Michael Howard

Michael Howard is Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford and the author of Clausewitz on War and War in European History, among other books. A memorial to the poets of the First World War was unveiled at Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey on 11 November. Michael Howard spoke on this occasion and the words of his address appear in this issue.

Death of the Hero

Michael Howard, 7 January 1988

Among the distinguished group of military historians which has flourished in this country since the Second World War, John Keegan is outstanding. His talents are remarkable: a wide-ranging and speculative mind; clarity in analysis; a deep understanding of the military community; and enviable descriptive gifts to ensure that his books will be acceptable to that wide class of readership which seeks no more from military history than a jolly good read. His skills in this last direction sometimes conceal the profundity of observations which penetrate deep below the surface of military phenomena into the social and psychological conditions which produce them, but all his books can be read on the two levels of military description and social analysis. Increasingly they have been tilting towards the latter, but it is his descriptive powers as a historian which will continue to hold the attention – as in The Mask of Command.

Letter

The Korean War

26 November 1987

SIR: Mr Halliday obviously feels strongly about the Korean War (Letters, 18 February), but his odium academicum engenders more heat than light. I can only advise your readers to consult my review and see what I actually wrote about the three books concerned: in particular, the reasons I gave for supporting the judgments of Max Hastings on the merits of the war. Whatever the legal situation, the 38th...

For twenty-five years, between the studies written in its immediate aftermath and those based on archives opened a generation later, the Korean War was largely ignored. That was natural enough: there is always such ‘dead ground’ as the writing of history moves forward. But that war was so significant as a paradigm for international relations in the post-war world that we can deplore the failure of Western statesmen and, still more, soldiers, to keep it in mind as a guide-post and a warning of what lay in store for them if they attempted any further military interventions in the Third World. For a few years, under the wise guidance of Dwight Eisenhower, American leaders did so bear it in mind, and shaped their policy accordingly: they realised the unwisdom of becoming involved in a land conflict anywhere, especially in Asia. But only ten years after the truce was signed at Panmunjom in July 1953 the slide into Vietnam had begun. The effects of that terrible conflict have been longer-lasting. Even so, the United States has trembled on the verge of military intervention in Central America and does so now in the Middle East. Their present leaders, still obsessed with the memories of Munich, would do better to remember Korea.

The Great War Revisited

Michael Howard, 23 April 1987

The Great War of 1914-1918 is at last a respectable field of study for British professional historians. There has been no lack of monographs on specialised aspects of that gigantic tragedy: what have been lacking are serious synoptic studies. The highly emotional arguments over the tactics and strategy of the Western Front, initiated during the war itself by the conflicts of ‘Easterners’ versus ‘Westerners’, and continued thereafter in the battles of the memoirs, were renewed after the Second World War by the defenders and detractors of Douglas Haig: arguments which for fifty years produced a great deal more heat than light. Only a few works by quiet specialists like Shelford Bidwell and T.H. Travers indicated the true problems and achievements of the commanders on the Western Front. Over naval affairs the exchanges of heavy fire between Arthur Marder and Stephen Roskill reduced all others to awe-struck silence. On domestic politics Lord Beaverbrook and his acolyte A.J.P. Taylor gave us plenty to be going on with, even before younger specialists like Cameron Hazlehurst began to dissect the minutiae of Cabinet crises. Arthur Marwick boldly opened up the whole question of war and social change. Recently a number of younger historians – Kathleen Birk, Keith Neilson, and David French in his first book British Economic and Strategic Planning 1905-1915 – have begun to consider some of the key questions of finance and economics. But until now nobody has tried to put all this specialist work together. The last oeuvre de synthèse was Sir Llewellyn Woodward’s competent but pedestrian Great Britain and the War of 1914-18(1961). A study taking all the new work into account was just about due.’

It is only fitting that nations should honour their poets, for poets shape the soul of the nation. They take our language, use it to mould the images and the thoughts which we share in common, and in so doing they enrich and develop the language itself. They create those secret harmonies which we alone can hear; they teach our ears to hear and our eyes to see; they bind us together as a family is bound together by common experience and memories. Unlike music, poetry is necessarily and properly parochial. It is ours. No other people can say the same things in the same way. It is the true essence of a people, their peculiar inimitable voice.

The Forty Years’ Peace

Keith Kyle, 21 October 1993

Early in 1983, when the newly founded Social Democratic Party was acquiring policies by holding study groups, one of these was devoted to East-West relations. At its first session a musty-looking...

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Desolation Studies

Edward Luttwak, 12 September 1991

I still recall my acute disappointment with Michael Howard’s The Franco-Prussian War, published some thirty years ago. The subject was exciting – what with the desperate German...

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Righteous Turpitudes

Basil Davidson, 27 September 1990

Ever since the Trojan Horse, the telling of lies in wartime has been found honourable, along with the bedevilment of enemies and the invocation of gods, and has been practised more or less...

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Boom

Arthur Marwick, 18 October 1984

‘With others of my own contemporaries,’ Denys Hay once wrote, ‘I certainly found myself in the years after 1945 still preoccupied with aspects of warfare in other times (in my...

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Rules of the Game

Jon Elster, 22 December 1983

Raymond Aron died of a heart attack on 17 October, a few weeks after the publication of his memoirs. He died on the steps of the Paris courthouse where he had been testifying on behalf of his...

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