. But as Martin van Krevel reminded us in Supplying War, as far back as 1977, the Germans set themselves a near impossible task in logistic terms, given the ambition of their attack into the Soviet Union. But as John Erickson in the 80s and more recent scholars such as David Glantz and David Stahl have shown, the failure of Operation Barbarossa was due to a combination of German weaknesses at every level, from the strategic to the tactical, but also the resistance of the Red Army and Soviet decision making. So the old idea of brilliant Germans and useless Soviet stooges, the Germans be defeated by Hitler's stupid decisions and by the weather, has been replaced by a much more nuanced version in which the Red Army has received agency. Where the Red Army's success in building on the pre-war ideas of deep battle has also undergone general recognition in the last 30-odd years. But a long way from John Ellis' book, Brute Force, which appeared in 1990, actually it was already outdated when it appeared, to the recognition of the scientific approach applied by the Soviet forces in the Second World War, writers such as Charles Dick and David Glantz, actually especially important. But it's really, really, really important to note that actually this is not simply Blitzkrieg in the German sense. It has some commonalities with Blitzkrieg, but actually Soviet style has a good deal of attrition that which is why many people don't actually like using the term Blitzkrieg in reference to Soviet deep battle. Well, German Blitzkrieg came unstuck in 1942. Essentially, his enemies learnt the counters to Blitzkrieg and the Germans ran out of luck and the remorseless attrition of fighting against superior enemies started to kick in. And for me, Richard Over is a 1995 book, Why the Allies Won is still, I think, a very good text explaining why. Well, the final subject I want to look at is the triumph of attrition. Now, attrition has gone from virtually being a dirty word associated with the nadir of generalship, especially in the First World War, hence, you know, Jehuda Wallach's 1987 book, The Dogma of the Battle of Annihilation, the theories of Klauswitz and Schlieffen and their impact on the German conduct of the two World Wars. But also, I think this is linked into revulsion at the American strategy in Vietnam. That has moved on to a recognition that attrition is a facet of all campaigns and battles, and good commanders can use attrition to their advantage in a highly effective fashion. Now, this is, I think, very interesting when you look at the reputation of two American Civil War generals, Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant. Well, once upon a time, Lee was seen as the brilliant master of maneuver, but his reputation has taken a severe battering over the last few years. Alan T. Nolan's book, Lee the Marble Man, 1990, very good example of that, not the first and far from being the last example. There's a recognition that actually, by his relentless attacking, Lee, although he achieved a whole series of tactical and operational victories, not only failed to translate these into strategic victory, but actually wore out his own armies by attacking too much. Whereas, for example, in Brooks D. Simpson's book on Grant's tromp over-adversary, published in 2000, it's very clear that Grant understood attrition, understood the numbers game, and applied it highly effectively. Crew tactics on the battlefield may be, but overall, it was the right result for the Union. Our own chairman, Bill Philpot, has also written very interestingly on Fosh's use of attrition in the First World War, and I think looked to mention the late Elizabeth Greenhalge's work on Fosh as well. And various other people have looked at this in a First World War context, including me, arguing that Hague had a mixture of attrition and breakthrough, as part of his thinking, didn't always work. But in the end, I think, actually, it did deliver the goods. And Jonathan Boff at the University of Birmingham, but did his PhD at King's under Bill, has argued very persuasively for the emergence of what he calls rolling attrition on the battlefield in 1917, 1918, conducting operations across a very wide front, grinding down the enemy in a series of relatively limited offensives, perhaps limited because the Allies did not possess the technical ability to carry out deep, deeper operations at that stage. The Soviets in the Second World War certainly did. And so on the Eastern front, between 1943 and 1945, we see another version of rolling attrition, but sometimes, also given the amount of space available, the Soviets were able to advance perhaps as much as 200 miles in a single operation. But it's essentially rolling attrition. Someone else whose reputation has been, I think, refurbished to a degree over the last few years because of his use of attrition is Berlomont-Gomery. We've moved beyond the hagiography of Monte's own memoirs. I think the fairly uncritical biography of Nigel Hamilton and flipping it round, I think the very hostile work of Corelli Barnett in the 60s, 70s, 80s. Too much more, I think, sophisticated nuanced look at what Mont-Gomery was able to do. Neil Bards writing on Alamaine, I think, actually captured his use of attrition in the desert extremely well. And a particularly impressive book, I think, is that by Stephen Hart, which came out in 2000, which uses a term used by Mont-Gomery himself, colossal cracks, the idea that Mont-Gomery would tee up a massive onslaught using attrition in a very focused fashion to break down the enemy, which was playing to the strengths of the British Army in 1944-45. And finally, in this section, very briefly, a recent and still controversial book, Philippe Sobriand, How the War Was Won, it came out in 2015. He argued that the Western Allies, rather than the Soviet Union, did most to defeat the Axis in the Second World War by using the air-sea super battlefield and destroying the bulk of German and Japanese war production. Land battles, by contrast, only actually used up a relatively small amount of cheap equipment like tanks and were fought in limited areas. Actually, I think this book is genuinely a game changer in the way we think about the Second World War, but there are caveats. So Hugh Davy, for example, argued that while land warfare might have occupied a smaller area, but these actually were more valuable areas in many ways than empty stretches of water. Many of the main features of winning the war, not least psychological, revolved around human beings and killing them and dominating them was most effectively done by soldiers on land rather than navies or air forces. For all that, it's a really important book and one which someone, maybe even me, ought to apply the principles back to the First World War and to see how that helps us to reshape the way we think about that war. In conclusion, three very quick points. A lot has been written on land warfare over the last 30, 40 years, but there's plenty of scope for additional work. There are some surprising gaps in the literature and some of the older stuff is definitely in need of revisiting. Second point, just