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Hugh McManners 1973.
From an academic family, Joseph Hugh McManners was born in Oxford on 9th December 1952. Spending his early years in New South Wales and Tasmania, he was later educated at Magdalen College School before reading Geography at Oxford. Training at Sandhurst, and awarded half colours for rugby, he was commissioned into the Royal Artillery in 1973. In his youth, McManners played bass guitar with the Leicester rock band Medusa.
Posted as a captain to 148 (Meiktila)
Commando Forward Observation
Battery, he provided naval gunfire
support to special forces during the
Falklands War and was MiD. Soon after the war, he wrote Falklands Commando, which is regarded as one of the best junior officer memoirs of recent times and one of the first to touch on the psychological trauma of war. After attending the Army Staff course, McManners was promoted to major and worked in the MOD before commanding 17 (Corunna) Field Battery. He retired from the army in 1989.
Working as the defence correspondent for The Sunday Times, he also contributed to The Telegraph, Observer and Independent. Especially well received were his analysis of the controversial Northern Ireland shoot-to-kill policy and the leadership and conduct of the army adventurous training expedition that became lost in Low’s Gully on the island of Borneo in 1994. Concurrently he continued writing books, including, in 1992, the highly acclaimed The Scars of War. This book examines aspects of warfare that are rarely covered in official histories, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and is on the Staff College reading list. At the time of writing, he has completed 13 books on a range of special forces and survival subjects.
McManners also presented radio and television documentaries, including the Radio 4 series The Psychology of War. In 2011, he combined with neuroscientist Morten
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