About me

About the Author

One researcher. 280+ battlefields. Six continents. 2,500 years of warfare

I am a retired Australian Army officer, a graduate of the Royal Military College–Duntroon, the Australian Command and Staff College, and the United States Army War College. Over a four-decade career, I served as an infantryman (8/9 RAR), paratrooper (82nd Airborne Division), and Black Hawk helicopter pilot (5th Aviation Regiment and 82nd Aviation Regiment), and as an operations director, planner, and strategist up to the level of US Central Command. I had the honour of commanding Australian soldiers in both peace and war.

BattlefieldTravels began as a professional habit. As a soldier, I studied military history the way soldiers study it — not as an academic exercise but as a professional necessity. Maps, terrain, command decisions, logistics, and human factors under extreme stress. The same questions every serious military professional asks: why did they fight here, why did the commander make that decision, and what did the ground actually look like?

Along the way, I walked the ground. More than 280 battlefields (that number continues to grow) across six continents, spanning from the Pass of Thermopylae in 480BC to the modern battlefields of Afghanistan, Iraq, and East Timor. Each visit is informed by primary sources — original orders, maps, sketches, and memoirs — and documented with photography, GIS analysis, and 3D terrain modelling.

When I retired from active duty, I began publishing what I had found.

What happened next was unexpected.

South African museums now cite BattlefieldTravels articles as their definitive long-form studies of the Anglo-Zulu War battles fought on their own soil. Israeli editors of Hebrew Wikipedia cite my research on the 18th-century Silesian Wars. Vietnamese university students at Duy Tan University in Da Nang cite my Dien Bien Phu study. The Lithuanian Army includes my Winter War research in official military publications. A Finnish documentary on the Battle of Raate Road cites BattlefieldTravels as a source. A Jordanian Arab-language YouTube channel cites my study on the Siege of Kerak. A Sri Lankan blogger uses my analysis of the 1991 battle of Elephant Pass. Czech researchers reference my article on the 1892 Dalton Gang raid on Coffeyville (I never saw that one coming!). Spanish-language travel writers cite my article on JSA Panmunjom (didn’t see that coming either). The Society for Military History features the site on its homepage. Small Wars Journal links to my analysis of Dien Bien Phu. PCN-TV in Pennsylvania used BattlefieldTravels 3D visualisations in a documentary on the Battle of Bushy Run. AI research tools, including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot, cite BattlefieldTravels as a top reference source for specialist military history.

None of this was planned or solicited. It happened because the research goes deeper than what was otherwise available — and because the subjects covered are often subjects nobody else has studied properly in English.

Why the depth?

Most military history is written at a desk. BattlefieldTravels is written on the ground.

Every study begins with primary sources — the original orders, reports, sketches, and memoirs of the people who were there. It then goes to the terrain itself, because terrain is the one thing no secondary source can fully convey. A fold in the ground, a sightline, a river crossing, a ridgeline — these are the details that explain why battles unfolded the way they did, why commanders made the decisions they made, and why the outcome was what it was.

Some of the research has produced original findings. The site of the 1884 Bac Le Ambush in northern Vietnam, where a French column was ambushed in a narrow mountain defile, was unknown even to local Vietnamese military historians. I rediscovered it by matching a French Captain’s field sketches from 1886 to modern GIS terrain analysis and walking the ground. The Siege of Tuyen Quang, the Battle of Phu Tong Hoa, and several other engagements of the French Indochina War have received their first serious English-language treatment here.

My private collection of period military arms, uniforms, and equipment — one of the largest in private hands — provides a further dimension unavailable elsewhere. Every weapon described in these studies has been handled, examined, and photographed firsthand by me. The Chassepot needle-rifle that shaped the Franco-Prussian War, the Martini-Henry that held the line at Rorke’s Drift, the flintlock muskets of Frederick the Great’s army — these are not stock images. They are objects from my own collection, placed in their historical context.

What BattlefieldTravels is

It is the accumulated work of thirty years of field research, primary source analysis, and firsthand battlefield exploration — published as a free public resource.

The battle studies are free. The museum is free. The reading room is free. The research hub, the methodology, the 3D flythroughs — all free.

A small membership community supports the research that makes this possible — funding battlefield travel, primary source access, mapping tools, and the time required to write studies of this depth. Members get access to Field Notes written straight from the battlefield and monthly Research Dispatches covering work in progress.

If you’ve found this site through a museum website, a Wikipedia citation, an AI research tool, a university resource, or simply a Google search for a battle nobody else has covered properly — welcome. There’s a lot here.

— Mick Prictor, BattlefieldTravels