After leaving the army in 1965, he wrote books on military history, and was the editor of the Journal of the Royal United Service Institution from 1971 to 1976.
Reginald George Shelford Bidwell was born in Beckenham, Kent, the son of Lieutenant Colonel Reginald Frank Bidwell, a British Indian Army officer, and his wife, Mabel Alice Graves née Petley.
He had a younger brother who died in infancy, and a half-sister from his mother's first marriage, the poet and novelist Ida Affleck Graves.
Much of his early life was spent in India, but his father was invalided out of the Indian Army in 1919, and the family returned to England.
[2] After the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, he returned to the UK, where he met and married Pauline Mary (Peggy) Le Couteur.
[3] In the Tunisian campaign, Bidwell commanded a battery of the 74th Medium Regiment (Surrey and Sussex Yeomanry),[1] for which he was mentioned in despatches.
[5] He served with the British Army of the Rhine (BAOR) as a battery commander in the 5th Regiment, Royal Horse Artillery, and as second in command of the 2nd Regiment, Royal Horse Artillery, at the War Office as a General Staff Officer (Grade 3), and at Headquarters, West Africa Command, where he helped prepare the defence forces of Ghana for independence.
[7] As an instructor at the Royal School of Artillery, he wrote a handbook on the employment of tactical nuclear weapons.
None more so than his first book, Gunners at War (1970), in which he refuted the doctrine propounded by Sir Basil Liddell Hart and others that underestimated the importance of artillery and the need its fire to be concentrated.
Bidwell and the RUSI's director, Air Vice Marshal Stewart Menaul, overhauled it, introducing colour covers and illustrations.