The end and a few changes…

Well I am sitting on the train to Birmingham to go and submit my MPhil thesis. Part of me is happy that it is done but the other part feels worried that I have left bits out. I know there are limitations but that is the nature of the beast. Being only 40,000 words there is only so much I could include. I admit as much in my introduction. I am proud of the work and feel that it does what I set out to do and that is to refute the revisionist accounts on the RAF’s perceived failure to use bombers at Dieppe.

One thing that I am very glad about is my choice of supervisor for it. I had the honour and pleasure of working with Professor Gary Sheffield, one of the UK’s leading military historians. I can not stress too much to potential postgraduate the importance of having a good working relationship with your supervisor. The ability to turn to him or her when you get stuck is so important and if the relationship is fractious it won’t help. I have been lucky to have a supervisor who let me explore the problem and offer pertinent advice when appropriate. He also acted as an excellent editor picking up on numerous mistakes that my tired eyes just could not pick up. I am certain that my thesis all the better for Gary’s help and assistance. So make sure you pick a suitable supervisor as it will pay dividends by the end.

In terms of what is next well the first thing will be the Viva at some date not too far in the future. However, before that I have got move. An offer by work means I leave this week. This is not as bad as it seems as I am going to go back to uni full-time for my PhD. I have to admit this is quite exciting. I am going to stick with Birmingham as even as a part-time student the atmosphere has been excellent. Also in the field of War Studies it is an up and coming challenger to KCL and it is exciting to be part of that. Birmingham already had a reputation in the field of First World War Studies and is growing in the area of Second World War Studies. It is also expanding into air power history. In terms of my thesis I plan to shift my area somewhat. Up until now I have concentrated on operational histories of the use of air power but I am now going to look at leadership effectiveness. In particular I am proposing to examine the career of Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory who seems to be the villain in many accounts of the Second World War. Hopeful, I will be re-focusing this in my thesis but time will tell on that. I hope to be starting in January. As I go along I will be blogging my experience as a comparison with Robert Thompson’s experience of a military history PhD in the states.

In the mean time I will be starting the process of chopping my thesis into one article and also starting some of the ideas I mentioned a few weeks back. I have just finished the editing process on my first chapter for a book on a conference that I attended last year. That should be out next year. I have also joined Zotero and so far I am pleased with it as a research tool. I have started an Air Power History group with thee aim of collating research and writing on this field. A grandiose task I know but who knows it may be of use to someone. All in all the next few months are going to be eventful.

An update…

I have been away from the blogoshpehere for a while because of various reasons. The most pressing of which has been my work. It is that time of year again in education and I have been busy marking coursework for submission and preparing and running revision sessions. I sure some of you can imaging the joy of marking the same 3,000 word essay over and over again. The other pressing reasons was because I was preparing a symposium paper for uni and preparing a submission for a conference that is coming up in July. Also I have been trawling through the 2000 or so pics I took at the National Archives at Easter.

My symposium paper, delivered at the Postgraduate Symposium for the Centres for First and Second World War Studies, was entitled ‘The Embattled History of Operation JUBILEE.’ The paper sought to explore some of the various reasons why the writing about the raid on Dieppe has been so divisive over the past sixty years. As I mentioned at the symposium if one does a search on the British Library database for Dieppe Raid it brings up about 30 books dedicated to the raid. This is quite a lot for an operation that did not even last a full day. If we compare it the Normandy Campaign that has about 330 books dedicated to it and that is a 90 day campaign. Also we must bare in mind that many of these books on Normandy will also include a discussion of Dieppe as the traditional argument for the raids purpose was as a necessary precursor for OVERLORD. I brought out several stands which for me showed the problems that have surrounded the writing about the raid. These were as follow: (Sorry Gavin should have written this early to go in the carnival!!)

• Nationalism

This concentrated on the role nationalism play in forming our national myths and in particular I concentrated on the role that C P Stacey had played in forming the national myths of Canada in his CMHQ reports and the Canadian official history. I also touched upon some of the difference between the accounts of Canadian historians and British historians.