like Phil O'Brien and Jonathan Fennell have integrated military with other sorts of history, not least social, political and economic, that is clearly the way forward. The old drum and trumpet approach of battles and generals and all the rest of it, it's really nothing more than antiquary now. It needs to be placed into a much broader context. And finally, it seems that despite the digitized battlefield, the emergence of new technology and all the rest of it, classical military operations are still relevant in 1991, 2003, and so it would seem in 2022. So the study of land warfare has a current utility. It isn't simply interesting for its own sake. Thank you very much. Thank you, Gary. Very interesting and plenty of recommendations for further reading, which I'm sure our audience will appreciate. Without further ado, I shall move on to our second speaker, Dr. James Smith. He completed doctorate in the Department of War Studies at Kings in 2021. He's now heading up the Corbett 100 project in partnership with Professor Andrew Lambert and others in the department. He's active in the Kings Wargaming Network, and he's leading a research project currently looking at the relationship between maritime strategy and space. And I will hand over to him to talk about maritime dimensions of historiography. Thank you, James. Thank you, Professor Philpott. It's been a great pleasure to present at Kings 2022 School of Security Studies Research Conference. I must admit that the suspect ranks of historians would probably politely smirk at the title of our school conference back to the future, because at the very core of military history, strategic studies and war studies, beyond pure historians who wish to write an account of a past event, many historians are equally futurists. Yet it's hinted in school conference title, we find ourselves revisiting the past to think about contemporary problems, which we applied history, it's about looking at trends and analysis of a sustained period of time to think about these problems and challenges. It's a person that reminded that humanity rarely sits still, but also neither does the execution of warfare, tactics and the rubble technology in it. It's a continually evolved and can easily be seen through the history of land, sea, air, and we can certainly add today, I think cyber and space warfare, something historians have attempted recorded and debate through their scholarship. On land, if you track the trend from classical naval and land forces of Rome and Greece, the sword, armor advancements, the design of the longbow in England, the gun, the missile, the pressure for greater lethality is hardly new or how it shapes warfare, nor is it new how scholars have attempted to record and discuss this. This can be easily seen in the maritime environment, whether that be on the sea surface, below or above it in how it influences what happens on and over land. The age of sail that saw ships for trade, travel and warships reflected the growth of nations through global spanning exploration, empire, economic power, wars and conflict, and scholars have attempted to certainly explore that. To make a way to the end for navies for mechanization and industrial revolution in the 1800s, where sea power and maritime connections became embedded in national cultures, sometimes purposely others by reality of being an island. Ultimately, this mechanization resulted in the arrival of the dreadnaught and battleships that turned in the 20th century and that placed emphasis on the big gun. The epoch of these ships in the World War I gave way to the submarine in the first steps in military aviation, something navies, in particular the Royal Navy for the Royal Navy Air Service, led the wave in. By the Second World War, again the epoch of navy and the success of the world around the world, having secured our logistics, ensured national survival such as the Royal Navy's successful deterrence and invasion, the battle at the Atlantic and the zenith of American sea power, so aptly demonstrated in Pacific theater, saw naval warfare shaped again, with air power, the missile and nuclear age. Certainly it seemed by 1945 that additional connections, myths and sentiments that have been reflected in scholarship, but generally beyond that, that surrounded ship-on-ship action and Nelsonian association that dated back to the 1500s was the Francis Drake and the Spanish Armada were smashed apart. After 1945, the shape and scope of naval warfare changed again, but far more fundamentally. Frown into the mix by extremist air power theorists, the concept that strategic air bombing could solve every foreign policy problem while navies had completely annihilated any threat at sea and the question of their mission and role started to become a key topic of debate by scholars, politicians and others in defense as the world moved to an age of nuclear brinkmanship, cold war and limited conflict. Naval warfare in itself like land and continue involved driven by technology, at times naval advancements shaped the changing face of warfare on land, sea and air. That advancements in naval technologies and warfare could be driven by the state and the fact that advancements in naval warfare could impact other forms of warfare served to point out these complex organizations that developed for centuries operate an environment inherently hostile that required professionalism, training and the maintenance of institutional coherence and memory of which scholarship played its part as an educational tool and was central to the success. It also touches on the reality of the decision by nations to emphasize in the natural environment of humans, the sea, for exerting effort to develop strategic power to project influence beyond the limits of land and it placed navies central to national power, international relations and expansions of economic power through global trade over centuries. That this process had occurred in the nations and continental states alike proved that maritime powers far beyond naval warfare are addressing seaborne threats, something scholars explored before 1939. But after all, naval warfare in battles at sea are quite rare and rarely decisive. But instead, the influence of sea forces upon land and the dependencies either for national survival, in the case of Britain, or the utilization and control of trade can be economic power to shape relations between nations. The reality that since the professionalization of navies, naval warfare was rare reflected reality that navies have become central to many nations national defence policy up to 1945. It was less about naval warfare, scholars also touched on this, but the range of other tasks sea power executed for the state, non-military tasks like custodial diplomatic to name a few and the capability they bought to support foreign policy, it set them apart from soldiers and air forces who were land bound. But all of this was encumbered in the task in the state that reflects the times, priorities and national realities that navies were being used for and something that scholars attempted to address over the past century. However, that navies were