Коррелли Дуглас Барнетт: Жизнь и творчество военного историка

British military historian (1927–2022)

Correlli Douglas Barnett (28 June 1927 – 10 July 2022) was an English military historian, who also wrote works of economic history, particularly on the United Kingdom's post war deindustrialization.

Barnett worked as historical consultant and writer for the BBC television series The Great War (1963–64). He contributed numerous articles to various newspapers arguing against the 2003 Iraq War. He was the author of The Desert Generals, a book that attacked the perceived cult of British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery and assessed the roles of his sacked predecessors as commanders in the North Africa campaign, including Richard O'Connor, who drove the Italians from Cyrenaica in late 1940, and Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck (whom he called "The Victor of Alamein"), who forced Rommel to a halt at the First Battle of El Alamein, only to be dismissed by Winston Churchill for his pains. He pointed out that Montgomery enjoyed massive superiority of men and materiel at the Second Battle of El Alamein, and described him as an "emotional cripple", a description, he noted in subsequent editions, borne out "in rich detail" by the Nigel Hamilton biography. However, Barnett's conclusions were attacked by Field Marshal Michael Carver in his book Dilemmas of the Desert War; Carver calls Barnett "naïve" and notes numerous flaws in his work. He also published Britain and Her Army 1509–1970, which as a survey combines the political, the social and the military over the grand sweep of Britain's post medieval history. In several of his works (The Desert Generals, The Swordbearers) Barnett portrayed the British armed forces as hidebound by tradition (e. g. cavalry regiments allegedly reluctant to adopt modern tank tactics) and by technology inferior to that of the Germans. This position was also attacked by Carver, who observed that during Operation Crusader and during the Battle of Gazala, British technology was a match for, or in some cases, better than that used by the German and Italian armies. Barnett made this point of the British armour in the desert, and of Jellicoe's Grand Fleet at Jutland in 1916. In his Bonaparte (1978), he took a more critical view of Napoleon Bonaparte than is customary, portraying him almost as a Mediterranean bandit keen to dish out crowns and honours to cronies and members of his blood family, and stressing how much many of his most famous successes owed much to bluff and luck (e. g. the fortuitous arrival of General Louis Desaix at the Battle of Marengo).

