Abstract
Traditionally Staff or War Colleges used battlefields from the past as training tools for officers. Analysing and discussing historical military confrontations on the location that these confrontations had taken place, is thought to increase the understanding of officers about the realities of war and improve their decision making in the future. In many ways, it is a very practice-orientated method of education military professionals. Its aim is not to turn the officers into academic military historians. A more reflective or academic approach to educational visits to battlefields seemed, from the military standpoint, unnecessary. But because in recent years, military education has reached the level of its civilian academic counterpart more and more, the battlefield tour has to adjust to that level as well. That is why we need more thorough academic reflection on this didactical tool. This process started about two decades ago, but needs to be developed further. Not only because of the creation of military educational curricula that follow civilian academic standards, but also to find affiliation with cultural historians and historians of memory, lieu de mémoire and tourism, who increase our understanding of the battlefields of the past. This chapter examines the Dutch effort to create a battlefield tour that both meets academic standards on bachelor level as well as gives cadets professional insights into the ‘realities of war’, which are relevant for their future work as subaltern officers. Based on the philosophy of the ‘thinking soldier’, but also rooted into the history of military education, this academic version of the battlefield tour should help officers in training developing critical thought and skills for academic analysis.
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- 1.
Osborne 2003.
- 2.
Cited in Reardon 1990.
- 3.
Caddick Adams 2010.
- 4.
Also published by the Strategic and Combat Studies Institute at Shrivenham as Occasional Paper 48.
- 5.
- 6.
Schoenmaker 2014.
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
Reardon 1990.
- 10.
The term was first used in 1913.
- 11.
The teacher behind this initiative was Gustave Fieberger.
- 12.
Klinkert (2016); the early proponents of combining military training with field visits were, in Russia, Nikolai Obruchev (1830–1904), in France Jules Lewal (1823–1908) and, in Canada, Sam Hughes (1853–1921), but all failed to make historical rides permanent elements within the staff course curriculum.
- 13.
Later head of the Combat Studies Institute.
- 14.
Opened in Washington in 1904, moved to Carlisle in 1951.
- 15.
Miller 1987.
- 16.
The Chief of Staff of the United States Army.
- 17.
Established in 1997 when the staff colleges of the three Services merged. The Normandy tour was part of the Staff College inheritance.
- 18.
See for instance the work of Martin Cook.
- 19.
- 20.
On the battle: Kamphuis and Amersfoort 2010.
- 21.
For instance, shortly before the new Breda curriculum was designed, the Naval College in Den Helder already organized week-long tours to the WW I trench lines in France, but also to Turkey and Berlin.
- 22.
Earlier tours took place in Belgium (World War I), Alsace-Lorraine (warfare 1870–1945) and Northwestern France (warfare 1650–1945).
- 23.
Echevarria 2005.
- 24.
Hamilton 1905.
- 25.
- 26.
Howard 1962.
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Klinkert, W. (2019). Bologna Meets the Battlefield – Using Historical Battlefields in Modern Academic Military Education. In: Klinkert, W., Bollen, M., Jansen, M., de Jong, H., Kramer, EH., Vos, L. (eds) NL ARMS Netherlands Annual Review of Military Studies 2019. NL ARMS. T.M.C. Asser Press, The Hague. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6265-315-3_14
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