REVIEW BY TOBY CLARK
Here is a history of the Second World War with a twist. John Buckley is a professor of military history at the University of Wolverhampton and a writer with both academic and popular histories to his name. Buckley’s flair for bringing new analysis to pre-existing assumptions has gained him a reputation for moving ahead of trends. His monograph British Armour in Normandy questioned whether British tanks and crews were actually a match for the German armour in the summer battles of 1944 – an argument that has since become popular. And Buckley refights historical battles using models. Put this all together and Buckley is not a typical historian.
So it should be no surprise to find that The Armchair General is not a typical history, either: the reader is invited to examine counterfactual, or ‘what if’, history. The counterfactual is a popular device within novels, but it has been derided as an ‘idle parlour game’ by academics. Which means there are not many other books competing with Buckley’s.
Robert Cowley brought together many big names for his compendium of counterfactual essays, What if? Military historians imagine what might have been (1999). In it, Cowley argued that the road not taken still belongs on the map. But that book is more than 20 years old now.
War Classics – Old Soldiers Never Die