John Laffin (21 September 1922 – 23 September 2000) was an Australian 20th century military historian. Early life John Alfred Charles Laffin was born on 21 September 1922 at Mosman, Sydney, Australia. Both of his parents had served with the British Imperial military forces in World War I, his father as a commissioned infantry officer, and his mother as a nurse. In the late 1930s Laffin was employed as a trainee journalist on the staff of Smith's Weekly, one of Australia's most patriotic newspaper-style magazines, and the Wagga Wagga Advertiser. In 1941 he enlisted as a Private into the 2nd Australian Imperial Force, subsequently being commissioned as an officer and going on to see active service in the New Guinea campaign in World War II. Journalism, education and writing career After the war, Laffin worked for a number of newspapers and magazines and began his own feature service and editing unit. In the mid-1950s he relocated with his family to the United Kingdom, where he resided for 40 years, earning a living initially as a school master, teaching History, English and Geography in secondary schools, one of which was Mayfield College in East Sussex (where he taught in the 1960s whilst living in Herstmonceux). In the late 1950s he attempted to establish himself as a fiction writer, publishing several novellas under the pseudonyms 'Carl Dekker' and 'Mark Napier', but without commercial success. In the early 1960s, while still working as a teacher, he began writing military histories, which after a few years sold well enough to allow him to abandon teaching and earn a living as a professional military historian and writer, as well as intermittent pieces of journalism in the field. Laffin was a prodigious author, producing works - many of which possessed a personally opinionated viewpoint of their subject matter - regularly for publication on a range of modern military history subjects, ranging from conflicts in the Middle East, the Falklands War, and several works on World War II, but the central subject that he returned to repeatedly throughout his career over the next 40 years was the British experience of World War I. He travelled extensively in Europe, especially along the old battlefields of World War I's Western Front. In the field of World War I history he was trenchantly of "The Donkeys" school of thought on the subject of British Generalship, castigating the British Army High