Stephen Ambrose

THREE TIMES over, in the Ambrose family of central Wisconsin, the eldest son followed in his father's footsteps as a country doctor. Stephen Ambrose, as an eldest son, grew up knowing he would be a country doctor too, and went up to Wisconsin State University at Madison to read Medicine. His tutor told him he had to take one non-medical subject in his first year; he picked history from a list, without looking at it. The history tutor told him to write an essay on Hugh Trevor-Roper's The Last Days of Hitler. Ambrose came back with the essay, and a demand to change faculties; thereafter he devoted himself to history, and became a prolific historical author as well as a university professor.

Stephen Edward Ambrose, historian: born Decatur, Illinois 10 January 1936; Professor of History, University of New Orleans 1971-95 (Emeritus); married (three sons, two daughters); died Bay St Louis, Mississippi 13 October 2002.

Three times over, in the Ambrose family of central Wisconsin, the eldest son followed in his father's footsteps as a country doctor. Stephen Ambrose, as an eldest son, grew up knowing he would be a country doctor too, and went up to Wisconsin State University at Madison to read Medicine. His tutor told him he had to take one non-medical subject in his first year; he picked history from a list, without looking at it. The history tutor told him to write an essay on Hugh Trevor-Roper's The Last Days of Hitler. Ambrose came back with the essay, and a demand to change faculties; thereafter he devoted himself to history, and became a prolific historical author as well as a university professor.

His first book, Upton and the Army, came out in 1964: a short life, based on his doctoral thesis, of a dedicated professional, who graduated from West Point in 1861 and was a major-general at 25, rising by sheer ability in the northern armies during the American civil war. He later wrote a life of Halleck, Lincoln's chief of staff, and a history of West Point called Duty, Honor, Country.

Turning to the Indian wars, he wrote a dual biography Crazy Horse and Custer (1975), about the Indian chief and the term-mate of Upton's, who also ended the civil war a major-general, who confronted each other at Little Big Horn in 1876, with disastrous results to the general and to two squadrons of the 7th US Cavalry, wiped out with him.

This book happened to be President Dwight D. Eisenhower's bedside reading at the end of his term. He liked it so much that he sent for Ambrose – who by this time was Professor at the University of New Orleans – and invited him to become his official biographer.

Ambrose's two volumes on Eisenhower, as general and as president, admirably frank, were widely read. They were based on a full understanding of war and of statesmanship, as well as the presidential archives. His publisher wrote to invite him, as he seemed good with republican presidents, to write a life of Richard Nixon as well. Ambrose replied that he had voted for Kennedy, and abominated Nixon. An advance of $400,000 persuaded him to change his mind; three volumes on Nixon duly appeared, and by the end of them Ambrose thought he had made a mistake in his vote in 1960.

He liked to alternate books on strategy with books on tactics. He rested from his life of Eisenhower by researching and writing Pegasus Bridge (1984), a blow-by-blow account of an airborne coup de main that secured the left flank of Montgomery's landing in Normandy in June 1944. When he had done with Nixon, he wrote Band of Brothers (2001), the story of a single company of American parachutists from their first encounter with the enemy, on the Cherbourg peninsula in the small hours of 6 June 1944, through the siege of Bastogne next winter to the drinking up of Goering's cellar at Berchtesgaden in May 1945.

The leitmotif of both these books, and of his major study D-Day: June 6 1944, was that the professional armies of dictatorships were no match for the military skills of democratic soldiers: a telling propaganda point during the cold war, still worth making after it (the D-day book came out for the 50th anniversary). Band of Brothers was made into a film, and he also wrote the film script for Saving Private Ryan (1998), which took care to pull no punches about how horrible wars are.

Ambrose wrote a monograph, Ike's Spies (1981), explaining how Eisenhower came (while still a general) to value secret action and how he got on with the espionage establishment in Washington; a book on Eisenhower and Berlin (1967); and a teaching textbook, Rise to Globalism (1971), on American foreign policy from 1938. He set up the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans, on the edge of Lake Pontchartrain, on the site of the Higgins boatyard where so many landing craft had been built to assist the Americans' war in the Pacific. It has become a useful centre for historical research.

He taught, as he wrote, well and clearly; but did not restrict himself to writing and teaching. He led an expedition in the footsteps of Lewis and Clark, the two young US Army officers who had explored the upper Missouri for President Thomas Jefferson. He threw a wedding breakfast for his eldest daughter on one of Lewis's favourite camping sites, a remote upper Missouri island.

For several years, Ambrose eked out his salary at New Orleans by taking parties of rich Americans through General Eisenhower's footsteps in western Europe; spending some days in London, sailing from Southampton to Caen on the night of 5/6 June, visiting the Normandy beaches and Paris, and in a good year Rheims and Berlin as well. He made a wonderfully affable tour guide, keeping up his party's spirits in spite of every hitch of weather and travel; and was once diplomat enough to secure the presence, all at the same time on the same beach, of the sons of Eisenhower, Montgomery and Rommel.

After the success of his Nixon book, he took early retirement to the wilds of Montana, while keeping on his house on the Caribbean at Bay St Louis, east of New Orleans. He took an interest in politics, trying to persuade Colin Powell to run for president – but Mrs Powell would not let her husband stand. Recently, Ambrose was sharply attacked in the press for plagiarism – a journalist's slur, unsupported by the facts of his hard work. He was sensitive enough to be hurt by this. He was carried away, by a sharp attack of cancer of the lung, still deep in another book, about how much he owed to America.

M.R.D. Foot