The April issue of Military History Monthly, the British military history magazine, is on sale today.
In the latest issue we cover:
Antietam – America’s Bloodiest Day
Marking the release of Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster Lincoln, MHM analyses the pivotal Battle of Antietam, 17 September 1862.
History of the British Army – Dunkirk, 28 May-4 June 1940
Despite being fought with gritty determination, Dunkirk was one of the greatest defeats in British imperial history. MHM assesses the battle.
The Lords of War – An interview with Correlli Barnett
Military History Monthly editor Neil Faulkner speaks to Correlli Barnett about his long career as a military historian and his new book The Lords of War.
Otto the Great – The Battle of Lechfeld and the First German Reich
Jack Watkins recalls the great early Medieval ruler in whose footsteps Bismarck and Hitler would march.
Plumbers in the cookhouse – Sir Ronald Adam and Britain’s New Model Army, 1941-1946
Roger Broad discovers that one of the most influential British generals of World War II was more political radical than great commander.
Also in this issue:
Back to the Drawing Board, War on Film, Museum Review, Your Military History, Books, and much more.
From the editor
- Neil Faulkner, Editor
Abraham Lincoln was a politician, not a soldier. Yet, with the release of Steven Spielberg’s new blockbuster biopic, we have a special focus this issue on America’s most iconic president. Coincidentally, veteran military historian Correlli Barnett has just published a new book, The Lords of War, which opens with an assessment of Lincoln as a politico-military genius.
Our Lincoln-themed coverage includes a major feature article on Antietam, a review of the Spielberg film, and an interview with Correlli Barnett.
Lincoln emerges as a figure who towered over his epoch, having a strategic grasp that was truly Clausewitzian in his ability to see the struggle that dominated mid-19th-century US history in all its totality and grandeur. Lincoln synthesised all the myriad complexities and contradictions of the conflict – both political and military – and crystallised them into a vision of how the war could be won, the Union saved, and America given ‘a new birth of freedom’.
Lincoln’s greatness resided in the completeness with which he personified the new America being forged in the violence of civil war – a war to destroy slavery and recreate the nation on the principles proclaimed by the infant Republican Party: ‘Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labour, and Free Men’.
Also this issue, we have Jack Watkins’ analysis of the little-known Battle of Lechfeld in AD 955, which created the First German Reich, and Roger Broad’s assessment of Ronald Adam, the ‘radical’ WWII general whom some believe was responsible for the 1945 Labour election landslide!
Meantime, our British Battles series, still wading deep in controversy, has arrived at the beaches of Dunkirk in May 1940…