Donald Armstrong The Reluctant Warriors - Signed Copy from Lord Portal’s Library

ARMSTRONG, Donald. The Reluctant Warriors: The Decline and Fall of the Carthaginian Empire.

New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1966.

First edition, first impression, signed by the author, from the library of Marshal of the Royal Air Force Lord Portal.

Octavo. Original tan cloth, spine lettered in red and black, map, original pictorial dust jacket priced $5.95. Foreword by Admiral Arleigh Burke. Signed by the author to the front free endpaper: “Donald Armstrong, April 9, 1967.”

An attractive signed copy of Armstrong’s military study of the Third Punic War, preserved in the library of Marshal of the Royal Air Force Charles Portal, 1st Viscount Portal of Hungerford. The exact circumstances of the association remain to be explored, but it is a highly fitting Portal provenance copy: Armstrong was a retired U.S. Army brigadier general whose wartime career lay in ordnance, industrial mobilisation, tank-automotive procurement and military education, while Lord Portal had stood at the summit of British air strategy during the Second World War and later occupied major post-war industrial roles. The shared terrain is not Carthage itself, but the larger problem of how states organise power, industry, war and survival.

Armstrong treats the final Punic struggle not simply as ancient history, but as a study in strategic failure. His preface presents the destruction of Carthage as a contest between a militaristic Rome and a commercially minded Carthage which had abandoned war as an instrument of policy, surrendered unconditionally, and disarmed itself. The jacket is explicit in its modern analogy, describing the book as a study of cold war, propaganda, subversion, terror, blackmail, unilateral disarmament and wars of attrition. This gives the volume a distinctly 1960s strategic edge, particularly interesting in a copy owned by Lord Portal.

Armstrong himself brought unusually practical authority to such a theme. During the Second World War he commanded or directed major U.S. Army industrial and training organisations, including the Tank-Automotive Center and the Army Industrial College, and later wrote on military and strategic history. The foreword by Admiral Arleigh Burke, wartime destroyer commander and later Chief of Naval Operations, further strengthens the book’s military credentials.

Condition: very good in a very good dust jacket. The cloth is clean and firm, with slight toning and light handling. Contents clean and bright. The jacket presents well, with gentle age-toning, minor rubbing, light spotting and small nicks to the spine ends and corners. A pleasing signed copy with distinguished Portal provenance.