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Author: Sir Alistair Horne
Penguin Books

The "Price of Glory: Verdun 1916" is the second book of Alistair Horne's trilogy, which includes "The Fall of Paris" and "To Lose a Battle" and tells the story of the great crises of the rivalry between France and Germany. The battle of Verdun lasted ten months. It was a battle in which at least 700,000 men fell, along a front of fifteen miles. Its aim was less to defeat the enemy than bleed him to death and a battleground whose once fertile terrain is even now a haunted wilderness. Alistair Horne's classic work, continuously in print for over fifty years, is a profoundly moving, sympathetic study of the battle and the men who fought there. It shows that Verdun is a key to understanding the First World War to the minds of those who waged it, the traditions that bound them and the world that gave them the opportunity. "Verdun was the bloodiest battle in history..."The Price of Glory" is the essential book on the subject". ("Sunday Times"). "It has almost every merit...Horne sorts out complicating issues with the greatest clarity. He has a splendid gift for depicting individuals". (A.J.P. Taylor, "Observer"). "A masterpiece". ("The New York Times"). "Compellingly told...Alastair Horne uses contemporary accounts from both sides to build up a picture of heroism, mistakes, even farce". ("Sunday Telegraph"). "Brilliantly written ...very readable; almost like a historical novel - except that it is true". (Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery). One of Britain's greatest historians, Sir Alistair Horne, CBE, is the author of a trilogy on the rivalry between France and Germany, "The Price of Glory", "The Fall of Paris" and "To Lose a Battle", as well as a two-volume life of Harold Macmillan.

Author: Ian Sumner
Pen and Sword

This graphic collection of first-hand accounts sheds new light on the experiences of the French army during the Great War. It reveals in authentic detail the perceptions and emotions of soldiers and civilians who were caught up in the most destructive conflict the world had ever seen. Their testimony gives a striking insight into the mentality of the troops and their experience of combat, their emotional ties to their relatives at home, their opinions about their commanders and their fellow soldiers, the appalling conditions and dangers they endured, and their attitude to their German enemy. In their own words, in diaries, letters, reports and memoirs - most of which have never been published in English before - they offer a fascinating inside view of the massive life-and-death struggle that took place on the Western Front. Ian Sumner provides a concise narrative of the war in order to give a clear context to the eyewitness material. In effect the reader is carried through the experience of each phase of the war on the Western Front and sees events as soldiers and civilians saw them at the time. This emphasis on eyewitness accounts provides an approach to the subject that is completely new for an English-language publication. The author's pioneering work will appeal to readers who may know something about the British and German armies on the Western Front, but little about the French army which bore the brunt of the fighting on the allied side. His book represents a milestone in publishing on the Great War.

Author: Barbara W. Tuchman
Presidio Press

In this Pulitzer Prize-winning history, Tuchman writes about the turning point of the year 1914—the month leading up to the war and the first month of the war. This was the last gasp of the Gilded Age, of Kings and Kaisers and Czars, of pointed or plumed hats, colored uniforms, and all the pomp and romance that went along with war. How quickly it all changed, and how horrible it became. Tuchman is masterful at portraying this abrupt change from 19th to 20th Century. And how she manages to make the story utterly suspenseful, when we already know the outcome, is the mark of a great writer, and a classic volume of history.

 

Praise for The Guns of August

 “A brilliant piece of military history which proves up to the hilt the force of Winston Churchill’s statement that the first month of World War I was ‘a drama never surpassed.’”Newsweek
 
“More dramatic than fiction . . . a magnificent narrative—beautifully organized, elegantly phrased, skillfully paced and sustained.”Chicago Tribune
 
“A fine demonstration that with sufficient art rather specialized history can be raised to the level of literature.”The New York Times
 
“[The Guns of August] has a vitality that transcends its narrative virtues, which are considerable, and its feel for characterizations, which is excellent.”The Wall Street Journal

 

Author: Ian Sumner
Illustrator: Giuseppe Rava
Osprey (Warrior)

