How and when did you get hooked on history?
Well, I think it was always. The largest room in my parents’ house is the library. Both my Mom and Dad have a wide range of books including CIA country studies, army field manuals of many equipment types as well as the typical titles like “Guns of August”. That said aviation history, technical details and current events were my first big interest. My Father and I collected Janes series research books on military aviation and naval ships. I also was very interested in models of aircraft and fighting ships. This morphed to an interest in artillery by the time I was about 12.
What role does history play or has it played in your personal life?
3. How does history play a part of your professional life/career?
(I have blended these two answers together because for me they seem to intertwine.)
I have collected a military uniforms and equipment since I was eight and bought my first heavy artillery piece at age 13, with some logistical assistance from my Father. In the Boy Scouts we conducted battlefield walks on a number of American Civil War battlefields. The research, terrain analysis and study of the equipment capabilities was all a part of it, and this fascinated me. I was a pre-teen as the Falklands War took place. This was the first war covered by 24-hour news. I do not think I ever slept. I just sat at the TV with my Janes research books on aircraft, ships, armor and artillery and speculated about what the UK and Argentinian militaries would do next. I joined the Georgia Army National Guard while in college and became fascinated with the battalion and regimental history of my unit. I went on to complete a four-year degree in history. Following graduation, I met a girl in Savannah, Georgia and I decided I wanted live near her. I had volunteered at Coastal Heritage Society in Savannah while in college so I contacted them with the hope they would hire me as a full-time historian. Amazingly, they did. Unfortunately, the pay was just minimum wage, but I was both a commercial artist and historian and I could almost pay the bills. I even got the girlfriend a job with Coastal Heritage Society. She was a quick learner and did quite well. For a few years I learned a fantastic amount of local history and how to interpret this to different age and ability groups. It was a tremendous learning experience, but the pay was just too low to stay. I moved on to a graduate program in education and got T-5 certifications as both a history teacher and fine arts teacher from the State of Georgia and Department of Defense. With both the museum and master’s in education experience I developed a constructivist style of teaching. Over the last two decades, I have served many years in the Middle East as both a military officer and as a project manager for technology demonstrator sensor systems. In times when I was not engrossed in these duties, I explored the area around me and of course read and tried to figure out how the culture and physical terrain around me had played a part in history. I tended to focus more on the last 125 years only diving into the enormity of that region’s history to understand the big cultural landscape, such as the Sunni verses Shia divide. On my own, I began to study the part of the battle for Baghdad where a soldier that had a connection with me had been killed. He was the first in that conflict to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor. My command found out what I was doing, and I was “ask” to volunteer to conduct staff rides (battlefield walks) on this site and teach NCOs and officers of the unit about these events, in my free time. Our unit location was only miles from the location where SFC Paul Ray Smith had been killed, so it was easy enough logistically. While I resisted this at first, it was a great program and helped me cope with a lot of difficult things ongoing at that time. Not having free time was actually best then. Recently, I was back in the region for my seventh combat tour and well, it happened again. I was board and started studying the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1995. I found a copy of the Iraqi brigade commander’s diary that was the spearhead of the invasion, and in these notes, I found something I had not expected. It showed a well-conceived plan with real insight and personal courage. I had earlier found interviews with the Kuwait brigade and small unit commanders about their response to this action. I started exploring again. I say again because some of this I had started twenty years earlier when I lived in the region as a project manager. I found where most of the engagements took place and slowly started to make sense of it all. I even got the G-2 (division level intelligence organization) to translate the diary of the Iraqi brigade commander. I also found that he had recently been a military college professor in Jordan and made a real attempt to find him but to no eval. Then, as before, the command found out what I was doing and I was assigned a significant additional duty. On top of being the senior targeting officer for this deployed division (28,000 troops), I was now the command historian of the division and was assigned 37 historians to lead in an effort to write the division task force history as we delt with the air evacuation of Afghanistan. Of course, I also incorporated an extensive staff ride program to study not only the 1990 invasion but the regional history and a program to convey the local culture to the junior small unit leaders of the division. It worked and we published a 700 page classified history and the staff ride program was regularly praised by the command. Of course, I could not leave it at that. Jordan (the Hashemite Kingdom) was also within our division’s area of operations, so I started working on research on the Arab Revolt (Arab Awakening) 1916-18. This event is most well known through the life of T.E. Lawrence “Lawrence of Arabia”. I flew to Jordan onboard a military transport aircraft and stated my study. Or at least I did after being quarantined for COVID. I traveled throughout Jordan with some time dealing with my other targeting duties but always with an eye to what had happened here during the Arab Revolt that shattered Ottoman rule of the region. I even got my boss, who was not a fan of history, enthusiastic when we visited the Amman train depot that had previously been the hub of Ottoman logistic reach into the region. To make this long story shorter, I turned the staff ride plan for Jordan over to the next command and today they are continuing this work. I am back home in Washington DC now and when I have free time, I do what I aways do. I research and try to understand what is around me. I also restore the artillery in my private collection and try to better understand its effect on history. That part of the story can be seen on my web site: https://www.lovettartillery.com
Why is studying/knowing history important?
