Duke of Wellington Medal for Military History 2025

We are delighted to announce that the winner of the 2025 Duke of Wellington Medal for Military History is Keith Lowe for his book Naples 1944: War, Liberation and Chaos in Italy During the Second World War, published by William Collins.

The Duke of Wellington Medal for Military History is awarded on an annual basis for the best English language writing in the discipline. This year, we had a highly competitive field of over 70 entries, which were then whittled down to a short-list of five.

Praising Naples 1944, Professor Michael Clarke, who heads the panel of judges, said:

"Keith Lowe’s book, Naples 1944: War, Liberation and Chaos is a great achievement of military history writing. The liberation of Naples was only one part of a bigger campaign that was part of a bigger war that was driving to its cataclysmic conclusion in the following year. It is easily ignored, or taken for granted, or just assumed, like so much else in war, to be necessarily ‘messy’. But Keith Lowe’s book presents a microcosm of what total war really is when forces sweep across an ancient city. Naples 1944 is forensic in its approach; the result of many years of scholarly work and understanding of the Neapolitan context in which the liberation took place. Keith Lowe challenges a number of previous assumptions about this phase of the war. He operates in an inter-disciplinary way and puts dramatic new historical material into the public domain."

Keith Lowe is a British historian and bestselling author specialising in the Second World War and its aftermath, best known for Savage Continent and The Fear and the Freedom, and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society who frequently contributes to media, lectures internationally, and is recognised for his meticulously researched studies of post-war Europe.