Six Campaigns: Allan Mallinson, interviewed by Gordon Corrigan
The historian and novelist has chosen six campaigns, and analysed each one to understand the factors behind the end result. He spoke with fellow historian Gordon Corrigan.
Six Campaigns picks six of history’s defining battles. Some are well-known, some less so. How did you choose them?
Alternating well-known and lesser-known battles seemed to me a good way of illustrating my theme of policy (determined by the nature of society)>strategy>campaign>tactics. In other words, what goes into shaping a battle – an audit trail of decision making. My Hastings, for example, is a very “spare” account, and the thread is easy to follow because most people know the overall story, which helps the reader to follow the rather more complex (but essentially the same) thread with Towton. Hastings is, of course, the real start of modern British history, and I wanted to show that it was far more than just a battle on a hill in Sussex.
Towton, I admit, was a battle of my boyhood, the first I ever studied, on foot, in short trousers. And the way the battle turned on three masterly tactical decisions is fascinating.
Waterloo chose itself: you simply can’t ignore it. But it’s not always studied in its context as Wellington’s army’s culminating battle, and a vindication of national policy.
D-Day was an entire battle in itself, not just the beginning of a campaign. It was the end of a fascinating policy>strategy>campaign thread (as well as, of course, the essential springboard of the NW Europe campaign). By focusing on Sword Beach – the most important of the allied divisional landing sectors – I could get down into the tactical long grass and demonstrate just how the highest-level decisions, including those of Churchill himself, worked themselves out at battalion level and below.
Imjin River: in the same way, I’m drawn to how Truman’s decisions in the White House led to an infantry brigade group fighting the British Army’s largest defensive battle in the past 75 years. That, and how a demoralized allied army was turned round in short order by a brilliant commander who understood that nothing would go right on the ground unless clarity could be brought to the campaign plan.
And then I felt I must end with the British Army’s most bruising battle of recent years – Operation Panther’s Claw, in Helmand. In many ways it’s still too raw to probe, but I wanted to tease out that same policy>strategy>campaign>tactics thread.
