The January 2013 issue of Military History Monthly, the British military history magazine, is on sale today.
In the latest issue we cover:
Edward III – England’s medieval warrior-king
Marking the 700th anniversary of the king’s birth, Stephen Roberts looks at the military achievements of Edward III in the second of our great commanders series.
History of the British Army – Loos, 25 September-14 October 1915
How a year of costly failure for the British Army culminated in a bloody fiasco.
Khmer Rouge – From freedom fighters to mass murderers
Tom Farrell explores the savagery of the Khmer Rouge and the tragedy inflicted on Cambodia in the 1970s.
Admiral Canaris – Friend or foe?
Stephen Taylor brings us closer to understanding the motives of Admiral Canaris, the Third Reich’s ‘gentleman spy’.
Chasing the Gunrunners – Arms-smuggling in Afghanistan
Tim Newark investigates a murky world of arms-dealers, insurgents, and black-market weapons a century ago.
Also in this issue: Back to the Drawing Board, Museum Reviews, War Culture, Behind the Image, Regiments, and much more.
From the editor
- Neil Faulkner, Editor
What makes a great commander? What are the key qualities? How far is military achievement a matter of individual genius as opposed to context and circumstance? Does the general make the army, or the army the general?
These are questions we have begun to grapple with in our occasional series on great commanders. But we are deliberately choosing the more obscure. Enough has been written on men like Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon. We are searching out some of the less famous, but nonetheless accomplished, exponents of the art of war.
Last month, we featured Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, architect of the modern German Army and German victory in the Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian Wars. This month, we feature Edward III, the Medieval monarch who forged a revolutionary military system that sounded the death-knell of feudalism.
The Medieval English system – dismounted action by ‘bill and bow’ in lethal combination – destroyed both Scottish pike phalanxes and French armoured chivalry during Edward’s long military career. How much was this a matter of Edward’s insight and genius, how much an expression of long-gestating changes in English society and war-making?
Our British Army series continues with the Battle of Loos, the most costly British offensive on the Western Front in 1915, and we also have articles this issue on Afghan gunrunning during the Raj, the enigmatic Nazi spymaster Admiral Canaris, and the military background to Pol Pot’s Cambodia. As usual, the aim is a broad range of articles covering a diversity of periods, places, and themes.