Paul Birdsall Prize Recipients
The Paul Birdsall Prize in European Military and Strategic History was established in 1985 by a generous gift from Professor Hans Gatzke, who remained anonymous until his death.
The Birdsall Prize is currently awarded biennially for the most important work published in English on European military or strategic history since 1870. Paul Birdsall (d. 1970) was a historian of European diplomatic and military affairs and a foreign service officer.
2022
Bastiaan Willems, Violence in Defeat: The Wehrmacht on German Soil, 1944-1945 (Cambridge Univ. Press)
2020
Brandon M. Schechter, The Stuff of Soldiers: A History of the Red Army in World War II through Objects (Cornell Univ. Press)
2018
Tarak Barkawi, Soldiers of Empire: Indian and British Armies in World War II (Cambridge Univ. Press)
2016
Bruno Cabanes, The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism, 1918-1924 (Cambridge Univ. Press)
2014
Jacob Hamblin, Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism (Oxford Univ. Press)
2012
Edith Sheffer, Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain (Oxford Univ. Press)
2010
Jonathan Winkler, Nexus: Strategic Communications and American Security in World War I (Harvard Univ. Press)
2008
Jeffrey Engel, Cold War at 30,000 Feet: The Anglo-American Fight for Aviation Supremacy (Harvard Univ. Press)
2006
Mark Lawrence, Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam (Univ. of California Press)
2004
Robert Citino, Blitzkrieg to Desert Storm: The Evolution of Operational Warfare (Univ. Press of Kansas)
2002
Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria's Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (Oxford Univ. Press)
2000
Marc Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945-63 (Princeton Univ. Press)
1998
John Beeler, British Naval Policy in the Gladstone-Disraeli Era, 1866-1880 (Stanford Univ. Press)
1996
David Herrmann, The Arming of Europe and the Making of the First World War (Princeton Univ. Press)
1994
Leonard Smith, Between Mutiny and Obedience (Princeton Univ. Press)
1992
Dennis Showalter, Tannenberg: Clash of Empires (Archon/Shoe String Press)
1990
Brian Villa, Unauthorized.Action: Mountbatten and the Dieppe Raid (Oxford Univ. Press)
1986
Robert Doughty, The Seeds of Disaster: The Development of the French Army Doctrine, 1919-39 (Shoe String Press of Archeon Books)
2022 Birdsall Prize
Bastiaan Willems, Lancaster University
Violence in Defeat: The Wehrmacht on German Soil, 1944-1945 (Cambridge Univ. Press)
Grounded in meticulous and exhaustive research, Violence in Defeat analyzes the German army’s brutality against Germans at the end of the war. By focusing on the transformation of Königsberg into a “community of violence” in 1945, Bastiaan Willems connects Wehrmacht soldiers’ participation in genocide on the Eastern Front to their destructive behavior toward their own society. This important first book by an early career scholar yields fresh insights into the dynamics of total war and mass violence.