central in culture, defence and policy changed after 1945 is critical, not only understanding the evolution navies, but the ongoing process of developing maritime strategy, doctrine for sea power and understanding naval warfare. This change is reflected in the historiography, even if understanding of how why fundamental change had come around in 1945 was left unaddressed, being one apparently of merely technological advancement and limited wartime analysis for navies in the Second World War, dare I insert a plug for my PhD thesis. The 1945 divide is essential to understand when it comes to not just research, existing scholarship, but also writing the history of navies for the broader spectrum of warfare and military history. Understanding strategy or so-called ways of warfare national or otherwise and the role of sea bay forces in and upon them has been shaped by the divide and reflected in the way we examine scholars work, naval and maritime focus post-1945. The fact that the sea was equalized into a homogenized way of thought and that it had classed as just another so-called domain demonstrates how thinking about navies and the sea in strategic terms was displaced and replaced as just another form of military power. This was a particular outcome of a process that took place between 1945 and 1964 and Britain and broad is part of defence unification that saw changes in the lexicon warfare, policy and strategy occur and ideas based on land warfare, not sea warfare, were recasting thought and navies, their voice reduced and scholarship equally so. The lexicon itself reflected technical and technicist views of warfare after 1945 as there was this reactionary turmoil that occurred because of the array of issues occurring in defence between nations and internal nations during those post-war decades. Talking technical about navies was to be the status quo for historians when looking at navies and a marks change to pre-1939. By placing regimented limits and rigid definitions on maritime strategy, discussion devolved to be one of naval power and naval solutions to naval problems. It brought in an era of land-focused continental ideas, Prussian, German and American and origin to debate over navies and this was reflected in scholarship either by those in naval circles or those beyond it. This is the baseline to remember when viewing post-1945 historiography across a spectrum of naval-related scholarship and its interaction with topics beyond that, particularly in a Western view. This devaluation of thinking in maritime terms and switching to a simpler naval view was antithetical to the work of British historian, strategist and philosopher C. Paramaritan strategy, Sir Julian Corbett. Corbett's work who is a strategic thinker amongst the greats and early in the 20th century through objective engagement of the past enabled in to develop theoretical models for modern maritime strategy and naval policy, the baseline user historian. Corbett's goals were not just the education of naval officers to think more intellectually about doctrine but also to increase understanding of national strategy amongst high-level policy makers. In contrast to other strategic theorists such as Carl von Klauschers, Corbett studied Britain's unique strategic problems and island maritime power rather than that of continental state. Corbett's recognition that classical strategic theory, long dominated by continental military concerns, again reflected in the scholarship, conflicted with his analysis of Britain's national strategic experience over prior centuries that had resulted in the decision to emphasise the sea and develop a maritime strategy as national defence policy. Prior to 1945, navy centrality, the national defence result in a cadre of civilian and military professionals to become naval intellectuals and scholars, all of whom who were historians and some advanced to questions about national strategic experience and theory. Naval historians were also engaged in popular writing of naval history although it often fell prey of navalist or national propaganda in the late 1800s early 1900s. Accessibility to naval history was certainly there over the past century. For navies this was slightly more important than the other services for a connected distant global maritime campaigns and the complexities of naval warfare more tangibly to the public and decision makers alike in partnership of assisting cultural forms. In short it's easier to be educated about a tank, plane or soldier as it's more readily accessible, it's difficult for the mass public to access the navy, its history and more importantly high policy makers to visit and therefore understand the capabilities as part of national strategy policy. Kings itself had a role in this, particularly academic scholarship. Long before Sir Michael Howard founded the department of war study 60 years ago, retired Royal Navy captain Sir John Knox Lawton joined the history department of Kings in the late 1800s where the idea of professional academic naval history and the growth of naval history was further developed. The recording of the events of navies was far more than a dull account of far of battles but applied history. It was not to provide an end goal but a way of thinking. Lawton's work went on to inspire scholars and other nations not least the United States where U.S. Admiral Stephen Lewis and Captain Alfred D. Maha and his historians founded the U.S. Naval War College as part of the process of the development of the notion of American seapower and creating a quasi-seapower state with the goal to maintain seapowers the correct choice in American defense and foreign policy. So what is going on here prior to 1945 is an intellectual academic push both within navies and outside. Scholarship is essential to this process. Many of the leading maritime strategic thinkers such as Corbett and naval strategists like Mahana are impacting and influencing through scholarship. They're advancing and enabling a forum for debate and discussion on naval topics, naval doctrine but also maritime strategy and naval national strategy through applied history and this is outwards facing rather than inwards facing. I mentioned earlier how it's harder for maritime and navies to outreach so any turn inwards creating an impenetrable barrier to decision makers and other services and so forth actually backfires on those who are interested in broader discussion about navies. In the past naval and maritime scholars gained insight through the sustained application to recovering the useful past by sophisticated analysis and this is communicated through the scholarship. Fundamental changes to the role of navies and thinking about maritime strategy in navies dramatically changed after 1945 and this is reflected in scholars work whether that be of naval history or contemporary question to the future of navies and the shape and scope of sea power. The once relatively secure position of navies in a national defense of continental states and island nations were challenged in the initial two post-war decades. Scholars since then have struggled to address this broader question and