Latest Updates
(This page is intended to keep my site more or less abreast of current news related to my books and other activities, although my experience since setting up the site is that I seem to update it only about once every two years. Hence please bear with me if you can't find my very latest activities).
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NEWS FROM THE BATTLEFIELDS TRUST: The Trust recently helped in the successful defence of the centre of the battlefield of Tewkesbury against a planned housing development. Alas, however, it failed in its attempt to purchase its first piece of land, at the English Civil War battlefield of Langport, Somerset. Other campaigns are currently in train, among which I am personally involved in that for Clifton, the last battle on English soil (1745). Also there is a programme to set up more interpretation boards at key points on battlefields.
The Trust is also currently in the process of setting up a network of local regional groups throughout the British Isles, which promise to multiply our activities and membership far beyond the levels seen only a few years ago.
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As for MY OWN BOOK WRITING, I fear I have been lamentably slow in progressing my research on Auchinleck's desert war; but I have at least cracked the mystery of the British 3.7" anti aircraft gun, and the reasons it wasn't used in the anti-tank role, in the same manner as the Germans used their redoubtable '88'.
I have also written two more pieces of 'alternative history' for Greenhill Books (both in volumes edited by Pete Tsouras). In the first, Rommel wins a battle at Alamein (which is of course the one known to real history as FIRST Alamein) and then goes on to grab the Iraqi oilfields and win the whole war - thereby succeeding in 1942 where G.Bush senior failed in 1991.
In the second, an unholy alliance of the Roberts MacNamara and Thompson conspire to impose a truly 'counter-insurgency' solution to the Vietnam war on a malleable LBJ, at the key moment when he is still reeling from the assassination of JFK. Airpower, Firepower and the ARVN's bumbling methods of 'pacification' are systematically excluded from the equation, with the result that victory for the freeworld is assured at a fraction of the cost in blood and treasure that the real historical record, alas, tells us was actually paid for a defeat.
If you want some really excellent mil.hist, remember my old friend, Jim Arnold, of Lexington Virginia, USA. His wonderful book Marengo and Hohenlinden, Napoleon's Rise to Power', is available from him through his e-mail address: [email protected]