Barnett's The Pride and Fall sequence comprises: (1) The Collapse of British Power; (2) The Audit of War: The Illusion and Reality of Britain as a Great Nation (published as The Pride and the Fall: The Dream and Illusion of Britain as a Great Nation, in the USA); (3) The Lost Victory: British Dreams, British Realities, 1945 50; and (4) The Verdict of Peace: Britain Between Her Yesterday and the Future. In sum, the sequence describes the decline of British power during the twentieth century, a decline attributed by the author to a change in the values of Britain's governing élite from the late eighteenth century, and one which was encouraged by evangelical and non conformist Christianity. Barnett claims that the statesmen of the eighteenth century were men "hard of mind and hard of will" who regarded "national power as the essential foundation of national independence; commercial wealth as a means to power; and war as among the means to all three". Furthermore, they regarded it as "natural and inevitable that nations should be engaged in a ceaseless struggle for survival, prosperity and predominance". The British national character, Barnett argues, underwent a profound moral revolution in the nineteenth century which came to have a deep effect on British foreign policy; foreign policy was now to be conducted in a reverence of highly ethical standards rather than an "expedient and opportunist pursuit of England's interests". Barnett came to this conclusion by beginning "with a colour coded flow chart which logically traced back step by step to their origins the chains of causation of all the 'total strategic' factors in Britain's plight in 1940–1941: political, military, economic, technological. These various chains eventually converged on a common primary cause: a mutation in the values – indeed the very character – of the British governing classes which began in the early nineteenth century. This mutation supplied the starting point of my narrative, and thereafter, in Enoch Powell's words in his review, was my 'guiding and interpretative thread through the events of the twenty inter war years'." A. J. P. Taylor said of The Collapse of British Power: "This is fine fighting stuff, powerfully based on the historical records". Robert Blake said the book was "Pungently written, perceptive and controversial". Peter Hennessy claims The Audit of War "acquired an instant vogue when published in 1986". Paul Addison called The Audit of War as "the most thorough and sustained assault so far" on wartime orthodoxy. Addison recognised that Barnett "is a withering critic of nineteenth century laissez faire capitalism and its legacy for twentieth century Britain. To this extent he shares some common ground with Marxist historians and quotes E. P. Thompson with approval. But he is no Marxist himself, and his ideal model of the relationship between state and society is Bismarckian. The development of modern Germany, through the creation of a state dedicated to the pursuit of national efficiency in a ruthlessly Darwinian world, is held up by Barnett as the example which Britain could, and should, have followed. Britain's tradition of collectivism he interprets as a decadent, "romanticizing humanism, anti industrial, riddled with illusions, and perpetuated by the public school system"". Addison criticised Barnett's thesis in The Audit of War as resting "on a number of simplifications. First, he divorced the history of Britain from its European context and thereby distorts the perspective. Secondly, he fails to acknowledge the political imperatives behind the reconstruction programme. Thirdly, he neglects the politics of industrial conservatism. Fourthly, his analysis is remarkably selective, singling out one factor – the welfare state – and one government, as uniquely responsible for difficulties that no other government, before or since, has surmounted". Roger Scruton claimed that whilst Barnett's thesis against public schools was set forth in "a series of brilliant books", his view of education is mistaken: "Relevance in education is a chimerical objective and the English knew this. Who is to guess what will be relevant to a student's interests in ten years' time? Even in the applied sciences, it is not relevance that forms and transforms the curriculum, but knowledge". Scruton goes on to say: "And for what life of the mind would Correlli Barnett have us prepared? Certainly not one that offers what has been offered to him: namely a synoptic vision of a national identity. If we examine the complaints made by Barnett, we cannot fail to be struck by the fact that they contain no comparative judgement. Set beside which élite did the English fail so badly? In which country of the modern world do we find the educational system which compares so favourably with the English college? Which European nations, unhampered by the code of the gentleman, have shown us the way to successful empire building and retreated with credit from their colonies? All such comparisons point to the amazing success of the English. By devoting their formative years to useless things, they made themselves supremely useful. And by internalising the code of honour they did not, as Barnett supposes, make themselves defenceless in a world of chicanery and crime, but endowed themselves with the only real defence that human life can offer – the instinctive trust between strangers, which enables them in whatever dangerous circumstances to act together as a team".

Barnett was a fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge and from 1977 to 1995 he was the Keeper of the Churchill Archives Centre. From 1973 to 1985, he was a member of the Council of the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies. He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Nigel Lawson, Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1983 to 1989, also cited Barnett's views on education as an influence, specifically The Audit of War. In 1995 when Michael Heseltine became Deputy Prime Minister in John Major's Cabinet, he presented each member of the Cabinet with copies of Barnett's The Lost Victory. Barnett's comment that "an attack on Iran would effectively launch world war three" was cited by Noam Chomsky in his essay "A Predator Becomes More Dangerous Once Wounded".

In 1950, Barnett married Ruth Murby. The couple had two daughters. Ruth died in 2020. Barnett died on 10 July 2022 at the age of 95 in East Carleton in Norfolk.

'The New Military Balance', The History of the Twentieth Century, 24 (1968). 'The Guilt: The Illogical Promise', in G. A. Panichas (ed. ), Promise of Greatness. The War of 1914 1918 (Littlehampton Book Services, 1968), pp. 560–572. 'The Education of Military Elites', in Rupert Wilkinson (ed. ), Governing Elites: Studies in Training and Selection (Oxford University Press, 1964). 'Offensive 1918', in Noble Frankland and Christopher Dowling (eds. ), Decisive Battles of the Twentieth Century (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1976), pp. 62–80. 'Auchinleck', in Michael Carver (ed. ), The War Lords. Military Commanders of the Twentieth Century (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976), pp. 260–273. 'Technology, Education and Industrial and Economic Strength, Education for Capability: Cantor Lecture 1, 13 November 1978', Journal of The Royal Society of Arts, cxxvii (5271), pp. 117–130. 'The Long Term Industrial Performance in the United Kingdom: The Role of Education and Research, 1850–1939', in Derek J. Morris (ed. ), The Economic System of the United Kingdom. Third Edition (Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 668–689.