War and Civilian Historians

摘要

Cmh Editors' Introduction: Richard Gilchrist Glover (1909-1985), one of Canada's first university military historians, became director of the Human History Branch of the National Museum of Canada, forerunner of today's Canadian Museum of History, for a brief but important period in 1964 to 1967. The first historian to head the branch, which until his appointment had focussed on archaeology and ethnology, he established the History Division. He also integrated into the branch the Canadian War Museum, hitherto a separate institution that mainly displayed artifacts of the two world wars, and oversaw the expansion of its exhibits to tell the history of Canada from its colonial origins to the present through its military experience. The present article, which originally appeared in The Journal of the History of Ideas (18, no. 1, January 1957) 84-100), is reproduced with the kind permission of the University of Pennsylvania Press. The piece is something of an intellectual autobiography, even though there is no direct reference to the author's life experiences. Here he makes an appeal for the integration of military history into "general history," as did several pioneering academic military historians of the 1840s-1960s, and he specifically highlights the need for scholars to acquire technical knowledge of military operations. Only in this way, he argues by reference to shortcomings in leading studies of the Seven Years' War, French Revolutionary wars and other more ancient conflicts, can historians explain the course and outcome of military events that fundamentally altered the fate of nations. Glover, who had studied British and European history as an undergraduate at Oxford University in his native England, had then done a phd thesis at Harvard, in 1933-1936, on the British Army during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Unable to obtain university employment in the midst of the Great Depression, he came to Canada in the latter year as a teacher at Trinity College School in Port Hope, Ontario. He joined the militia in the fall of 1940, and in 1941 was called up for active service. After infantry training he went overseas to England in 1942 as a reinforcement officer for the Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry Highlanders. He received further training as an intelligence officer, and was ultimately assigned to the headquarters of First Canadian Army. He crossed to Normandy with the army headquarters in July 1944, and served throughout the campaign in North-West Europe. Glover thus worked in the heart of a senior headquarters responsible for coordinating all aspects of operations during one of the greatest land campaigns in modern Western history. In 1946 he obtained a position in the history department at the University of Manitoba. He soon started to revise and expand his thesis, partly on the basis of the operational analysis set forth in the present article, which, as he explained to friends, grew out of his wartime service. The process of revision grew longer when he did not obtain the sort of major grant that would free him of teaching for an extended period, and as he found important opportunities to publish in Canadian history. The present article records the development of his thinking on his major military history study, which he completed six years later: Peninsular Preparation: The Reform of the British Army 1795-1809 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963).