Peter Caddick-Adams


Peter Caddick-Adams TD, VR, FRHistS, FRGS, is a British academic historian, author and broadcaster who specializes in military history. He is best known for his several books, mostly about 20th Century warfare, television work, and battlefield tours.

Background

He is the son of John Caddick-Adams and Joy Mary Caddick-Adams, and grandson of Major Charles Caddick-Adams, JP, all of Brampton Lodge, Newcastle-under-Lyme, in the county of Staffordshire. The house was in possession of the family for 110 years before being sold in 2008. His grandfather and great-uncle, Captain Thomas Geoffrey Caddick-Adams, were both awarded the Military Cross during World War 1 serving with the North Staffordshire Regiment. His maternal grandfather was Clifford Arthur Martin, fourth Bishop of Liverpool and Chaplain to King George VI. His cousin is Vice Admiral Paul Bennett.

Military career

He was born in Chelsea, and educated between 1974-78 at Shrewsbury School in Shropshire. He then attended the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, where studied under Professor Richard Holmes, later his director and mentor at Cranfield University. He was commissioned into The Staffordshire Regiment, a regular regiment of the British Army, in 1979. This was a regiment in which several family members had served. He joined The Queen’s Own Mercian Yeomanry, a cavalry unit of the British Territorial Army, in 1985, was promoted Captain in 1994 and Major in 2000. He was awarded the Territorial Decoration in 1998. A fellow officer was the MP, Sir Desmond Swayne.
In 1996-7, Caddick-Adams was mobilised as an army reservist and served as the official NATO and SHAPE Historian in Bosnia with the IFOR and SFOR peace keeping missions, based in Sarajevo. He was attached to the staff of the US Commander, General William W. Crouch. He wrote about some of his experiences in 1998. One of his entertaining letters home, written from Sarajevo in 1996, appeared in Behind the Lines by Andrew Carroll.
In 2003, Caddick-Adams served in Operation TELIC, during the Iraq War, as the official UK Historian, based at CENTCOM in Qatar and later in Basra, where he was on the staff of the UK Contingent Commander and at the USAF Tallil Air Base at Nasiriyah, near the ancient city of Ur, which he visited. He also reported for The Sandy Times forces newspaper. Latterly, he served with the Media Operations Group, when it was commanded by Alastair Bruce of Crionaich. In 2010, Caddick-Adams worked for ISAF in Afghanistan, under General David Petraeus, and in the same year, he was awarded the Volunteer Reserves Service Medal.

Academic career

Caddick-Adams worked for several years for the family business of John Caddick & Son Ltd before switching to an academic career. He is a descendant of the Adams family, first recorded as owning land in Staffordshire in 1307, who have been active in the pottery industry since 1590. In 1985 he was elected a Councillor of the Ancient Corporation of Hanley and helped found the National Saucer Protection League, which campaigns to ‘protect the humble cup and saucer against the relentless global march of the mug’. He read War Studies and History at The University of Wolverhampton, graduating with a First Class Honours degree in 1997, and was awarded his PhD by Cranfield University in 2007. He subsequently worked as a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Birmingham and for Kellogg College, at the University of Oxford.
From May 1999 to December 2017, he taught at the Joint Services Command and Staff College, the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom, and at the Security Studies Institute, and later the Centre for International Security & Resilience, of Cranfield University as Lecturer in Military and Security Studies, where he again worked under the military historian Professor Richard Holmes. He was also Academic Director of Air Power studies at RAF Halton. He is currently Director of the Defence & Global Security Institute and Visiting Lecturer at the Centre for Historical Research, School of Social, Historical & Political Studies, University of Wolverhampton.
In 2003 Caddick-Adams provided expert witness testimony to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. He has been a Member of the British Commission for Military History since 1995 and the International Guild of Battlefield Guides since 2004. He has led more than 500 battlefield tours since 1984 for groups of civilians, military personnel, politicians, veterans and royalty. In 2010, Caddick-Adams was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society , and in 2017 became a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. He was a Member of the Education and Learning Committee of Waterloo 200, Research Consultant to the Fields of Battle, Lands of Peace 14-18 photographic project, and serves as a Consultant for Royal Mail Commemorative Stamp Issues and is an Honorary Patron of the annual Chalke Valley History Festival. He is also a member of the American Historical Association, the Society for Military History, the Battlefields Trust and Patron of two 19th Century British defensive structures, Fort Luton in Kent and Shoreham Redoubt in West Sussex.