instead to revert into addressing more specific and arguably more pressing topics. So maritime and maritime strategy disappears and as I mentioned earlier becomes a question of naval power in a particular context land-based views of navies driven by continental nations because the great island nation states for essentially broken post-war. This changes the discussion that scholars are engaged in because it's supported by mechanisms that focus on the potential of war in Europe, changes in organization and defense unification and the changing of national priorities and of course alliances like NATO and all these other things which are coming in. So we see a decline after 1945 in maritime thinkers and scholarships related to it. It's kind of a atypical demonstration of questions being asked about causality kind of circling around the problem. The air-evolving nature of warfare that continued after Second World War featured growth in a lexicon of verdicts something naval scholars did little to help or readdress the growing distance of defense and government intellectuals from both navies and an understanding of sea power maritime strategy. Complicating matters further negative terms enter colloquial language across cultural media not just about navies but in the British sense economic social or political affairs of which naval historians didn't particularly appreciate was also being applied to navies. It emboldened post-war perceptions and arguments that navies and sea power antiquated, imperial and outdated. Simplistic and sentimental notions based on imperial naval power overpowered national sea power messages. Scholars ignore the question did the state understand maritime strategy or navies role in national policy? If not why not and what changed? In short it's plausible that using terms and concepts that featured regularly in scholarships such as golden age for navies generally attached to the age of sale of the great investment of fleets at the start of the 20th century. Damage not just perception of sea power navies but significantly damaged the next steps of developing maritime strategy and developing naval history of field. If we were to use Corbett's 1911 work some principles of maritime strategy the hint is in the title it's some principles not their principles so those engaged in serious historical research naval maritime strategic theory who were focused on this were supposed to join and evolve this process and it really didn't happen in naval scholarship. Assessive negativity terms like fall and decline became common later 20th century naval history or writing and talking about navies. These deconstructive techniques and the labyrinth of technology also brought about negative change creating an almost self-fulfilling prophecy because the message that was coming from scholars and historians was undermining the work of academics and scholars who are attempting to address the pressing question of the future of navies. A common path for scholarship was that so-called naval decline can only be understood when it's compared to an imperial notion of sea power. This rejected maritime strategy asserting the role and function of the navy was therefore defunct of our empire. This wasn't helped by popular military naval history although it does increase in quality but it rested on safe grounds like the Battle of Trafalgar and academic history gets into a kind of tussle as I mentioned earlier the problems of making navies and naval history accessible to what is a land-dwelling readership. This underlines Cloudship's corpus and that was criticism of the tendency to deploy a handful of catchphrases in heroic mythology because it offers very little provided basis of serious thought on current and future strategy let alone a nuance and sophisticated understanding the past and you can see arguments being offered by those who want to challenge and stop navies having some defence policy in the 1950s really getting into quite large debates particularly between historians about that you can pick up on things like the Battle of the Atlantic and the Battle of Britain you can see this real tension coming between historians. It had very little to do with strategy and behind all of it the military scholars are involved with this were actually they were trying to vie for political control and access to finance. So generally comparative studies of naval material asset numbers technological aspects of naval warfare carriers nuclear propulsion sensor systems also becomes the characteristic of naval focused scholarship throughout the latter 20th century. So the key point is one of fundamental change and that really shaped scholarship on navies and strategic thought who attempted to view the world from maritime lens. So from this there's some views some themes when viewing scholarship on navies naval history and warfare maritime strategy post 1945. How scholars and thinkers responded to questions over the future of the navies role is particularly interesting because it was also a political snowball that was going on at the same time that looked at short-term tactical experience that overwrote strategy. So it placed navies on the back foot from the outset 1945 and it puts naval and maritime scholars in the back foot because navies were thinking of talking long-term focus rather than short-term results. This is the very reason you see a swelling of navalist scholarly output on both sides of the Atlantic with things like naval aviation is they're trying to stay in a step short-term focus at the time of defense. Fast results in aircraft and carriers and nuclear weapons and submarines off of that. So the pressing need to address immediate problems ejects and essentially cancels the development of serious naval history and serious corbetting and way of thinking about these problems. Other questions were more important at the time. What's the role of the navy? What's emerging technologies? How are navies relevant to defense policy? So this veil of 1945 drops is almost a defense mechanism for naval focus scholars because of the pressing need to address threats to the future existence of navies incontinent on nations first and foremost and this spills over into Britain. This is against the wishes of the few remaining and corbetting thinkers and because of poor defense leadership 1950s that sought quick fix cost effective solutions. Contemporary strategic naval minded thought and scholarship is reduced to doctrinal glosses rather than deeper understanding of strategy and maritime influence upon it. So there's a certain irony here in the rush to evolve navies and particularly island nations it disregards strategic experience. Again scholars are reflecting on this and in fact to some degree are pushing this forward. Experient analyzer appear at a time which is more effective as an intellectual set of principles is effectively ejected and also because there are no great real maritime strategic thinkers at the time. There is no corbet critical time during Cold War panic nuclear weapons and so forth. It's all the last stronghold of maritime influence both on historians and defense policies such