Philip A. Crowl, an author and retired head of the strategy department at the Naval War College, died Sunday of cancer at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda.

He was 76 and lived in Annapolis since his retirement in 1980.

Services for Dr. Crowl were being held today at the First Presbyterian Church in Annapolis.

An expert on military history, Dr. Crowl joined the war college faculty in Newport, R.I., in 1973. Previously, he was head of the history department at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. Earlier, he taught at Princeton and Stanford universities and at the Naval Academy.

His books included a history of Colonial Maryland; three military histories of World War II, of which he was co-author; and three historical travel guides on Scotland, Britain and Wales, and Ireland.

Dr. Crowl, born in Dayton, Ohio, was a graduate of Swarthmore College, did graduate work at Yale University and the University of Iowa and earned his doctorate at Johns Hopkins University.

Surviving are his wife, the former Mary Ellen Wood; three daughters, Ellen Wood Crowl of Fort Worth, Texas, Catherine Pauline Crowl of Mountain View, Calif., and Margaret Axtell Crowl of Rochester, N.Y.; and two grandchildren.