Robert Lyman
Author
Robert Lyman was born in New Zealand and educated at Scotch College, Melbourne, Australia. He was an officer in the British Army for twenty years, being commissioned into the Light Infantry from the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, in April 1982. He has a First-Class Honours degree in History from the University of York and Master’s degrees in Strategic Studies (University College of Wales, Aberystwyth), War Studies (King’s College, London) and Military Studies (Cranfield). He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2009. A critically acclaimed historian, his interest to date has been the experience of both warfare and of military command during the Second World War, producing narrative studies that explore campaigns in the Middle East, Far East and North Africa.
His Under A Darkening Sky - Americans at War, 1939-1941 was published by Pegasus in the US in 2018. A War of Empires on the Japanese invasion of South-East Asia was published by Osprey / Bloomsbury in 2021 and praised by James Holland as 'a superb book'.
Co-written with General Lord Dannatt, his acclaimed Victory to Defeat, on why the British Army was catastrophically unprepared for the Second World War and the lessons we must learn, was published by Bloomsbury / Osprey in 2023.
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Victory To Defeat by Robert Lyman
A compelling history of the decline of an army from the triumph of victory in 1918 to defeat in 1940 and why this happened. A salutary warning for modern Britain.
The British Army won a convincing series of victories between 1916 and 1918. But by 1939 the British Army was an entirely different animal. The hard-won knowledge, experience and strategic vision that delivered victory after victory in the closing stages of the First World War had been lost. In the inter-war years there was plenty of talking, but very little focus on who Britain might have to fight, and how.* Victory to Defeat* clearly illustrates how the British Army wasn't prepared to fight a first-class European Army in 1939 for the simple reason that as a country Britain hadn't prepared itself to do so. The failure of the army's leadership led directly to its abysmal performance in Norway and France in 1940.
Victory to Defeat is a captivating history of the mismanagement of a war-winning army. It is also a stark warning that we neglect to understand who our enemy might be, and how to defeat him, at the peril of our country. The British Army is now to be cut to its smallest size since 1714. Are we, this book asks, repeating the same mistakes again?