as the Admiralty dragged into debates over technology power and force rather than delivering strategic arguments. A situation that benefited the other scholars and other services who were promoting a different ideology. So this rivalry in substituted bickering is reflected in scholarship which really didn't help drive forward a great understanding of within naval history or contemporary naval discussion. So in a particular context of Britain it's favoring continentalist doctrine and ways of viewing of the world. It's a land view not a maritime view that really starts happening after 1945 and there was only way to combat this was a strategic argument that historians had to put forward and there wasn't sufficient response or capability within historians at the time or maritime focused scholarship to push back. Now there's a lot more to this than I get in today but a key takeaway is this shift by scholars from talking in maritime terms to talking and publishing in navies and sea power terms and post 1960 scholars really struggle with this and it's a particular low point in naval maritime historiography that thinking in maritime terms takes on a philosophical backwater is because it's a question of national policy and trade and foreign policy. Enable thinkers are not in a mindset with the creation of unified defense or in a position to challenge the continental status quo that's coming from land and land-based air power theorists work. So scholars turn to talk about answering the technological changes in navies the soviet naval threat and building arguments along sea power lines. However this makes navies and naval scholars work incredibly vulnerable to high-level decision makers as shifting national priorities occur. Navies were viewed as essentially for answering just sea-borne threats and scholarship did little to escape this inward-looking approach. This has real-world impact and as something Sir Julian Corbett demonstrated his lifetime scholarship through rigorous education it does have real-world impact scholarship because in the British context continentalist doctrine runs prime after 1960s and this is alien to British strategic experience so Michael Howard provided a historical framework to support that argument and the discussions on navies is reduced to one of capability and technology. Naval scholarship struggles to address this using applied history and spends more time refighting old battles if not between naval historians. So the role of the naval historian as a broader strategies has lost time and to some degree it's a lasting insult to the efforts of Corbett and the real-world impact which I like to touch on is demonstrate the Royal Navy is reduced to a niche role subservient to the US Navy and confined to the North Atlantic and the connection of an island recognized sea dependency is cast aside something that naval historians and scholarship was essential to promoting and communicating before. So this focus on technological questions reflected in the scholarship is antithetical to a maritime view to the world with the question of what navies doing peace in wartime is lost in scholarly output because the focus is very much on naval capabilities to ensure navy survive and their value to the state is reinforced because of emphasis is placed on a media problem. So in growing military political industrial bureaucracy where jointness is brutal, superior to strategy put to stop the thinking and being responsive in maritime terms so an entire way of scholarship maritime thinking and methodological practices behind it are really ejected in the latter 20th century and but there are few very few who keep the likes on about this through research and scholarship. So to wrap up as the Cold War continues arguably to its height in the 1980s it's a maritime campaign that enables or nudges maritime influences on policy and scholarship and it gives rise to some scholarship about maritime influences and this of course is the 1982 Falklands war. It starts advanced research into a host of maritime related questions like heritage shipbuilding and so forth. It's not quite thinking in maritime strategic terms as it's still very technical and scholarship you can find the scholarship about this. How many ships, what weapon systems, how effective are they and how to address vulnerabilities and actually this is also reflecting history. If you look at discussions say 1916 Battle of Jutland these type of discussions are going on as well but big ideas are starting to shape scholarship again of what navies can do in so-called peacetime and beyond just addressing threats at sea and the word maritime starts to reappear in scholarship after hiatus after 1945. In the United States in the 1980s see the idea of maritime strategy arrive decades after US Navy failed to convince congress for national maritime strategy but it's really an area that we start to see confusion over terms like naval strategy, naval doctrine, maritime strategy take off and this is generally because continental nation using the term maritime strategy is called a scholarship. American navalists are pushing this but in reality it's not national policy it's naval strategy and either army or air force are supporting at it. That this conversation is evolving in literature coming up to the end of Cold War is no fluke and naval capabilities expand including trade and global logistics come into the limelight the last few years notwithstanding but it's an exceptionally slow process well as the 21st century. Only recently have we seen books exploring the impact of navies and maritime warfare on the successor periods like the Second World War when being positive about them. I'd know I'd certainly argue that I think until recently the impact of navies and their involvement in places like the Second World were actually quite negative and as Professor mentioned earlier actually we've only really started exploring that now with some great output but it really demonstrates a slow pace at which serious research and scholarship again on maritime strategy and maritime aspects of warfare published to be outward looking and we can look at debates on the relationship to maritime thinking and space to see that actually today so utilizing that proven methodology of analyzing trends and applying that to the historiography of navies and naval warfare after 1945 that this puzzle to understand the development of naval maritime strategy and the build of naval history comes to light and potentially may have come a full circle. Thank you. Thank you very much James sir. I will move quickly on to our third speaker Dr Kristina Gulter he's a co-director of the Sir Michael Howard Center for the History of War at Kings and also a co-theme lead for the military and political history research theme. She's going to talk to us today about historiography of air power since the First World War. Thank you Kristina. Thank you Berlin. Good morning ladies and gentlemen. It's like a comet coming into view with clockwork precision it seems that every seven years I'm asked to contribute to one or other official history and my most recent studies have paired with