Correlli Douglas Barnett CBE FRHistS FRSL FRSA (28 June 1927 – 10 July 2022) was an English military historian, who also wrote works of economic history, particularly on the United Kingdom's post-war "industrial decline". Early life Barnett was born on 28 June 1927 in Norbury, County Borough of Croydon, the son of Douglas and Kathleen Barnett. He was educated at Trinity School of John Whitgift in Croydon and then Exeter College, Oxford where he gained a second class honours degree in Modern History with his special subject being Military History and the Theory of War, gaining an MA in 1954. Barnett later said: "I can safely say there were only two books that I read at Oxford which strongly influenced my subsequent approach – one part of the Special Subject, and the other something which a friend recommended to me. The first was Clausewitz's On War, which was part of a Special Subject on military history and the theory of war. The other was Lewis Mumford's Technics and Civilization – if I read it again now I do not know what I would think of it, but certainly that was a starting point for my interest in looking at history in technological terms rather than in the constitutional/political terms prevalent at Oxford". From 1945 to 1948, he served in the British Army in Palestine during the Palestine Emergency as a sergeant in the Intelligence Corps. Work Military history Barnett worked as historical consultant and writer for the BBC television series The Great War (1963–64). He contributed numerous articles to various newspapers arguing against the 2003 Iraq War. He was the author of The Desert Generals, a book that attacked the perceived cult of British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery and assessed the roles of his sacked predecessors as commanders in the North Africa campaign, including Richard O'Connor, who drove the Italians from Cyrenaica in late 1940, and Field-Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck (whom he called "The Victor of Alamein"), who forced Rommel to a halt at the First Battle of El Alamein, only to be dismissed by Winston Churchill for his pains. He pointed out that Montgomery enjoyed massive superiority of men and materiel at the Second Battle of El Alamein, and described him as an "emotional cripple", a description, he noted in subsequent editions, borne out "in rich detail" by the Nigel Hamilton biography. However, Barnett's conclusions were attacked by Field