We have only been here a short while. The things we accomplish in our lives are possible because of the technology and concepts developed by the generations that lived before us. Understanding how these technologies developed, how the concepts we follow day to day came about, and the chain of events that lead us to our current situation, helps understand what is otherwise chaos. In other words, if you at least have a reasonable understanding of the last 125 years, little in today’s news cycle will really surprise you.
What is your favorite period or aspect of history to learn about and why?
To me, it is from the invention of modern steel to today. Why steel? Well, from that point many of the concepts that could only exist on paper, could suddenly be functional and have great influence. An unbelievable number of inventions cascaded out from this one spark. Human history moved quite slowly before steel. After steel, the cycle of innovation is so rapid it is beyond the capacity for an individual to fully comprehend. It is not boring at all.
How did you become a military collector and what do you do with it all?
As mentioned earlier, the house I grew up in was filled with books of all types. Country studies and manuals with technical illustrations first caught my imagination. I love working with my hands and building from my imagination and the complexity of these devices was fascinating to me. With it came a desire to understand how they were used and why.
What do you do with it. Well, it is a collection for study of technology in the timeline of history. What were the capabilities and limitations of artillery during a particular era is the question the collection answers. Because it is not a collection open to the public, I use the web site Lovett Artillery Collection to allow others to see much of what I have and access my research. At first, I worried that if I put the web site out there everyone will just steal my photos and ideas. That happens on a small scale but what I gain from it is far greater. It opens my collection up to the full world of people with some interest in this subject, from authors struggling to describe the life of an artilleryman in a storyline, to modelers striving for more realism in their work, to others restoring similar pieces. I now regularly correspond with people all over the world through this medium. We share research and ideas and I learn far more than I ever would have keeping it all to myself.
The collection is now owned by me. Someday, I will not be around, and it will have another owner or owners. My hope is that that will be my sons. Regardless of who the next owner is, it is my hope that these systems will remain together and that the integral parts will not be yet again dispersed.
Are there some pieces in particular that you are searching for, a collector’s holy grail so to speak?
So, I need to explain my concept first, what is the mission for the collection then maybe it will make sense. From an early age I was very disappointed with museums. You would go see them and well, there is a cannon. I have no idea how it works, because it no longer does. I have no idea about the systems that allowed it to do what was intended because they are nowhere around the exhibit. Museums almost always fail miserably. The analogy I use is that it is like taking a kid that is interested in biology to see a mounted deer head on the wall and saying, “here kid, this is a deer”. No, to understand a deer you need to see and understand not only its full body but how it interacted in its environment. What made it able to live and survive. A cannon is like that. Just seeing it alone is nothing. There is a vast system of systems that make it capable of movement from place to place on the battlefield. There is a complex system of mathematical instruments that must be used to calculate how the gun/howitzer’s projectile can hit a target miles away, despite the rotation of the Earth as the projectile flies along, despite the changes in wind direction in the strata of air the projectile passes through, etc. I collect not only the artillery piece but its full system of systems that make it functional on the battlefield. Few others do this.
I have almost all the artillery I am really interested in. All total, forty howitzers, cannon, and mortars. What I am really looking for now are those systems that flesh out the supporting technology. That is the limbers, caissons, horse harnessing, saddles, aiming circles, panoramic sights, fuzes, fuze setters, ammunition, meteorological instruments, observation optics, sound direction finders, maps, small arms, technical manuals, etc. So, what is the big short term goal, the piece I don’t have yet that I am really looking for? It is a limber, which is a munitions wagon. The type I want is one that is correct for German Foot Artillery (Heavy Artillery Branch) from the WWI era. I already have all the Field Artillery Limbers from German service in that era, but the heavy artillery used completely different limbers to transport their heavy guns and howitzers. Their horse harnessing and saddles also differed substantially. I have the heavy howitzers and the horse equipment. What I am missing is what goes in the middle, the limber.
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