Professor Sir Michael Howard, OM
Doyen of military historians who had experienced war at first hand and been awarded a Military Cross of which he felt unworthy
PROFESSOR SIR MICHAEL HOWARD, who has died a day after his 97th birthday, was an authority on the history and theory of warfare whose penetrating assessments, concise, elegant style and gift for combining general views with illuminating detail made him one of the most widely respected historians of his time.
As someone who had experienced the real thing when he won a Military Cross with the Coldstream Guards in Italy, he was not an enthusiast for war. On the other hand, he had no pacifist illusions about the perfectibility of human nature, and was regarded as a civilised voice supporting a robust Western defence strategy, a proponent of deterrence based on a strong Nato.
For Howard, war rather than peace constituted the natural state of mankind. In a pithy yet wideranging study, The Invention of Peace (2000), he suggested that until the Enlightenment in the 18th century, war was regarded as a natural, even desirable, state of affairs. Armed conflict between organised political groups had been the norm throughout human history and, though the notion of a world in which war plays no part had been a common aspiration for visionaries throughout history, it has only been regarded as a practical goal by political leaders during the past 200 years.
Howard’s hero was the Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant, who believed that there would eventually be progress towards a league of nations which would provide collective security.
It was the emergence of the system of independent, sovereign nations inaugurated by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 that made the crucial difference, in Howard’s view. “Peace is not an order natural to mankind: it is artificial, intricate and highly volatile,” he wrote. Only the nation state could make it possible by preserving social order and organising human activities.
Gracious, erudite and goodhumoured, Howard liked to describe himself as “a historian who happens to have a bias for military matters from time to time” and to argue that “those who do not change their minds in the course of a decade have probably stopped thinking altogether.”
He believed that historians should participate in public debate, but with a full awareness of their limitations. In a field more than usually fraught with controversy, Howard had the rare capacity to pronounce those exceedingly difficult words “I was wrong.”
Perhaps his most controversial intervention came in a speech given in October 2001, shortly after the terrorist bombing of the World Trade Centre in New York. In it, he delivered a devastating critique of American strategy, lambasting the bombing of Afghanistan as tantamount to “trying to eradicate cancer cells with a blow torch”.
Many people, Howard suggested, would have preferred a police operation conducted under the auspices of the UN against a criminal conspiracy, whose members should be hunted down and brought before an international court. President George W Bush had been wrong to describe the campaign against terrorism as “war” because this just played into the hands of terrorists: “As we discovered in both Palestine and Ireland, the terrorists have already won an important battle if they can provoke the authorities into using overt armed force.”
The speech was much quoted by newspapers and politicians opposed to American action in Afghanistan. But in a lecture three months later, Howard conceded he had been wrong to doubt the efficacy of bombing as an instrument in the war against terrorism: “In fact, selective bombing in support of ground attacks by the Northern Alliance and its allies, linked together by an intelligence and communications network masterminded from a command centre in the United States, proved an essential element in a brilliant campaign that perhaps marks a turning point in the history of war, and for which the United States Armed Forces deserve high praise. Like many others better informed than myself, I got it wrong, and I apologise.”
The son of an aspirin manufacturer and his German Jewish wife, Michael Eliot Howard was born on November 29 1922, and went to Wellington, where he was in an air-raid shelter when the Master was killed in his lodgings during the Blitz. He went up to Christ Church, Oxford, to read History under Keith Feiling and edit Cherwell, which had been started by one of his uncles.
Commissioned into 3rd Battalion, Coldstream Guards, after two years, Howard steeled himself by imagining that he was David Niven. On the night of September 22 1943 he led a bayonet charge down a slope and up a hill outside Salerno known as “The Pimple”, which was taken in the face of under closerange Spandau and grenade fire at a cost of four wounded.
After settling into an abandoned German slit trench until dawn he ordered the dead to be buried in graves, which were marked by their rifles and helmets in a scene suggestive of Goya.
A couple of months later, after he had spent six weeks in a North African hospital with malaria, he was informed of his MC. In his autobiography, Captain Professor, published more than 60 years later, Howard recalled his surge of pride, which never completely died away, but wondered if it was deserved.
The reasons for the award were clear. The planned attack had been disintegrating into shambles when he had his burst of energy, which the citation declared had been “responsible for straightening out the situation”.
But, Howard argued, first, he had been lucky in having nowhere else to go as enemy tracer fire zipped over the wall shielding his men until he gave the order: “Right – over with me.” Secondly, his superiors, whose reputation depended on his success, had watched him. Thirdly, it was his first action, “and any fool can be brave in his first action”.
