Peter Apps

‘Semisesquicentennial’ does not roll off the tongue, nor would such an occasion normally be marked by publishers. But the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 75th anniversary, which arrives on 4 April 2024, has already led to the publication of a brace of new books about the past and future of the alliance which, with the recent accession of Finland, now counts 31 states among its members.

With the war in Ukraine – which has re-energised NATO even as it has kept its own involvement in a state of deliberate ambiguity – entering its third year, it is unsurprising that there should be renewed interest in the North Atlantic alliance. But underneath it all is a sense of anxiety, widely but quietly shared, that NATO may not live to see its centenary. This anniversary may be the last big one and thus a particularly appropriate time to assess what NATO has accomplished so far and guess what its future will hold.

Peter Apps’ contribution to the occasion, Deterring Armageddon, is a straightforward and breezy history of NATO. A former Reuters correspondent and British army reservist, Apps has an eye for the dramatic, and the book’s almost 500 pages contain few longueurs despite much of it being concerned with bureaucratic debates among politicians with dimly remembered names.

Like a classical tragedy, the story of NATO’s creation, as retold by Apps, possessed unity of action, time and place. The men who assisted in its establishment and who shepherded it through its first years of existence were dramatic figures in their own right. There was Ernest Bevin, the unskilled labourer turned world statesman of the nuclear age. There was Dwight D. Eisenhower, for whom supreme military command of NATO provided a welcome escape from the ennui of peacetime university administration. And there was the middle-ranking Europhile American diplomat with the impossibly WASPish name of Theodore C. Achilles, who hoped the Atlantic alliance would one day turn into a federal union.

Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.

Yuan Yi Zhu is Assistant Professor of International Relations and International Law at Leiden University.… (mere)

On 14 June 2017, a 24-storey block of flats went up in flames. The fire climbed up cladding as flammable as solid petrol. Fire doors failed to self-close. No alarm rang out to warn sleeping residents. As smoke seeped into their homes, all were told to 'stay put'. Many did - and they died. It was a disaster decades in the making. Peter Apps exposes how a steady stream of deregulation, corporate greed and institutional indifference caused this tragedy. It is the story of a grieving community forsaken by our government, a community still waiting for change.… (mere)

Pretty good short book (Kindle Single) focused on Churchill's time in WW1 -- after the Gallipoli disaster, where he was forced out of government. He went to France and was commander (as a Lt Col) of an understrength battalion (6th Bn of the Royal Scots Fusiliers) while continuing to agitate politically in the UK by letter, by using his wife as proxy, and when on frequent leave. What struck me was just how little effort a unit commander could put into running his unit at the front, and how this was apparently tolerated; I'm happy we have a professional officer corps rather than political appointees in the modern US military. It was apparently really weird even then to have someone as famous and politically powerful as even a disgraced Churchill serving as a field grade officer, though, to the extent that his men often assumed he was a General (as he wore civilian clothes, maybe it was more plausible).… (mere)