On Victory and Defeat

Michael Eliot Howard was born in London on Nov. 29, 1922. His father, Geoffrey Eliot Howard, ran a family company manufacturing pharmaceutical and industrial chemicals. His mother was Edith Julia Emma Edinger, a socialite and, later, art collector. He became aware of the consequences of his mother¿s Jewish ancestry only when her relatives, a sad procession of refugees, began arriving in England in the 1930s, fleeing Nazi persecution.

Mr. Howard was educated at Wellington College and at Oxford University, where he studied history. In 1942, he joined the Army as a second lieutenant in the Coldstream Guards and was sent to join the campaign in Italy. In the postwar years, Mr. Howard returned to Oxford to complete his studies and, in the early 1950s, helped found the Department of War Studies at King¿s College. In 1960, he traveled widely in the United States on a grant from the Ford Foundation. He later taught for six months as a visiting professor at Stanford. In 1968, he moved to Oxford as a fellow of All Souls College, an elite center of postgraduate studies, and later held the Regius chair which he called the flagship of the historical profession at Oriel College, Oxford.

After two decades lecturing and writing in Oxford, he moved to Yale in 1989 to take up the Robert A. Lovett Chair of Military and Naval History until his retirement from the post in 1993. Michael Eliot Howard passed away on November 1, 2019 at the age of 97.

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