Point of Failure - British Brigadiers in France and Norway 1940

Point of Failure - British Brigadiers in France and Norway 1940
With Philip McCarty
Part of our 1940 series on WW2TV
   • 1945  
Also part of our British Army ongoing series
   • British Army in WWII  

By the early summer of 1940, the British Army had suffered two simultaneous strategic failures in Europe - in France & Belgium from May to June and in Norway from April to May. In today's show, Philip McCarty will talk about his forthcoming book - Point of Failure, which considers a specific set of British Army officers, Brigadiers, who served there. In 1940, while the rank of Brigadier existed, it was more a holding rank for an officer occupying a post temporarily to fulfil a role, after which he would either revert to Colonel or be advanced to Major General. Therefore, Brigadiers were, in a sense, the Army’s ‘middle management’ – heading for the top or making no further progress. Point of Failure aims to examine this set of officers and to see whether their professional survival and/or advancement after 1940 was influenced by factors prevailing before it.

Factors which may have contributed to the advancement of officers, be they professional, social or operational before 1940, are addressed. Also considered are those presumed to do so, but which this book shows were either ineffectual or less influential than prior presumptions arising from the literature on the British Army in the Second World War, such as the influence of patronage by senior officers, most notably Bernard Montgomery and Alan Brooke.

Philip McCarty is a retired civil servant and academic. He worked in the Ministry of Defence and the then Foreign and Commonwealth Office for 26 years. He has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Manchester, a master’s degree from King’s College London and a doctorate from the University of Wolverhampton. He served in the Territorial Army, sits on the Members’ Advisory Group of the National Army Museum and has served similarly on other academic military history bodies. He is a Visiting Lecturer in Military History at the University of Wolverhampton.

Buy the Book:
Uk https://www.helion.co.uk/military-his...
USA https://bookshop.org/a/21029/97818045...

Point of Success: British Brigadiers in Normandy 1944
https://youtube.com/live/RqEJ2jTEvpk

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