Professor Gary Sheffield MA PhD FRHistS FRSA FSAHR is Visiting Professor in the Defence Studies Department. Patron of the Guild of Battlefield Guides, and a past President of the Western Front Association, he shared the 2002 Templer Medal for his contribution to David French and Brian Holden Reid (eds.) The British General Staff: Innovation and Reform. His best-known book is the bestselling Forgotten Victory: The First World War – Myths and Realities (2001). Educated at the University of Leeds (BA 1982, MA 1995) and KCL (PhD 1994), he retired as Wolverhampton University’s Professor of War Studies in 2021 and in 2022 rejoined DSD, where he worked from 1999 to 2006 before taking up a Chair at the University of Birmingham. Gary is actively involved with the KCL military historians’ research agenda, including the Sir Michael Howard Centre for the History of War, and, as a Sessional Lecturer, does some teaching (including on staff rides), marking and supervision. He finds mentoring colleagues (at all stages of their careers) to be particularly rewarding.

Research Interests

• Military history of the British Empire c.1750-1960
• First and Second World Wars
• Command and Leadership
• Land and Joint Warfare
• War, Politics, and Society

Gary specialises in the military history of 1914-45 and is completing Civilian Armies: The Experience of British and Dominion Soldiers in the two world wars for Yale University Press. He has also published in the fields of war and society, and command and leadership. He is currently researching into the origins of Joint Warfare.

Publications

Books

• Douglas Haig: From the Somme to Victory (Aurum, 2016)
• Command and Morale: The British Army on the Western Front 1914-18 (Praetorian Press, 2014)
• Douglas Haig: War Diaries and Letters 1914-18 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005; paperback edition, 2006). Co-editor with John Bourne
• Leadership in the Trenches: Officer-Man Relations, Morale and Discipline in The British Army in the Era of the First World War (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000)
  
  

Book chapters

• Wendy Ugolini, Gary Sheffield and John Buckley (eds.) Global Narratives of the Second World War: Fresh Perspectives on the Experience of Conflict (Abingdon: Routledge, in press).
• ‘Between Gallipoli and D-Day: Canadian Soldiers’ Experience of the Dieppe Raid, 1942’. In Wendy Ugolini, Gary Sheffield and John Buckley (eds.) Global Narratives of the Second World War: Fresh Perspectives on the Experience of Conflict (Abingdon: Routledge, in press).
• The ‘Fifth Column’, Cohesion and Identity in the British and South African Armies in the Second World War’. In Wendy Ugolini, Gary Sheffield and John Buckley (eds.) Global Narratives of the Second World War: Fresh Perspectives on the Experience of Conflict (Abingdon: Routledge, in press). Co-authored with Jonathan Fennell.
• ‘The London Yeomanry in the Era of the Great War: Home Service, Gallipoli and Palestine' in Charles Fair, Richard Hendry, and Tom Thorpe (eds.), London Pride: The London Territorial Force in Peace and War, 1908-1921, Vol. II (Warwick: Helion, forthcoming)
• ‘The Second World War in Global History’. In Paul R. Bartop (ed.), The Routledge History of the Second World War (Routledge, 2022)
• ‘Manpower, Training, and the Battlefield Leadership of British Army Officers in the Era of the Two World Wars’. In Douglas E. Delaney, Mark Frost and Andrew L. Brown (eds.), Manpower and the Armies of the British Empire in the Two World Wars (Cornell University Press, 2021)
• 'Strategic Command’. In Jay Winter (ed.) The Cambridge History of the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Co-author with Stephen Badsey.
• ‘The Australians at Pozières: Command and Control on the Somme, 1916’. In David French & Brian Holden Reid (eds.), The British General Staff: Innovation and Reform (London: Cass, 2002)
  
  

Research articles

• ‘All Pretty Well Fed Up and Worn Out’? Morale, Combat Motivation, and the ‘Marshall Effect’ in VIII Corps at Gallipoli’, British Journal for Military History Vol 5, No 1 (2019)

Media articles

• 'Total warriors: Contrasting views of generalship', TLS, 7 August 2026
• 'The power of the citizen-soldier', Engelsberg Ideas, 12 December https://engelsbergideas.com/essays/the-power-of-the-citizen-soldier/
• "Beyond the longest day: How the US snatched the glory in Normandy', TLS, 13 June 2025

Teaching

• Advanced Command and Staff Course MA
• Royal College of Defence Studies MA
• Intermediate Command and Staff Course (Land)

PhD Supervison 

• Military History 1750-1945

PhD Students

• Lucy Betteridge-Dyson (second supervisor)

Professor Gary Sheffield's PURE Profile.

Professor Gary Sheffield's website.