To see in the New Year, Defence-in-Depth is re-publishing its three most-viewed posts of 2019. At No. 1, Ben Wheatley’s new research on the visual record of the Battle of Prokhorovka. BEN WHEATLEY Ben Wheatley is a Honorary Research Fellow in the School of History, University of East Anglia and a former Teaching Fellow at… Read More In Pursuit of Prokhorovka
ANNA BRINKMAN The creation of foreign policy and the prosecution of war are often largely dependent on the personalities and circumstances of those in power. This is, perhaps, a disconcerting truth that can be mitigated by the development of international law, alliances, and multilateral or unilateral treaties. The mitigation, however, only goes so far, as… Read More The Antigallican Affair: British Foreign Policy and the Personalities of the Spanish Court in the Seven Years’ War
ANNA BRINKMAN There are few moments more satisfying, or tantalizing, for an historian than looking through the catalogue of an archive and discovering that it holds vast repositories of material relevant to one’s research. . Though catalogues give an idea of the material contained in a collection, with varying degrees of accuracy, it is always… Read More From the Archives: Versions of History in Two Collections: Assessing the Purpose and Conclusions of Compilers
DR TIM BENBOW It was a signal that Admiral Bertram Ramsay must have been longing to send, while being concerned at the potential consequences: ‘CARRY OUT OPERATION HERMETIC’. The issue of this simple order would have executed the contingency plan he had devised as Allied Naval Commander, Expeditionary Force to counter any attempt by the… Read More From the Archives: Operation ‘Hermetic’: countering the threat to D-Day from the German surface fleet
by Dr ROBERT T. FOLEY On 25 April 1915, units of General Sir Ian Hamilton’s Mediterranean Expeditionary Force landed on the Gallipoli Peninsula. The goal of this force was to clear the peninsula of Turkish defenders, and in particular their heavy artillery, in order to allow an Anglo-French naval force to sweep the Dardanelles Straits… Read More From the Archives: A Disastrous Campaign: The US View of Gallipoli
by DR HUW J. DAVIES In 1799, the British Government assembled an expeditionary force for use in a joint operation with the Russians against French held Dutch ports. The campaign, commanded by the Duke of York, was a dismal failure, blighted by poor intelligence, inter-service friction and competing agendas on the part of the allied… Read More Forgotten Battles: The Anglo-Ottoman Campaign in Egypt, March-September 1801
by DR HUW J. DAVIES John Campbell, Fourth Earl of Loudoun, has a bad reputation. Seen by historians as incompetent and ineffective in command, he also raised regiments of Highlanders to help suppress the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745/6. He participated in some of the more brutal suppression methods employed by the British Commander-in-Chief, the Duke… Read More From the Archives: The Loudoun Papers at The Huntington Library, California.
By DR ROBERT T. FOLEY For many years I envied the research sources available to my colleagues writing about contemporary defence and strategic issues. The ability to research a project from the comfort of their favorite desk, be this at home or in the office, seemed so much more appealing than exhausting and sometime fruitless… Read More Digital First World War Resources: Online Archival Sources
by DR DAVID MORGAN-OWEN “Circumstantial evidence is a very tricky thing. It may seem to point very straight to one thing, but if you shift your own point of view a little, you may find it pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different.” – A. Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes… Read More From the Archives: Building a Case: Overcoming the Often Fragmented Nature of Surviving Records
From the Archives is a new regular feature on Defence-in-Depth. Archives are the lifeblood of historians. Papers, correspondence, diaries and journals constitute the primary material on which historical analysis is based. This feature is designed to fulfill two objectives. Our authors have selected an archive that has yielded an important find and will explain how… Read More From the Archives: Locating NATO’s ‘Surreal’ Mission
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