Michael Howard, an eminent military historian and decorated combat veteran who helped redefine the chronicling of conflict between states and pioneered a so-called “English school” of strategic studies, died on Saturday in Swindon, in southwest England. He had turned 97 a day earlier.

His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by the historian Max Hastings, a friend.

By his own account, Mr. Howard grew up in a world of privilege in the 1920s and 1930s, a member of the upper middle class, used to large homes populated by servants and nannies to tend the children.

His lineage was distinctive, a blend of Quaker traditions from his father’s family and Judaism from his mother — a German-born debutante who had been presented at the royal courts of both Berlin and London long before the surge of virulent anti-Semitism that characterized Hitler’s Third Reich.

His father, though, raised him as a Christian.

“Christianity,” Mr. Howard wrote in a memoir published in 2006, “seemed an anchor of certainty and reassurance in a fast-dissolving world. It still does.”