Randon 2015 and OUP in 2016 these works examined the 2011 Libyan air campaign. The work was commissioned by the US Air Force in collaboration with the REF and I was brought on board for a number of reasons. I used to work for the Americans at the US Naval War College and since that time I've had an advisory role at the USAF Research Institute. Being invited to do such work is on one level really gratifying because you're identified as somebody who's a trusted partner and can make some judgments on subjects but it also carries enormous burdens of responsibility. If you don't make the right judgments it could well be that military practitioners in the future make the wrong decisions and people end up paying the ultimate price and I try never to lose sight of this burden of responsibility. I want to start by making some very general reflections about the nature of official history before discussing the official histories of the First World War and Second World War and then I'm going to bring it right up to date and talk about how official history writing today differs from previous generations. My bottom line is that the writing of official history has generally improved. Today it is far more about explanatory history rather than purely narrative history and then before I close I want to just briefly touch on some of the perils of researching what can be very brutal subjects. In this case I've been researching back-to-back civil war scenarios and I think these various studies have undoubtedly left a mark on me so I want to have a quick reflection on that. I think it's a case that all good historians go through a rite of passage the point at which they realise that official histories aren't necessarily always gospel and I think it comes as a considerable shock when people realise that they don't necessarily agree with everything that is written in official histories and that they are not necessarily the definitive word on particular subjects and what's striking about the official histories of the First World War and Second World War experiences is that how different they are in terms of their rigour. At one end of the scale we have what remains the single best analysis of strategic bombing in World War II by Charles Webster and Noble Franklin and that was published at the beginning of the 1960s and at the other end of the spectrum we have the history of the air war between 1914-18 by Raleigh and Jones written during the 1920s and reflecting very much the dogma of the day by elevating the role and achievements of strategic bombing. All history official or otherwise should be judged by the same basic criteria. We need to keep in mind a number of questions. We must ask who is the author and this is where EH card is right that you should always study the historian before studying the facts presented and I think he was largely right when he said that. We should go on to ask what are the basic assumptions that like the basis of selection and organisation of facts when was a particular history written. There is a danger I think of forgetting these very basic questions when we read official history because unconsciously we see official history as serious work having been sponsored by official organisations and therefore we presume that the history written must be rigorous but these questions are even more important when we're dealing with a military sphere because drawing the wrong conclusions ultimately ends up and lives being lost unnecessarily and certainly wasted treasure. So having said that we must judge all history by the same basic criteria what then is the precise function of official histories. Is it not sufficient to rely merely on the collective scholarship of individuals working in a particular field? I think British air power in particular has been well served by historians over the last couple of decades in particular but even if we take these works collectively they don't result in a comprehensive treatment of the air campaigns since the First World War. The prime role I think of official history is to ensure comprehensive coverage of all operations and campaigns and this is important for the lessons learned process. I think it's also very important so that we honour properly those people who participated in those conflicts. The difficulty with official history is that sponsoring departments often are very uncomfortable with anything less than glowing assessments of various campaigns or conflicts and I think this is what really differentiates the First World War official history from the Second World War history. World War I history by Raleigh and Jones is partisan and largely narrative in the count. Whilst Jones was at least a historian by training Raleigh was chosen for his literary skill and this is the way this history comes across. It's a carefully crafted piece of literature but without pause for a reflection and I think this had very serious consequences because planning and procurement which went on in the 1930s was heavily influenced by the Raleigh and Jones official history simply because it was the most accessible digest available at the time but the seven volume history was also written against a backdrop of very severe budget cuts in the 1920s when the REF's very survival was at stake and having to compete with the traditional services the REF had to come up with a role that lay beyond a support to the traditional services and face dismemberment. Therefore Raleigh and Jones were put under a lot of pressure to highlight that part of the official history which offered something different in that case it was strategic bombing particularly in 1917-18 and seemingly the verdict that they offered that strategic bombing really made a decisive difference was apparently further reinforced by the British Empire policing experience when the REF was called upon to quell various uprisings in the empire. Now in contrast the official history of the British bomber offensive in World War II by Webster and Franklin analyzed the good the bad and the very ugly of that campaign even in the face of very serious pressure from the air ministry to tone down some of the criticism of bomber command. Franklin who was the principal author did not fall into the trap of making exaggerated claims for the efficacy of the bomber offensive. The failures in the first two years of the war are explained in detail as a consequence of a complex set of factors had material expansion of the REF in the 1920s and 1930s was not matched by a training organization how the doctrine of the day done played the challenges posed by long-range navigation, bad weather and a potent enemy air defense system and the many controversies which arose during the Second World War were also analyzed in detail especially things like Sir Arthur Harris's insistence on pursuing a strategy of area bombing when the Ministry of Economic Warfare and other service chiefs argued very convincingly that attacks needed to occur against German transport or oil production. According to Franklin the air ministry took what he said was very strong objection to massive and key parts of the official history and Webster and