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Military historian and TA brigadier, he focused on the lives of troops on the frontline
Professor Richard Holmes, who has died aged 65 after suffering from cancer, was a leading military historian whose consuming interest in soldiering, especially the roles and lives of frontline troops, brought him distinction in authorship, academia and the army itself. He became Britain's most senior reservist, with the rank of brigadier.
However, he was best known as a presenter of television documentaries on military history. Eschewing glamour and self-promotion, his on-site explorations, in such programmes as the War Walks series (1996-97), of the battle of the Somme in the first world war or Monte Cassino in the second, were all the more evocative for being understated and matter-of-fact.
The bespectacled figure with the military moustache, standing in the middle of a field or walking along the fading line of a Flanders trench, always gave the impression that he knew what he was talking about, an authority that surely derived from the fact that he had done his own research, on site and in the archives. He also led groups of visitors to historic sites on behalf of Holt's Battlefield Tours.
Long before he visited such places as the Somme battlefield, Holmes read Siegfried Sassoon's description of the first world war in his Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man. He said that the book changed his life: "I reread it every two or three years and it never fails to move me to tears."
Holmes was born too late to be called up for national service, but enlisted in the Territorial Army (TA) at the age of 18, receiving his commission after two years' service. From Forest school, north-east London, he went as a scholar to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and pursued his studies at the universities of Northern Illinois and Reading, where he gained his doctorate.
In 1969 he became a full-time lecturer at the department of war studies at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, rising to deputy head of the department (1984-86). In the TA, he became a lieutenant colonel, commanding the 2nd battalion, the Wessex Regiment full‑time (1986-88).
Then, in 1989, he became co-director of the Security Studies Institute, a department of Cranfield University based at Shrivenham, Oxfordshire. Cranfield is a postgraduate establishment with close connections to the UK Defence Academy and senior officers in the armed services. Holmes added a professorship of military and security studies to his Cranfield duties in 1995, retiring from both roles in 2009.
It was at Shrivenham in 2004 that Holmes gave a lengthy interview to John Crace for the Guardian. He had just completed his book Tommy, a work that won him high acclaim, focused on the British soldier in the trenches on the western front of the first world war (part of a trilogy on frontline soldiers, with Redcoat, 2001, and Sahib, 2005, on the army in India). Shrivenham at the time was more like an armed camp than a campus, neatly reflecting the military-academic dualism of Holmes' entire career.
"It really mattered to me to get this one right," he told Crace. "There have been countless books on the generals, the campaigns, the Treaty of Versailles and the origins of the first world war, but the ordinary soldiers have been somewhat marginalised: they are usually only dragged in as evidence in another debate … I wanted to put them centre-stage."
Holmes did not interview the dwindling band of veterans of the first world war because he had found that first-hand reminiscences differed widely only 10 years after the event from those written down at or near the time of the action concerned. The usual complete absence of knowledge of "the big picture" shown in such accounts is more than compensated for by the unpretentious immediacy of often private recollections: the historian can step in to supply the context.
Therefore Holmes made extensive use of the veterans' records at King's College London (the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives) and the fabulous collections at the Imperial War Museum in south London for his primary material. But he adopted a down-to-earth approach. "I enjoy spending some time in the library, but I would never last as an ivory-tower academic … I like to get my hands grubby with the practicalities of military life as much as with the academic." As his employer, Cranfield received a proportion of his external earnings as battlefield guide, author and television presenter.
In the latter role, his studies of British military history from the 17th century to modern times enabled him to make programmes on Cromwell and the English civil war, the American revolution, Wellington and the Napoleonic wars, as well as the battles of both world wars. An ambitious series in 2005 enabled him to follow the career of Winston Churchill from the Sudan and South Africa to his wartime bunker in London in the 1940s and VE Day.
More than a dozen well-received books included, in 1984, a life of Field Marshal Sir John French, who led the British army in France in 1914, and Dusty Warriors, a study of frontline troops in Iraq in 2003 (published in 2006). Another serendipitous fusion of interests – he was a keen horseman – led to Riding the Retreat: Mons to Marne (1995), in which he followed on horseback the famous fighting retreat of the British Expeditionary Force from Mons in 1914, culminating in the crucial defensive battle of the Marne, where the German army was stopped in its tracks and the western front stalemate was born.
In parallel with this multi-faceted career – Holmes had to slow down after a health scare in 2004 – he remained active in the TA. Promoted full colonel in 1989, a year after his appointment as OBE, he served as an ADC to the Queen (1991-97, a rare honour for a TA officer), and in 1994 was promoted to Brigadier TA, which made him the highest-ranking reserve officer in the country. In 1998 he was appointed CBE (military division).
Holmes was also a magistrate in Hampshire, patron of the Guild of Battlefield Guides, president of the British Commission for Military History and the Battlefields Trust, and retained a part-time association with Cranfield as well as several other voluntary positions. He is survived by his wife, Liz, whom he married in 1975, and their two daughters.
MRD Foot writes: Like most other military historians writing in English, I got to know Richard Holmes well on paper, and could not help admiring both his range and his skill at recounting precise military detail in language that non-experts could readily understand. He was no mere button-counter: he was a proper historian, who understood war and the sinews of war. The Oxford Companion to Military History (2001), which he edited, shows that he was no narrow specialist; he understood ancient commanders as well as modern ones, and appreciated the ways in which changes in weaponry have constantly transformed tactics.
Not many people have held the rank of professor and of brigadier at the same time. Just as Gibbon found that his captaincy in the Hampshire militia had not been useless to him as historian of the Roman empire, Holmes found his experiences of the intricacies and muddles of administration in the Territorial Army helped him in his own chosen work. Moreover, his genial personality made him an ideal chairman for the group of historians that he ran, studying the strategy and tactics of past campaigns.
• Edward Richard Holmes, historian, born 29 March 1946; died 30 April 2011