Admiral John (Jacky) Fisher radically transformed the Royal Navy in terms of its people, doctrine, equipment and structures. Dr Richard Dunley explains how.

Few service chiefs have had such a profound effect on their service as Admiral of the Fleet, Baron Fisher of Kilverstone, Chief of the British Royal Navy in 1904-1910, and again in 1914-1915, before resigning in frustration over Churchill's Gallipoli campaign.

Joining a wooden-hulled, sail-powered Royal Navy at the age of 13, by the time he retired aged 74, his Service was operating steel-hulled, oil-powered and technologically advanced battleships, with submarine and aviation arms. He was at the forefront of many of these reforms, but his impact went beyond the technology, overseeing profound changes in naval strategy (working alongside Julian Corbett - Season 1, Episode 1), doctrine, force disposition, personnel and training. Like other great strategic leaders, he was adept at shaping the political environment, securing for the Royal Navy the lion's share of the defence budget. Yet his legacy is mixed - his Royal Navy was undoubtedly a stronger, more capable fighting force but, according to our guest, was institutionally damaged and divided, and took some time to recover.

Dr Richard Dunley is a senior lecturer in history and maritime strategy at the University of New South Wales, Canberra, where he teaches at the Australian Defence Force Academy. His research focuses on the relationship between navies and technology, with a particular emphasis on the Royal Navy in the early 20th century.

Professor Charles Forsdick tells the story of Toussaint Louverture, who led Haiti’s successful and highly adaptive slave revolt against the 18th century’s great powers.

Toussaint Loverture was a force of nature. A former slave, he led the revolt in Saint Domingue between 1791– 1802 that resulted in Haitian independence. As a self-taught military commander, he was ever present in the fight, adapting his tactics, employing psychological warfare techniques and harnessing the island’s tropical diseases to degrade the French occupying forces. A man of contradictions, he was variously a Spanish monarchist and a French republican who played the great powers of Britain, France, Spain and the United States to secure the space and resources for his revolution to succeed.

Despite leading one of the only successful slave revolts in history, he was less successful as a ruler, where the traits that made him such a great military leader, isolated him from his people. Internal divisions within the revolutionary army led to his capture by Napoleon’s forces and death in captivity in France a few months before Haiti achieved full independence in 1803. For this reason, the Haitian’s know him as ‘the Precursor’ and reserve the title, ‘Liberator’, for one of his lieutenants, Dessalines.

Professor Charles Forsdick is the Drapers Chair of French at the University of Cambridge. He writes extensively about post-colonial memory in Francophone countries, and is the co-author of Toussaint Louverture, A Black Jacobin in the Age of Revolution, with Christian Høgsbjerg published by Pluto Press in 2017.

Jean-Marc Lieberherr examines Jean Monnet’s vital role in securing US arms for Britain and France during the Second World War and in driving international cooperation.

A committed internationalist, long before becoming one of the founding fathers of the EU, Jean Monnet played a crucial role in enabling cooperation between countries in two world wars. As a member of the Executive Committee of the Allied Maritime Transport Council during the First World War, he helped coordinate shipping between the Allied powers of France, Great Britain, Italy and, from 1918, the US, before becoming the Deputy Secretary General of the League of Nations in 1919.

During the subsequent world conflagration, , Monnet, trusted by Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle, coordinated arms procurement from the US through the Anglo-French Co-Ordinating Committee, the British Purchasing Committee and the Combined Production and Resources Board. According to economist John Maynard Keynes, Monnet’s work shortened that war by one year.

After 1945, Monnet continued seeking internationalist solutions, connecting the French and German markets under the European Coal and Steel Community. Seeing how the principles of cooperation could be applied more broadly, he advocated for a European Defence Community during the Korean War. While this attempt at European defence integration failed, his work inspired the founding treaties of the EU. He became the first ‘Honorary Citizen of Europe’ in 1976.

Jean-Marc Lieberherr is the founding chairman of the Jean Monnet Institute (JMI), which is devoted to promoting Monnet’s historical heritage. Before creating the JMI in 2021, he had a career with large international groups such as LVMH, Unilever and Rio Tinto.

Further Reading

Jean Monnet, Memoirs (London: Harper Collins, 1978).

François Duchêne, Jean Monnet: The First Statesman of Interdependence (New York, NY: W W Norton, 1994).

Robert R Nathan, ‘An Unsung Hero of World War II’, in Douglas Brinkley and Clifford Hackett (eds), Jean Monnet: The Path to European Unity (New York, NY: St Martin’s Press, 1991).

W W Rostow, ‘Jean Monnet: The Innovator As Diplomat’ in Gordon A Craig and Francis L Loewenheim (eds), The Diplomats, 1939-1979 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 257–88.

Sherrill Brown Wells, Jean Monnet: Unconventional Statesman (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Reinner, 2011).

Institut Jean Monnet Website, available at: https://institutjeanmonnet.eu/en/.

Professor Mark Wilson explains how governments, industry and the military collaborated to forge the US’s ‘arsenal of democracy’ during the Second World War.

The prevailing myth is that the miracle of US industrial production was achieved by individual business leaders who were freed from the dead hand of government. The truth is more nuanced. The impressive efforts of business leaders relied on their workforce, government and the military. It was also a truly international effort. French and British orders started before the European war and long before Pearl Harbor, thereby expanding US industrial capacity and providing a springboard for success once the US was mobilised.