Franklin then had to appeal to the secretary of the cabinet office some Norman Brooke to intervene and the latter's judgment was that the air ministry had been totally unreasonable. The official historian's verdict on the bomber offensive remained intact and we are the beneficiaries of a very objective and comprehensive analysis as a result and I think since the 1960s air power scholars have tried to emulate what Webster and Franklin attempted to do I think very successfully. I don't think their work has been seriously challenged over the last 50 years and I think only a handful of scholars have matched or surpassed their standard of scholarship especially as far as strategic bombing is concerned. Unfortunately however the other roles performed by the Royal Air Force in World War II have not received the same standard of treatment. Another set of official historians in the rally in Jonesmore, Dennis Richards and Hilary Saunders were asked to write an official history of the whole of the area's operations in World War II. While Webster and Franklin sought to explain the area's deficiencies and why it conducted the bomber offensive and the way it did Richards and Saunders tend to describe the various campaigns with a selection of antiquarian facts in support. Anyone wanting to understand what the RAF did in wider Europe, North Africa, Middle East, Far East or Atlantic is far better served by looking at the 30 plus volumes of the cabinet office histories which at least set their operations within the wider strategic context. For example Stephen Russell's cabinet office official history the War at Sea remains one of the best and I think very even-handed treatments of what the RAF achieved in the Battle of the Atlantic. Should anyone attempt to write a proper official history of the RAF in World War II and replace the Richards and Saunders volumes they will have an uphill task. Whilst the various official historians had free access to air ministry, command and other official documentation much of this material has been lost since the 1970s when the largest tranche of World War II documents came up for review and the material that was used by the official historians was supposed to be preserved for posterity but the much of the documentation relating to policy planning and operations was weeded out by reviewers who collectively lacked a historical nose. They were typically accountants or scientists by background and this has been made all the more serious by the fact that Raleigh and Jones failed to reference their sources. However all is not lost because at least the administers air historical branch which still exists within RAF wrote its in-house narrative histories of all campaigns since 1939 and at least these allude to the old documentation which has subsequently been lost but having said this that RAF and all those who served and died in World War II and various campaigns since deserve far more than purely narrative history. If military historians are to protect their profession from the criticism leveled at them that they are merely dealers and antiquarianism they must engage in explanatory history rather than descriptive history. As EH Carr reminds us the study of history is a study of causes how the historian deals in the multiplicity of causes and how every historical argument revolves around the question of priority of causes. Before I close I just want to have a few quick personal reflections on the nature of official history writing. I've been involved in a number of officially sponsored research projects most recent being the study of the Libyan air campaign of 2011. In November of 2011 I was contacted by one of my former students who was then working in the Pentagon and he said that the US Air Force wanted what was described as a trusted entity to do a study of the British contribution to Operation Unified Protector the campaign against Gaddafi's regime and I said sure thing when do you need the first draft of this history and when I was told April of next year April of 2012 I gasped and why I did that was because I had to go through various processes in order to be given access to the classified documents and then I had scarcely a month to write this thing and it then had to go through various hoops of approval before the unclassified version of ped was ran in 2015 and writing under pressure is never a good thing but I managed to produce the first draft by the beginning of April and happily those who presided over the official project changed very little so I had this sort of warm glove satisfaction and having produced something that was of worth not just to my own satisfaction but something hopefully which should help to inform current air operations and that sort of warm glow lasted for some time but what I didn't anticipate however was the impact that the study would have on me as a human being that what this work demanded was an insight into what Gaddafi had been doing to his own people and when the protests broke out against Gaddafi's regime in February of 2011 Gaddafi singled out certain centers of opposition for special treatment he spoke about dealing with the vermin of Benghazi and how the population needed to be taught a lesson his son Chalmers who was in charge of 32 brigade developed a particularly bad reputation for brutality and I will not get any more graphic than this but suffice it to say that when Gaddafi met his end at the hands of the Mizratans it was payback and several months after completing this work I realized that the subject matter had more of an impact on me than I appreciated at the time and the most obvious manifestation of this was having difficulty getting back into what was then my main research on the Greek civil war with all its attendant brutality I managed to complete an article in 2014 on the subject but then I had to take a complete break and write on something very very different and the completely different took the form of a study of the cargo war between India and Pakistan in 1999 mainly from an intelligence point of view in this piece of work appeared in the journal of Indo-Pacific affairs and what I'm contemplating doing now is writing an article on the historian's craft and what the examination of brutality does to the researcher if noble franken still alive I would ask him as a former navigator and bomber command in one or two how did the writing of this official history affect him in today's parlance did it revive PTSD issues the trouble with such questions is that you have difficulty asking them unless you are seen to be a uniformed person of some experience and I've come across several military people who believe that only the soldier scholar can write proper military history but from our perspective there's also the awkward question as to whether former military are too close to their subjects to offer truly objective verdicts and to his great credit I think noble franken did and this is why his work has remained an exemplar and if I have a final worry being about the profession at the extent to which the digital age is a help or hindrance for future historians on one level it's a concern over