Upcoming Conference…

On the 18th and 19th of July King’s College London will be holding the following conference:

Allied Fighting Effectiveness in North Africa and Italy, 1942 – 1945

As the call for papers says this conference will seek to evaluate the role the Mediterranean theatre played in the the Second World War.

Issues of Allied strategy aside, academic attention to the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations during the Second World War has not been commensurate with the scale and significance of the military operations conducted therein. Compared with other major campaigns of the conflict, most notably that of France and Northwest Europe during 1944-5, there has been a lesser focus in recent years on the issue of Allied fighting effectiveness at the operational and tactical levels of war in the North African, Sicilian and Italian campaigns. Yet the breadth of operational and tactical experiences encountered in these campaigns was perhaps uniquely broad; each campaign full of contrasts. For example, battles in Italy could be characterised by a degree of attrition more common to 1916 than the Second World War; they could be static and bloody affairs which involved protracted efforts to break strongly-held defensive positions. Over the course of the campaign in Italy alone the British Army sustained more casualties than in any other theatre during the war. On the other hand, these campaigns witnessed bold amphibious strokes, accompanied by the innovative application of force in complex joint and combined operations. New approaches were evolved and refined at the operational and tactical levels of warfare; it was in these campaigns that the Allies learnt much of their trade before the invasion of Northwest Europe in mid-1944. Encompassing the major campaigns of North Africa, Sicily and Italy from operation ‘Torch’ to the end of the war in Europe, this conference seeks to explore the intriguing dichotomy of the nature of battle in the Mediterranean theatre, whilst helping to emphasise its significance to the study of Second Word War military history.

The conference will explore the following key themes:

• Tactical effectiveness: doctrine, training and experience; combined arms tactics; urban and mountain warfare; technology; morale and combat psychology.
• Operational art; command, control and communications; logistics.
• The war in the air: the counter-air battle, the employment of tactical airpower; the effectiveness of air-to-ground operations.
• Naval operations, specifically the development and evolution of amphibious technique.
• Intelligence, propaganda, partisans and irregular warfare.
• Inter-Allied cooperation and aspects of coalition warfare.

This should be an interesting conference and if you have an interest in the war you should come an listen to some of the papers.

 

Ross

$170 for a 200+ page book on the war?

I recently had the pleasure of reading two excellent new books on the Second World War. The first book was a monograph on the development of airpower in the interwar years. The second book was a collection of essays by prominent historians that dealt with various facets of the battle of Normandy.

These books, in my opinion, made a serious contribution to the existing literature on these topics. However, there was one serious problem; the retail price for the books respectively was $170 US (256 pages) and $120 (240 pages). Of course, these prices are prohibitively high even for research libraries. Thus, these books are condemned to an existence in only a handful of libraries around the world. How can this be (and why?)? How can the prices be so high? Well the answer lies mainly in the fact that there isn’t a trade market for these books and as such they’ll never really possess the appeal needed to sell lots of copies. It also helps that there a handful of elite institutions willing to pay exorbitant prices for small single volumes. The real problem is that some publishers realize they can get away charging such high prices per volume because college and university professors need an avenue in which to be published.

It is no suprise that academics are pressed by their institutions and by prestige factors to seek publication for their books. Thus, sometimes the only available route for books that lack wide appeal are publishing houses that will offer little or anything in the way of advances to the authors, and minimal royalties in the event they sell a few hundred books. In exchange, the book will be published and the retail price tag will be startlingly high. No effort will be given to marketing. It’s unlikely an expert editor will have ever given feed back.

Of course, it raises the obvious question, what value is a book if no one is going to read it because the price is prohibitively high? Second, why bother writing the book in the first place? This isn’t a problem unique to military history.

Unfortunately, these publication schemes seem like the trend. Academics must publish or wither on the vine of non-tenure track life. Yet, there must be a better way…

In this day and age creative solutions exist to ensure that the written word will be read: ebooks, self publishing, blogs, and a whole host of other mechanisms serve to ensure that great ideas and insights could reach a wider audience for way less money.

-jd