Christopher Duffy, military historian who challenged the consensus on 18th century warfare obitu

Christopher Duffy, who has died aged 86, was an English military historian and prolific author who wrote extensively on the military powers of “Old Regime” Europe and also published ground-breaking work on the two world wars and the Jacobite rising of 1745.

Alongside his fellow historians John Keegan, the former Daily Telegraph defence correspondent, David Chandler and Richard Holmes, he taught generations of British officers at Sandhurst. No armchair historian, as well as beavering away in the archives (he could read six languages) he was known for extensive fieldwork in historical army encampments and battlefields, a discipline, he once observed, that “helps to preserve the historian from some of the idiocies he would commit if he stayed at home and copied what other people have written on the subject”.

Writing in The Guardian in 2016, Richard Holmes described Duffy as “an extremely self-effacing, old-style scholar”. “Whenever I begun to think I had got the measure of something,” Holmes went on, “a conversation with Christopher would demonstrate how little I knew.”

For much of the 20th century historians dismissed the military forces of 18th-century Europe as stagnant and mainly decorative, easy prey for the brilliant Napoleon Bonaparte. Duffy, by contrast, saw the armies of the mid-18th century as serious and effective institutions which, through the development of standardised weapons and uniforms, prescribed codes of military conduct, better training and professionalism, had been transformed into bodies more stable and more responsive to their leaders than any known since the Classical period.

His expertise led to Duffy being recruited as a military adviser to the BBC during the making of its epic 20-part dramatisation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1972), helping to train extras, recruited from a Serbian contingent of the Yugoslav territorial army, for large battle sequences. A Festschrift published earlier this year in Duffy’s honour recounts that, while filming the Battle of Borodino, the extras mutinied over working conditions and Duffy retreated to a squad of gunners in the “Raevsky redoubt”, with whom he had developed a good working relationship, until the dispute was resolved.

In Britain, and particularly in Scotland, Duffy was known for his work on the Jacobite rebellion which culminated in the bloody defeat of Prince Charles Edward Stuart and his followers at Culloden on April 16 1746.

In The ’45: Bonnie Prince Charlie and the untold story of the Jacobite Rising (2003) and in Fight for a Throne: The Jacobite ’45 Reconsidered (2015) he challenged the conventional wisdom that the campaign was doomed to failure from the outset and argued that Prince Charles Edward Stuart was a far better military leader than he is often given credit for.

In July 1745 Charles and a tiny group of companions had arrived in Scotland unheralded and with no followers, and yet in less than five months he had assembled an army which swept all before it, getting as far south as Derby, before being routed at Culloden.

Far from being the rabble of kilted savages depicted by English propagandists, Charles’s forces were highly organised and disciplined. Moreover, his advocacy of religious toleration and an accountable monarchy won him support not only from the Stuarts’ traditional followers but from Enlightenment thinkers, and skilled artisans in places like Manchester, who were angry at taxes on goods such as beer and candles. The Jacobite rising, Duffy suggested, could even be viewed as a forerunner to the Chartist movement.

The turning point in Charles’s fortunes was when, influenced by the advice of his commander Lord George Murray (whose reputation, Duffy regarded as overrated), decided to head north after a spy convinced them that English forces were blocking their way.

Even so, Charles could have retrieved the situation before Culloden had he followed through his original intention to mount a surprise attack on the English camp the night before the battle. Once again, he was dissuaded by Murray.

“The trouble with Bonnie Prince Charlie’s reputation,” Duffy reflected, “is the collapse of his character after [Culloden]. He hit the bottle and had affairs and became a violent drunk. It’s almost as if he used up all his reserves of integrity and fortitude during the uprising. He was a sad wreck for the rest of his life.”

Duffy was in the forefront of the fight in Britain to preserve battlefield sites from development, and in recent years played a leading role in the battle to preserve Culloden, preparing detailed maps of the battleground and drawing on evidence from modern archaeological survey methods such as lidar, which uses laser imaging, his research showing that the battle was fought over an area far bigger than previously thought.

Christopher Duffy was born in 1936 and was a contemporary and friend of the military historian and former Daily Telegraph defence correspondent John Keegan at Balliol College, Oxford.

After taking a First in Modern History in 1958, followed by a DPhil in 1961, he joined the Department of Military History at Sandhurst, where he remained until 1996, retiring as senior lecturer in War Studies.

Duffy’s first book, The Wild Goose and the Eagle: A Life of Marshal von Browne 1705-1757, published in 1964, was an account of Maximilian Ulysses, Reichsgraf von Browne, the son of an Irish gentleman exiled in the aftermath of Tyrone’s Rebellion, who rose to the rank of Field Marshal in the army of Austria.

A major interest was Frederick the Great and the Seven Years’ War. Duffy’s The Military Life of Frederick the Great (1985) profited from his visits to the battlefields and access to German General Staff Histories, and with the aid of informative maps of all the battles, Duffy described complicated operations in fluid prose, with a minimum of complicated technical detail.

The book is regarded as a classic of military history, and following the end of Communism in eastern Europe, through his connection with the Seven Years’ War Association Duffy led tours of battlefields of the conflict in the newly opened East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Poland.

Duffy published more than 20 books, sometimes giving surprising insights into more recent conflicts. In Through German Eyes: the British and the Somme 1916 (2006), he drew on records in German military archives to show that German interrogations of British PoWs in the First World War did not fit the traditional hostile stereotype.

Instead, British officers taken captive during the Battle of the Somme could expect a cordial welcome from Anglophile German officers, many of whom had visited Britain before the war. “The British expected to be beaten and shot, but this very rarely happened,” Duffy wrote. “Instead the initial questioning was very mild and persuasive. The Germans were interested in building up a picture of what made the British tick. They asked some initial questions, then gave the prisoner a coffee and cigar, then turned the conversation to militarily irrelevant details. In this relaxed stage, a lot of military information did leak out.”

In Red Storm on the Reich (1996) Duffy drew on newly released records from Moscow archives, cross-referenced with German accounts, to describe the Soviet Union’s brutal final push against Germany in 1945, during which 30 million lives were lost. He revealed that such was the terror the Red Army wrought in the last few months that even PoWs, including 32 British officers, chose to join retreating Panzer regiments rather than stay with their Russian “liberators”.

He also translated into English Achtung-Panzer! the classic exposition of Blitzkrieg tactics written in 1937 by the German Second World War general Heinz Guderian when he was a tank commander.

After retiring from Sandhurst Duffy held a research professorship at De Montfort University until 2001. Afterwards he became involved in a volunteer work and fund-raising for the National Trust of Scotland’s centre at Culloden. He was a founder member of the British Commission for Military History and the Scottish Battlefield Trust, and served as a vice-president of the Military History Society of Ireland and chairman of the 1745 Association from 2014 to 2016.

Duffy also served as a volunteer witness adviser in court cases, including at the trial of the gang of elderly men accused of carrying out the Hatton Garden safe deposit burglary of 2015. Duffy claimed that knowledge gained about police crime scene procedures had helped him in his research at Culloden.

He was unmarried.

Christopher Duffy, born 1936, died November 16 2022

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