how long digital records remain intact but the other observation is that you have a lot of military who no longer engage in things like writing personal diaries but what I've also noticed in their post-operational reports a lot of that is getting shorter and shorter and far less critical of their own military apparatus or the wider governmental apparatus so I think to close here's the danger if historians of the future are dependent on a partial digital record I think the profession may be threatened by populist narratives and this is something that is written about very profoundly by Anne Appelbaum in her excellent book Twilight of Democracy. Thank you very much ladies and gentlemen. Okay thank you to our three speakers I hope you are going to appear in panel format now on the screen. We have about 10 minutes left so slightly less the question so I won't hold the screen but we have one question already from Carl Islam where the other questions can be put in the Q&A function on zoom please but Carl is asking us in modern warfare involving nuclear power does Machiavelli's argument still hold that it's not wealth that is the our seniors war but good soldiers or sailors or airmen in fact. Can I start? Yes please go. It's both I mean obviously as I was saying at the end of my piece all of this stuff needs to be integrated but of course unless you've got the raw material which is prepared to fight which is prepared to train which is prepared to cooperate then actually you're not going to produce you're not going to be effective in combat so so much of it is about getting the personnel and training right and it's fascinating listening to my colleagues thinking about how much of my arguments about armies are also applicable to air forces and navies I would have thought in spades and also it tends to be more technological as well. Christina and James do you have an observation? I think one of the sort of obvious areas is the importance of education and comprehensive education and whenever there've been budget cuts it tends to be things like military education that comes under the closest scrutiny and is an easy target for for for cutting. So there's no substitute for intellect and thoughtfulness it's no coincidence that the finest soldiers sailors and airmen done throughout military history have been either scholars in their own right but they tend to read voraciously and that I think you know whenever I come across military students of that ilk I'm always encouraged so it's about sort of maintaining that as the sort of core capability to think through some of the challenges that we're facing currently which require very nuanced approaches but I would argue you also some serious thinking and reflection on on what we saw in the late 1930s thanks. Christina, James? I think if I can I can build on the education argument I think naval historians are in a bit of an interesting position here because the the roots of the field somewhat is in professional military education naval historians field starting out first thing is about educating naval officers and something I think has actually been achieved probably in the past 30 or 40 years because naval historian and naval history has been so tied to talking about contemporary issues and this sort of had this theme going through let's talk about the modern they've even a bit of navalism in it that actually has been a separation a little bit that the we've seen naval history increase in quality over the public public or academic because there's been some real quality research to try and understand the past and it not be so dominated by purely answering contemporary strategic studies questions what it is on the other hand keeping this thread off and picking up exactly what and support of Christina said naval officers and academics being involved in study of history reading really I think from the naval perspective disappears post 1945 so we're seeing that technological aspect I mean technology can solve everything really the people who in it from naval circles are talking more in strategic terms the foreign policy terms and talking about these questions of the future or who are they they are the people who have attended the war courses and the and studied history when they went to places like Greenwich back in the 1910s and so forth and then the ones who are speaking out in the 1940s and 1950s that disappears we end up really talking about technological solutions so we've seen this change I think in the latter 20th century and perhaps you're going through one again where actually there is this pull up purely talking technological terms but actually there is more to talk about than that and historians have a role in kind of trying to balance this out a little bit would be my kind of view thank you James was that addressing the other question on the focus of contemporary technology and conflict which has just popped up or is that a different question can you see that in the Q&A oh yeah I got that yes yeah do you want me to have a go yeah we've got a couple of minutes left yes okay it's about whether I guess it's about history of warfare how relevant is it an age in which increased digitalization of warfare led to a cent more of folks contemporary technology and conflict I've been hanging around the fringes of the British Armed Forces since 1985 that's what Sandhurst and then the staff college and moving beyond that but still having stuff to do it's perennial battle that history is bunk but actually the only thing that matters is recent stuff actually I mean both Christine and James have already addressed this but actually understanding history in depth in context is absolutely critical not least because many of the things which pop up as being new actually tend to have roots deep in the past and I would agree with Christina it's actually the most impressive military people I've come across who read an awful lot who read military history and they're prepared to read if like outside the box so the classic thing you know going back to I know the Peloponnesian wars and recognizing that there are lessons inverted commas to be drawn from ancient conflicts there's warfare things don't repeat themselves exactly but there's lots of well as Andrew Gordon would say approximate precedents and so a good grounding in history I think is the difference between very often a mediocre officer and someone who actually understands the tools of their trade. Gary we have another question for James Smith but I'm where we have essentially one minute left so perhaps James might type an answer to that question before we the session ends but I'd like to end by thanking our three speakers very interesting insights into the past I didn't say much about the future my question would have been well what's next a couple of you mentioned applied history possibly that is something that is going to influence historiography as we go forwards but that's a thought to leave you with to thank our panelists for their contributions today and hope our audience enjoyed the session and will engage with the other sessions of the conference going forward over the next couple of