WILLIAM PHILPOTT
William Philpott teaches the history of warfare in the Department of War Studies, King’ College London, an internationally renowned centre for the study of war and conflict. He completed a doctorate at Oxford University in 1991, and taught modern European and international history in a number of British universities, before joining King’s College in 2001 as their historian of the First World War. He specialises in the history of Anglo-French relations, British strategy, and the military operations of the French army, and has published several books and more than twenty scholarly articles and chapters on these subjects. He has lectured in Britain, France, Germany, Canada and Australia to academic and public audiences. He is a Councillor of the Army Records Society (for whom he is editing Sir John French’s command diaries), Secretary General of the British Commission for Military History, and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He is academic editor of the Palgrave Macmillan monograph series Studies in Military and Strategic History, and sits on the editorial board of the leading French military history journal, Revue Historique des Armées. In 2005 he was a visiting fellow at the Centre d’études d’histoire de la Défense in Vincennes and in 2006 at the Australian War Memorial, Canberra. The Douglas Haig Fellowship has appointed him their 2011 fellow. Following Bloody Victory, his wide-ranging, critically acclaimed history of the battles of the Somme, his next book will be a study of the strategic conduct of the First World War, War of Attrition. He lives in London.
LATEST BOOK: BLOODY VICTORY: THE SACRIFICE ON THE SOMME AND THE MAKING OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
1 July 1916: the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the hot, hellish day in the fields of northern France that has dominated our perception of the First World War for just shy of a century. The shameful waste; the pointlessness of young lives lost for the sake of a few yards; the barbaric attitudes of the British leaders; the horror and ignominy of failure. All have occupied our thoughts for generations. Yet are we right to view the Somme in this way? Drawing on a vast number of sources such as letters, diaries and numerous archives, Bloody Victory describes in vivid detail the physical conditions, the combat and exceptional bravery against the odds but it also, uniquely, captures how the Somme defined the twentieth century in so many ways. Moreover, it was the fundamental turning point of WW1 in the same way Stalingrad was in WW2. This is an utterly gripping new analysis of one of the most iconic campaigns in history. Bloody Victory was awarded the 2010 Templer Prize for military history and the 2009 Norman B. Tomlinson, Jr. Book Prize by the US Branch of the Western Front Association for the best work on the First World War published in the year. A U.S. Military Book Club Main Selection and History Book Club Alternate selection.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bloody Victory: The Battle of the Somme and the Making of the Twentieth Century. (Little, Brown, London, 2009). Three Armies on the Somme: The First Battle of the Twentieth Century,(Alfred Knopf, New York, 2010).
Anglo-French Relations and Strategy on the Western Front, 1914-1918 (Macmillan, UK & St Martin's Press, USA, Studies in Military and Strategic History, 1996) Anglo-French Defence Relations between the Wars, edited with Professor Martin Alexander (Palgrave Macmillan, Studies in Military and Strategic History, 2002 Palgrave Concise Atlas of the First World War, with Matthew Hughes, Brunel University (Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2005). Palgrave Advances in Modern Military History, edited with Mathew Hughes(Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