It was not to happen again, he continued: he had done no more in the action than earn good points, and he felt an enormous fraud compared with some of his friends who were never decorated.
After convalescing and then training as an intelligence officer he was wounded twice more, but there were lighter moments. In Chianti he met and fell in love with a “charming boy called Franco Corsi”, an art student who had joined the partisans and had been co-opted as a guide and interpreter by the Scots Guards.
“We held hands, but that was as far as it got … Many years later I learnt his middle name: Zeffirelli. When Franco came to London for his first season at Covent Garden [a friend] reintroduced us. Franco flung his arms around me: ‘Peter,’ he cried ecstatically. Clearly I was not the only British officer who had been kind to him.”
Howard ended the war as an Army education officer before returning to Oxford, where he failed to win a fellowship at All Souls and obtained only a second; but he triumphed as Cardinal Wolsey in a production of Henry VIII.
Although Howard then had little interest in military history, his luck continued with his being asked to co-write The Coldstream Guards, 1920-1946 with John Sparrow, who had lost interest after the first chapter; and he then took an assistant lectureship at King’s College, London. After respectful reviews for the Coldstream book in 1951, Howard was in the right place to be asked to revive the department of war studies, where he duly rose to be become head.
To prepare himself he took a year’s sabbatical to read and learn German, and set about making his reputation with The Francoprussian War (1961), a devastating critique of the failure of the French military system that had failed to recognise such innovations as railways, telegraph and lethal weapons. It won the Duff Cooper Prize, while his Grand Strategy in The Official History of the Second World War (1971) won the Wolfson Foundation History Award.
The limitations of close studies had been brought home to him early in his teaching career, however. He had just finished talking about the reasons for the campaign, its course and the quality of leadership on both sides when an apparently dissatisfied young man stood up to ask: “But what were its lessons?”
To that question, he confessed, he had no answer.
Howard did not work for a doctorate as his was the last generation of scholars not expected to do so before receiving an academic appointment.
In 1968 he headed back to Oxford, where he became a Fellow of All Souls and then Chichele Professor of the History of War from 1977 to 1980. As a Fellow of Oriel he was then Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford while his cousin, the Tudor historian Sir Geoffrey Elton, held the same post at Cambridge. The Robert A Lovett chair of military and naval history at Yale followed, until 1993.
Other books included War in European History (1976), which examined how wars have often determined the character of society and how society determined the character of wars. In 1977 he translated (with Professor Peter Paret) Carl von Clausewitz’s On War, which is considered the standard English version.
In The Causes of Wars (1983) he observed that, however disreputable the motives for war may be, “its initiation is almost by definition a deliberate and carefully considered act and its conduct … a matter of very precise central control. If history shows any record of accidental wars, I have yet to find them.” The Lessons of History (1991) comprised essays whose common focus was not so much war itself as “those deeper processes of historical change from which the wars of the 19th and 20th centuries originated”.
Among his later books were The Oxford History of the Twentieth Century (1998), which he edited with W Roger Louis, The First World War (2002), and Liberation or Catastrophe?: Reflections on the History of the 20th Century (2007).
Howard continued to work in his retirement from his farm in Berkshire, relaxing by watching crime dramas on television.
He was always ready to provide a historian’s insight into current affairs. In an interview in 2001 he warned that the nation state, the foundation stone of peace, was under siege. Supranational entities encroached on countries’ authority; globalisation was eroding their power to conduct economic policy; and some faced pressures from ethnic groups or regions seeking to splinter off. In Europe, loyalty to the state was disappearing.
But the nation state would survive: “It does seem to me that the long-term trend we are watching is the extension of Enlightenment values … the extension of liberal capitalism, internationalism and the development of a real transnational elite of people that speak the same language, share the same interests and values and live within each country. There will be kickbacks and backlashes, but these people are gradually creating a more peaceful and manageable world.”
Modern warfare appalled him; in 2017, during the battle to liberate the Iraqi city of Mosul from Isil, he told The Oldie: “What sickens me now is the rate of casualties … Day by day, one sees these nightmarish images of scores and scores getting killed. That is what war now involves, and it should be stopped, but how do you stop it?”
He was president and co-founder of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the independent centre for research and debate on conflict, and was twice appointed vice-president of the British Academy between 1978 and 1980. He won the Chesney Memorial Gold Medal of the Royal United Services Institute in 1973 and received the Nato Atlantic Award in 1989.
Michael Howard was appointed CBE in 1977, knighted in 1986, made CH in 2002 and OM in 2005. In 2006 he entered a civil partnership with Mark James, his former research assistant and companion of more than 50 years.
Sir Michael Howard, born November 29 1922, died November 30 2019