Exeter professor gets top history award

Duke of Wellington medal for WW2 book

An Exeter academic is the recipient of the country’s foremost prize for military history writing.

Professor Richard Overy has won the 2022 Duke of Wellington Medal for Military History, bestowed by The Royal United Services Institute, for his 1,000-page epic Blood and Ruins.

The book, published in 2021, argues that the Second World War should be framed as the violent end to almost a century of global imperial expansion, reaching its peak in the ambitions of Italy, Germany and Japan in the 1930s and early 1940s.

Professor Overy explores how war on such a huge scale was fought, supplied, paid for, supported by mass mobilization and morally justified.

“I wanted to write a history of the Second World War that had something new to say,” he said.

“I put the war into a much wider global context and with a much longer background, based on the idea that it was the last gasp of the imperialism that had characterised global politics since the mid-nineteenth century.

“I also wanted to ask large questions about the war: how is it possible to mobilize on such a remarkable scale? How did mass armies cope with the psychological and emotional impact on the millions of mainly civilians mobilised? Why was there such a high level of atrocity and crime? And finally, what technical or operational innovations explain victory by one side, defeat for the other?”

A Professor of History at the University of Exeter since 2004, Professor Overy has written extensively on the Second World War, and on the Royal Airforce, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union. Blood and Ruins took him five years to write and was based on exhaustive research of secondary literature in four languages, as well as official publications and memoirs.

The Duke of Wellington will present Professor Overy with his award in November.