• Narrative Vs. Analytical

This area detailed some of the critical difference that have occurred over the writing of the raid. The most notable difference is the the narrative works details the actions of the raid where as the analytical works only deal with issues of planning and the aftermath of the raid. As such we still do not have a holistic work of the raid that merges both the planning issue and the operational and tactical problems occurred during the the operation.

• Amateur Historian Vs. Professional Historian

This then led me on to consider why this has happen and in my eyes the difference comes very much from the audience the works have been written for and by whom. The narrative works, going all the way back to the early piece written after the raid, have tended to be written by non-academics, and in many cases journalists, this has show up in the concentration on the ‘face’ and experience of the battle and skimping over some of the larger issues. For the more analytical pieces there has been a tendency to concentrate on documentary evidence and the use of sources to come up with an analysis of the raid. Thus, there remains a dichotomy between the two strands and in my minds brings up the questions of is it the case that the narrative historians have produced that type of work because a lack of training?

• Official Vs. Revisionist

I also explored the problems that occurred when writing about the raid and the pressure placed upon the official historians by Mountbatten to produce his version of events and the control he placed over the Ministry of Information over the writing of the Combined Operations pamphlet in 1943. This is a position that has now been heavily challenged by historians.

I finished the piece by looking at some of the operational issue that came out of the raid and the posited the questions of whether there was a need for another analysis of the raid, thus, playing devils advocate to my own thesis. Obviously, my answer is yes, as there is a need for a more operationally orientated history. Hopefully more people will agree with this.

Of the other papers at the symposium 2 that I really enjoyed were Air Commodore Peter Gray’s piece of Strategic Leadership in Bomber Command. Peter is trying to create an understanding of the relationship between Harris and his superiors using contemporary leadership theory and pushing this theory further by utilising a historical case study. Also I enjoyed Trevor Harvey’s piece on the formation of the CEF in the First World War. This was particular interesting because of my discussion of Canadian nationalism in the planning of Dieppe. This theme also resonates in Trevor’s piece with relation to the formation of the CEF.

The other thing that I have been playing with was a submission for a paper for an upcoming conference at KCL and the IWM in July. The conference is on Allied Fighting Effectiveness in North Africa and Italy, 1942 – 1945. The conference will explore the following key themes:

Tactical effectiveness: doctrine, training and experience; combined arms tactics; urban and mountain warfare; technology; morale and combat psychology.

Operational art; command, control and communications; logistics.

The war in the air: the counter-air battle, the employment of tactical airpower; the effectiveness of air-to-ground operations.

Naval operations, specifically the development and evolution of amphibious technique.

Intelligence, propaganda, partisans and irregular warfare.

Inter-Allied cooperation and aspects of coalition warfare.

I put a proposal in entitled ‘A Case Study in Army-Air Force Co-Operation: The Western Desert Air Force and the Battle of the Mareth Line, 19 – 29 March 1943′ I am pleased to say it was accepted so I have now got to prepare that. I hope to explore the following key issues:

• To examine the role the Western Desert Air Force (WDAF) played in Operations PUGILIST and SUPERCHARGE II
• To understand the affect that WDAF planning had upon the conduct second half of the battle around the Mareth Line, Operation SUPERCHARGE II
• To examine the operations in their operational and tactical context
• To examine the affect of the operations on the future conduct of the air war, specifically in North-West Europe

I have obviously continued buying and these are some of the more recent title that have landed on my doorstep, I must get another bookshelf at some point.

1. Richard Overy The Air War, 1939 – 1945
2. C P Stacey Six Years of War
3. Henry Probert “Bomber” Harris
4. David Mets and Harold Winton (Eds.) The Challenge of Change: Military Institutions and New Realities, 1918-1941
5. Randolph Bradham To the Last Man: The Battle for Normandy’s Cotentin Peninsula and Brittany
6. Hugh Henry Dieppe Through the Lens of the German War Photographer
7. William Slim Unofficial History
8. James Corum The Luftwaffe: Creating the Operational Air War, 1918-40
9. Geoffrey Till (Ed.) The Development of British Naval Thinking