Malakand Field Force

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The Story of the Malakand Field Force: An Episode of Frontier War was an 1897 book written by Winston Churchill; it was his first published work of non-fiction.

It details an 1897 military campaign on the Northwest Frontier (an area now part of Pakistan and Afghanistan). Churchill participated in the campaign as a second lieutenant in the cavalry; he volunteered for the posting, having become bored of playing polo in India.

Moving through the land mostly by political care, and paying local khans to support them, they moved into the mountains to fight an essentially punitive campaign against the Pathan tribes and the Taliban, for repeated brutal armed raids on the villages on Plains of India. Crops were burnt, wells were filled with stone and houses burnt, and the occasional firefights broke out in the mountains. This campaign effectively neutralised the aggressors for several decades.

In the book, Churchill observes the incredible killing power of the new breech loading weapons. The Taliban fighters, sure of victory by numbers and simply overrunning British camps, were cut down en masse by repeating rifles of the British Imperial forces. Six-foot-high piles of bodies are described outside the fire trenches surrounding the temporary Brigade camps.

His experiences in this campaign meant that, unlike most military thinkers of the time, he could better understand the stalemate of WWI trench warfare. This undoubtedly influenced his choice to invest government research and funds into the development of the tank via the Landships Committee when he was First Lord of the Admiralty.