8vo. xii, 82pp, [2]. With half-title. Original publisher's blue cloth boards, lettered in gilt to spine, with original tricolour dust-wrapper. Lightly rubbed, with very light chipping to edges of dust-wrapper. Dust wrapper price-clipped. Internally clean and crisp.

The first edition of an analysis of Allied strategy in the second world war by celebrated military historian Sir Michael Eliot Howard (1922-2019), who over the course of his storied career held the position of Professor of War Studies at King's College, London, All Souls College, Oxford, Oriel College, and Yale. Howard, who revolutionised the field of War Studies through his sociological analyses of conflict and wartime strategy, began his career in the Coldstream Guards, fighting in the Italian campaign of WWII; later in life, he would stress the futility of applying historical military techniques to the conflicts of the present day.