This episode’s guest, Professor Mark Wilson, is an historian from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He specialises in in military-industrial relations and war mobilisations in US history, having written important books on US Civil War mobilisation and the business and politics of US industrial mobilisation for the Second World War.

Fighting for her rightful inheritance of the English crown, Empress Matilda (1110–1125) proved to be a grandmaster in the Anarchy’s bloody chess game.

The war of dynastic succession in 12th century England and Normandy is known as the Anarchy. (1135-1154). Barons and nobles of all ranks joined in the family quarrel over the succession to Henry I. Matilda, Henry’s only surviving legitimate child and widow of Holy Roman Emperor Henry V, challenged her cousin and rival Stephen of Blois, who managed to seize the crown. This was a game of chess or chequers, in which seizing castles and fortified towns was what mattered, as well as bringing nobles with their retainers over to one’s side. Matilda played astutely but only won when she ceased to pursue the crown for herself and demanded it for her son. She continued as the power behind Henry II’s throne from Normandy.

This episode’s guest, Dr Catherine Hanley, is the author of the latest scholarly biography of Empress Matilda, Matilda: Empress, Queen, Warrior (Yale University Press, 2019). Holding a PhD in Medieval Studies from the University of Sheffield, she is the author of several history books.

Modern Turkey was forged by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk from the Ottoman Empire’s collapse. In this episode, Dr Mesut Uyar joins us to discuss Atatürk’s legacy of strategic leadership.

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was the most important Turkish political leader since the Ottoman Empire’s expansion was checked at Vienna in 1683. A career officer educated from the age of 12 in military academies – where he excelled, earning the nickname Kemal (‘the Perfect’) – he saw service in Tripolitania (modern Libya) and the Balkans. He entered the world stage during the First World War, especially for his command of the Ottoman 19th Division defending the Gallipoli peninsula against the Allied forces’ landings in 1915–16.

His ascent was secured through his command in the war with Greece over the frontiers of the Turkish rump-state in 1919–1922, which ended in a population exchange. His military successes paved the way for his political leadership, which was inspired by French Republican views. He transformed Turkey through a profound programme of modernisation, which earned him a new title, Ata-Türk – father of Turkey. Despite his small stature, he cast a long shadow over Turkey that endures today.

Dr Mesut Uyar, our guest for this episode, graduated from the Turkish Military Academy and from Istanbul University (Political Sciences). As a Turkish career military officer twice wounded in action, he served as an instructor in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and did several tours for the UN in Georgia and as a staff officer in Afghanistan. He has lectured on Ottoman military history at the University of New South Wales, Canberra, and at Antalya Bilim University. He is currently a visiting professor at the University of New South Wales, Canberra.

H.R. McMaster shares his extensive experience of strategy-making and strategic leadership as a military officer, academic and former United States’ national security advisor.

‘The Iconoclast General’, H.R. McMaster has a distinguished record serving his country. Commissioned from West Point into the armoured cavalry, he retired as a Lieutenant General after thirty-four years’ service, including operational service in Iraq and Afghanistan. His success in fighting counter-insurgency campaigns saw him involved in the development of the United States’ Army and Marine Corps’ counter-insurgency field manual (FM3-24). One of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in April 2014, he was described by Lieutenant General (retired) David Barno as ‘the 21st century Army's pre-eminent warrior-thinker’.

Appointed by President Trump, H.R. McMaster served as the 25th National Security Advisor between February 2017 to March 2018. His account of his time in the White House is described with typical balance and candour in At War With Ourselves. Consultation, bringing top leaders together and getting them to thrash out what the problem is and what one should do about it, and then to issue directives to a (sometimes) reluctant bureaucracy, that was his recipe. In this episode, he describes how the National Security Strategy of 2017 was negotiated during his time in office, the methodology, some of its main tenets, and how it was translated into policy making. And how an historical perspective offers lessons and consolation today.

A historian by training, he has a PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on the flaws and inadequacies of U.S. strategy in the Vietnam War, and now lectures at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. He hosts the podcast series Battlegrounds: Vital Perspectives on Today’s Challenges and is a regular on GoodFellows, both of which are produced by the Hoover Institution. He is a Distinguished University Fellow at Arizona State University.

The world’s first independent air force owes its survival and shape to its ‘father’, Hugh Trenchard. We explore how with the RAF Museum’s Dr Harry Raffal.

Described as ‘the architect and patron saint of modern air power’, Marshal of the RAF Viscount Hugh Trenchard (1873–1956) was the first Chief of the Air Staff (January–April 1918 and 1919–1930).

An army officer badly wounded in the Boer War, he was among the first British military pilots and the frontline commander of the Royal Flying Corps during the First World War.

The RAF was formed on 1 April 1918, and Trenchard set firm foundations for its survival and development, often against bitter hostility from the other Services. His administrative skills, realism, tenacity and willingness to be unpopular created an organisation that saved the nation during the Battle of Britain.

His friend TE Lawrence (Season 3, Episode 7) argued that ‘The RAF is the finest individual effort in history. No other man has been given a blank sheet and told to make a Service from the ground up. It is your single work…’

Following retirement from the RAF, Trenchard was appointed as Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, where he set about a substantial reform agenda with the same single-mindedness.

Dr Harry Raffal is Head of Collections and Research at the RAF Museum. His doctorate, from the University of Hull, explores RAF and Luftwaffe operations during the evacuation of Dunkirk. He is a Committee member of the RAF Historical Society and the British Commission for Military History, and Vice-Chair of the Royal Aeronautical Society’s Aeronautical Heritage Group.