He was not an original theorist but a superb practitioner, who applied the lessons he learned from others with extraordinary effectiveness. Chandler establishes the characteristics that brought Napoleon an incredible run of success – losing just six of the 34 major battles that he fought between 17 – as well as identifying the sources of his eventual defeat.Ĭhandler sees Napoleon as a gifted improviser whose operations were nonetheless underpinned by certain consistent principles. Its subtitle, ‘The mind and method of history’s greatest soldier’, sums up the author’s view of his subject. Remarkably, The Campaigns of Napoleon was David Chandler’s first major publication rather than the culmination of a lifetime of research. He was also an authority on John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, whom he regarded as the greatest-ever British general. Chandler’s main area of expertise was the Napoleonic era – in addition to The Campaigns of Napoleon, he wrote a short biography of the emperor and specialist studies of the battles of Austerlitz, Jena, and Waterloo. He was head of the Department of War Studies at Sandhurst from 1980 to 1994, where his brilliance as a communicator enthused a generation of trainee officers. David Chandler served briefly in the British Army before dedicating himself to writing and teaching military history.
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