Gregory W. Pedlow

Dr. Gregory W. Pedlow is a professional historian with broad interests in modern European history. He has published numerous books and articles on German history, the history of NATO and the Cold War, the Waterloo Campaign of 1815, and the U-2 spy plane. His career has included teaching posts in academia and service as a historian in national and international posts, along with 28 years of service as a US Army Reserve officer. His final appointment as a professional historian was Chief of the Historical Office at NATO's Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), a post which he held from 1989 until 2015. After graduating Magna Cum Laude from Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1970, he earned a Master of Arts degree in History from the Johns Hopkins University and then served on active duty as a US Army Military Intelligence Corps officer from 1972 to 1974 (after which he remained active in the Army Reserve and ultimately reached the rank of Lieutenant Colonel before retiring from the Army in 1998). In late 1974 he returned to Johns Hopkins to work on his Ph.D. in Modern European History, and in 1975 he went to Germany to conduct the research for his dissertation with a fellowship from the German Academic Exchange Service. He completed his Ph.D. dissertation in 1979 and then carried out additional research to broaden the work's scope with the help of a post-doctoral fellowship from the Institute for European History in Mainz, Germany. Princeton University Press published this book as "The Survival of the Hessian Nobility, 1770-1870" in 1988. He returned to the U.S. at the end of 1980 to become an assistant professor of history at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and then left academia for government service at the end of 1985, when he joined the History Staff of the Central Intelligence Agency. While on the CIA History Staff he was co-author of a classified history which was subsequently released (originally with many deletions) as "The CIA and the U-2 Program, 1954-1974" and recently re-published with new maps and photographs and introductory material. In 1989 he was selected to become NATO's senior historian as Chief of the Historical Office at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), a post also known as the SHAPE Historian. During his service at SHAPE he published "NATO Strategy Documents, 1949-1969" (NATO, 1997) and a number of articles on NATO history and Cold War subjects such as the Second Berlin Crisis of 1959-1962. He retired from NATO in the summer of 2015 and now lives in Germany. While in Belgium he became very interested in the Waterloo Campaign of 1815 and assembled a large personal library on this subject, including many rare books and manuscripts. He frequently offered battlefield tours and staff rides to the personnel of SHAPE headquarters and distinguished visitors. In recognition of his research and writing on the Napoleonic Wars he was named a Fellow of the International Napoleonic Society. While attending the US Army War College during the 1980s he met Christopher Bassford, who was working on a book that would compare the writings of Clausewitz and Wellington about the Waterloo Campaign of 1815. Greg's detailed knowledge of the battle of Waterloo and his fluency in German made him an ideal collaborator in this project. After doing his own English language translation of Clausewitz's "Der Feldzug von 1815" (The Campaign of 1815) during the 1990s (the first one since a rough and incomplete translation done for the Duke of Wellington in 1840), he merged this with an independently prepared translation done by Daniel Moran in 2004 (who also joined the Bassford project), taking the best features of both translations. All three co-authors added essays and additional historical material, and the result was the book "On Waterloo: Clausewitz, Wellington and the Campaign of 1815" published in 2010. Greg's conclusion after working on translating Clausewitz for well over a decade was that "Clausewitz should only be read in translation!" due to the dense 19th-century academic style of writing, which is difficult reading even if you are very fluent in German, as Greg is (thanks to 48 years of speaking nothing but German with his wife, plus his academic studies in the German language and German history).