The British Way in Warfare, 1688-2000

Defence is one of the biggest items of public expenditure in Britain, and has been a major political issue of the 1970s and 1980s general elections and in recent developments in East-West relations. In "The British Way in Warfare", David French offers a concise history of British defence policy over the last three centuries and an analysis of the relevance of these historical themes to security concerns. French begins his history in 1688, the year of the last successful invasion of Britain. He traces the emergence and dominance of Britain through the American and French revolutions, the Napoleonic Wars, and the Pax Britannica, to the decline of the British Empire and World War II. He then goes on to analyze the Thatcher period and Britain's relations with the nations of Europe, the Soviet Union, and the United States as they strive together to create new security structures to replace those established in the 1940s. In the final chapter, French points to the lessons we can learn from history as we consider the perplexing problems of how to safeguard British security up to the end of the century and beyond.

Engineering & Transportation

French, David

Engineering

Routledge

First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

British economic and strategic planning, 1905-1915

george allen

This book illustrates the relationship between British military policy and the development of British war aims during the opening years of the First World War. Basing his work on a wide range of unpublished documentary sources, David French reassesses for the benefit of students and scholars alike what was meant by ‘a war of attrition’.

British Strategy and War Aims, 1914-1916

History

Military

Unwin Hyman

Deterrence, Coercion, and Appeasement presents a compelling and original survey of British grand strategy in the inter-war period. Whereas most existing accounts privilege either diplomacy and foreign affairs, intelligence, or military affairs more narrowly, this study underlines the inexorable relationships between foreign policy, grand strategy, military force, intelligence, finance and not least, domestic politics and public opinion. Britain was the world's only global power in the inter-war period, and it confronted problems on a global scale. Policy-makers sought two goals: peace with security. They did so successfully in the 1920s, partly due to favourable circumstances that made their task relatively easy, and partly because they understood the strengths and limitations of British power and knew how to wield them. The situation deteriorated rapidly in the 1930s, however, as the international system became increasingly unfavourable to Britain. Policy-makers proved less adept than their predecessors at meeting these new challenges, partly because those challenges were more formidable, but also because they lacked the self-confidence of their predecessors, who had held high office during the most difficult years of the First World War and who lacked their understanding of how to wield the lever of international power. The study ends by providing a new and more sophisticated account of how and why Neville Chamberlain appeased the fascist powers in the late 1930s, and why Winston Churchill opposed him and eventually supplanted him in May 1940.

Deterrence, Coercion, and Appeasement: British Grand Strategy, 1919-1940

Oxford University Press

· Uses previously unavailable archival evidence to challenge earlier theories The popular image of the First World War is dominated by two misconceptions. The first holds that the war was an exercise in futility in which incompetent upper class generals callously sacrificed an entire generation of young men to no good purpose. The second holds that the debate about British strategic policy during the First World War was a gladiatorial contest between `brass hats' (generals), and `frock coats' (politicians). Historians, denied access for too long to the contemporary records of the private deliberations of policy-makers, had been forced to follow both interpretations. David French challenges this orthodoxy and suggests that the policy-makers were united in trying to relate strategic policy to a carefully considered set of war aims. His challenging conclusion is that the policy-makers never lost sight of their goal, which was to ensure that Britain fought the war at an acceptable cost and emerged from it with its security enhanced against both its enemies and its allies.

The Strategy of the Lloyd George Coalition, 1916-1918

Europe

Clarendon Press

This is the first detailed analysis of the combat capability of the British army in the Second World War. It sweeps away the myth that the army suffered from poor morale, and that it only won its battles through the use of 'brute force' and by reverting to the techniques of the First World War. Few soldiers were actively eager to close with the enemy, but the morale of the army never collapsed and its combat capability steadily improved from 1942 onwards.

Raising Churchill's Army: The British Army and the War against Germany 1919-1945

Drawing upon a wide range of unpublished sources, including files from the recently-released Foreign and Commonwealth Office 'migrated archive', Fighting EOKA is the first full account of the operations of the British security forces on Cyprus in the second half of the 1950s. It shows how between 1955 and 1959 these forces tried to defeat the Greek Cypriot paramilitary organisation, EOKA, which was fighting to bring about enosis, that is the union between Cyprus and Greece.By tracing the evolving pattern of EOKA violence and the responses of the police, the British army, the civil administration on the island, and the minority Turkish Cypriot community, David French explains why the British could contain the military threat posed by EOKA, but could not eliminate it. The result was that by the spring of 1959 a political stalemate had descended upon Cyprus, and none of the contending parties had achieved their full objectives. Greek Cypriots had to be content with independence rather than enosis. Turkish Cypriots, who had hoped to see the island partitioned on ethnic lines, were given only a share of power in the government of the new Republic, and the British, who had hoped to retain sovereignty over the whole of the island, were left in control of just two military enclaves.

Fighting EOKA: The British Counter-Insurgency Campaign on Cyprus, 1955-1959

This is the first detailed analysis of the combat capability of the British army in the Second World War. It sweeps away the myth that the army suffered from poor morale, and that it only won its battles through the use of 'brute force' and by reverting to the techniques of the First World War. Few soldiers were actively eager to close with the enemy, but the morale of the army never collapsed and its combat capability steadily improved from 1942 onwards.

Military Identities: The Regimental System, the British Army, and the British People c.1870-2000

The regimental system has been the foundation of the British army for three hundred years. This iconoclastic study shows how it was refashioned in the late nineteenth century, and how it was subsequently and repeatedly reinvented to suit the changing roles that were forced upon the army. Based upon a combination of official papers, private papers and personal reminiscences, and upon research in the National Archives, regimental museums and collections, and other depositories, this book challenges the assumptions of both the exponents and detractors of the system. The author, David French, shows that there was not one, but several, regimental systems and he demonstrates that localized recruiting was usually a failure. Many regiments were never able to draw more than a small proportion of their recruits from their own districts. He shows that regimental loyalties were not a primordial force; regimental authorities had to create them and in the late nineteenth century they manufactured new traditions with gusto, whilst in both world wars regimental postings quickly broke down and regiments had to take recruits from wherever they could find them. French also argues that the notion that the British army was bad at fighting big battles because the regimental system created a parochial military culture is facile. This is the first book to strip away the myths that have been deliberately manufactured to justify or to condemn the regimental system and to uncover the reality beneath them. It thus illuminates our understanding of the past while simultaneously throwing glaring new light on the still continuing debate over the place of the regimental system in the modern army today.

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Books by French, David

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by French, David. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The British Way in Warfare, 1688-2000

The British Way in Warfare, 1688-2000

British economic and strategic planning, 1905-1915

British Strategy and War Aims, 1914-1916

Deterrence, Coercion, and Appeasement: British Grand Strategy, 1919-1940

The Strategy of the Lloyd George Coalition, 1916-1918

Raising Churchill's Army: The British Army and the War against Germany 1919-1945

Fighting EOKA: The British Counter-Insurgency Campaign on Cyprus, 1955-1959

Raising Churchill's Army: The British Army and the War against Germany 1919-1945

Military Identities: The Regimental System, the British Army, and the British People c.1870-2000