Andrew Roberts on military history
Paul Lay’s Providence Lost: The Rise and Fall of Cromwell’s
Protectorate (2020) is a fascinating short history of the years of the Protectorate, which successfully answers the question of how the Roundheads – who had swept all before them at the battles of Dunbar in 1650 and Worcester in 1651 – could possibly have sunk to the disastrous position of losing power entirely within a decade, especially with so talented a leader as Oliver Cromwell at their head. Lay writes with charm and humour about Puritans, who despised both.
Sometimes subtitles let books down with their ludicrous hyperbole, but the subtitle to Saul David’s The Force: The Legendary Special Ops Unit and WWII’s Mission Impossible (2019) describes its subject perfectly. The soldiers of the First Special Service Force, who fought in Italy in 1943, fully deserved their almost mythical status, and their story is told with insight, humour and verve. How these young Americans and Canadians were trained to scale the rockface and capture the Italian hillside fort of Monte la Difensa will stay with readers for a long time.
Peter Caddick-Adams’s Sand and Steel: A New History of D-Day (2019) and James Holland’s Normandy ‘44: D-Day and the Battle for France (2019) both examine the D-Day invasion and the liberation of France, and it would take a braver man than me to choose between them. Both books represent military history writing at its best: scholarly yet engaging, objective yet passionate. One of many impressive aspects of these volumes is their engagement with the German side of the struggle, as the Wehrmacht woke up to the startling fact that this was no reconnaissance force, but instead a full-scale invasion.
Dan Jones’ book
Crusaders: An Epic History of the Wars for the Holy Lands
(2019) approaches the three centuries of the west’s military involvement in the medieval Holy Land from a multicultural perspective, where some earlier histories tended to concentrate much more on the Christian invaders than the Muslims and other defenders. Jones is one of the most readable military history writers working in Britain today, and has the ability to make complex interactions – the struggle between the Mamluks and the Mongols in the mid-13th century, for example – instantly comprehensible.