Journalism and filmography

Apart from his books, Caddick-Adams has made podcasts or written for The Daily Telegraph, The Independent, The Sunday Times, The Daily Mirror, The Wall Street Journal, The Field, BBC History Magazine, Britain at War magazine, History Today, The American, The Week, and BBC online publications. He commentates for BBC News, Sky News and Euronews on national events, current defence issues and military history. Caddick-Adams has contributed to numerous documentaries, including Battlefield Detectives, The 100 Greatest War Films , 21st Century Warfare, Weaponology , , Battle of Britain: The Real Story , Combat Countdown , The Battle for Malta , Normandy '44: The Battle Beyond D-Day , Nazi Megastructures , Gary Lineker: My Grandad’s War , Frontlines, World War II By Drone and Decoded. In 1994, Caddick-Adams introduced the BBC Radio 4 five-part series Book Of The Week: Countdown To D-Day. In 2012, it was announced that he would be the Historical Consultant for a forthcoming movie about the Battle of Monte Cassino, to be directed by John Irvin. Caddick-Adams introduced the game Company of Heroes: Ardennes Assault on its release in 2014.

Politics

Caddick-Adams worked for a year as parliamentary researcher for the Conservative Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton South West, Nick Budgen, and was his election agent in the General Election of 1983 and 1987. In 2009 he joined the UK National Defence Association, a politically independent pressure group which supports Britain's armed forces and advocates increasing the UK defence budget.

Authorship

His 2011 work, Monty and Rommel: Parallel Lives about Field Marshals Bernard Montgomery and Erwin Rommel was praised by historian Michael Korda in The Daily Beast for ‘its readability and very rare fair-mindedness’. Andro Linklater writing in The Spectator assessed it a "discursive and highly rewarding book". In 2012 Caddick-Adams published Monte Cassino: Ten Armies in Hell, which was assessed by The Washington Post as ‘an excellent account of one of the bloodiest and most violent battles in human history’. Alexander Rose, writing in The Wall Street Journal called it ‘exceptional’. It has since been translated into Polish , Italian and Spanish . It was shortlisted as British Army Military Book of the Year for 2012. In reviewing Snow and Steel, Caddick-Adams’s 2014 work on the Battle of The Bulge, Professor Chris Bellamy of the University of Greenwich observed that ‘Caddick-Adams is probably the best military historian of his generation, combining a sweeping command of politics and strategy with authoritative detail worthy of Ian Fleming’. Sir Max Hastings in The Sunday Times wrote that ‘Caddick-Adams knows more about the Bulge than any other historian I have read...I admire his originality. Snow and Steel offers an authoritative narrative of the drama.’
In National Geographic magazine, Caddick-Adams explained why he felt Hitler was influenced by the 19th Century opera composer Richard Wagner for his 1944 attack. “In Wagner’s operas, a huge amount of the action takes place in woods and forests. This taps into old Nordic mythology - that woods are a place of testing for human beings. So it was no accident that the attack against the Americans was launched from large forests, in heavy fog.” In 2019, Sand & Steel was released for the 75th anniversary of the D-Day landings, about which Trevor Royle in The Herald wrote that it ‘is destined to become a standard work on this iconic battle, and it well deserves that accolade’. Jerry D. Lenaburg, writing in the New York Journal of Books noted the work questioned “many of the long-held myths of D-Day. This critique is long overdue and actually adds value to the overall narrative as these myths are either corrected or validated.” It was shortlisted for British Army Military Book of the Year 2020 , The Templer Medal of the Society for Army Historical Research, and the RUSI Duke of Wellington Medal for Military History, 2020.

Publications

By God They Can Fight: A History of The 143rd Infantry Brigade, 1908-1995
The Fight For Iraq
Monty and Rommel: Parallel Lives
Monte Cassino: Ten Armies in Hell
Snow & Steel: The Battle of The Bulge 1944-45
Sand & Steel: A New History of D-Day

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