'Why,' the Kaiser enquired of Czar Nicholas in 1913, did he wish to ally himself with France when 'the Frenchman is no longer capable of being a soldier?' Indeed, during World War I (1914-1918) the French Army was in a state of disarray, plagued by indiscipline, mutinies and desertion. The ordinary French citizens that were called upon to defend their motherland, the Poilu, were disrespected and demoralized, and the infamous mutinies of 1917 by the Poilu were not protests against the war itself, but against how the war was conducted. The rebellions sent a stark warning, forcing a reform in the management of the war. Consequently, the performance of many French regiments improved and the Poilu went on to become the only European troops to fight the entire war within their own borders. Ian Sumner expertly charts the history of the Poilu, from the conscription of hundreds of thousands of men, through their training, to the horrors of the trenches and the fear of no-man's land, providing a fascinating insight into the events that led to the 1917 revolts. New artwork and diagrams illustrate the experiences of the soldiers as the comforts of civilian life were stripped away from them and the trenches became their homes.

Author: Andrew Robertshaw
Illustrator: Peter Dennis
Osprey (Campaign)

The first day of the Battle of the Somme of World War I (1914-1918) is still on record as having the largest number of deaths in any one day in any war. This book explores the myths of this infamous battle, and the use of mines, tunnels, gas and flame-throwers by the British in combination with innovative tactics such as smoke. Andrew Robertshaw analyses the first day of the battle, explaining how British tactics developed as a result of the experience of the Somme, and provides an overview of the events along the entire front line, examining the actions of two British Corps, VIII at Serre and XIII at Montauban.

Author: Ian Drury
Illustrator: Howard Gerrard
Osprey (Campaign)

Osprey's examination of the destructive events of a pivotal battle of World War I (1914-1918). On 21 February 1916 German General Erich von Falkenhayn unleashed his hammer-blow offensive against the French fortress city of Verdun. His aim was nothing short of the destruction of the French army. Falkenhayn was sure that the symbolic value of Verdun was such that the French would be ‘compelled to throw in every man they have.’ He was equally sure that ‘if they do so the forces of France will bleed to death’. The massed batteries of German guns would smash the French troops in their trenches and bunkers. But the French hung on with immense courage and determination and the battle became a bloody war of attrition.

Author: Colonel Rod Paschall
Da Capo Press

This book goes a long way towards showing how many of the conventional beliefs concerning WW1 are totally innaccurate. He dosen't diminish the loss of life but he does show that the generals in charge were no less capable than their WW2 counterparts. Much of what was practiced in WW2 started in WW1. Pascall builds a compelling case that the generals on both sides invented ingenious new strategies that simply failed in the context of a war of attrition. An outstanding contribution to the body of knowledge of World War One.

January 1917. On the Western Front the armies of Imperial Germany, Great Britain, and France were locked in grim stalemate. Repeated attempts by both sides to achieve breakthrough in the face of machine-gun fire, barbed wire, long-range artillery, and poison gas had brought only enormous casualties.The Defeat of Imperial Germany focuses on the innovative plans created by generals on both sides in their struggles to dislodge the entrenched enemy and to restore maneuver and victory on the Western Front. In a series of vivid analyses of successive offensives, Paschall examines the problems of command and what happened when the massed soldiery sought to carry out their orders. These strategies and tactics developed by the military leadership in 1917–1918, though largely failing to shatter the deadlock, would prove successful when implemented twenty years later in World War II.The first volume in the Major Battles and Campaigns series published under the general editorship of John S.D. Eisenhower, The Defeat of Imperial Germany has been designed for the "armchair strategist." Dozens of photographs, many never before published, as well as clearly drawn theater and battlefield maps help to make this book an outstanding, challenging, and original contribution to the history of the Great War.

Author: Prof. Robin Prior and Professor Trevor Wilson
Yale University Press

Despite superior air and artillery power, British soldiers died in catastrophic numbers at the Battle of Somme in 1916. What went wrong, and who was responsible? This book meticulously reconstructs the battle, assigns responsibility to military and political leaders, and changes forever the way we understand this encounter and the history of the Western Front.

Author: Prof. Robin Prior and Professor Trevor Wilson
Yale University Press

No conflict of the Great War excites stronger emotions than the war in Flanders in the autumn of 1917, and no name better encapsulates the horror and apparent futility of the Western Front than "Passchendaele". By its end there had been 275,000 Allied and 200,000 German casualties. Yet the territorial gains made in four desperate months were won back by Germany in only three days the following March.

The devastation at Passchendaele, the authors argue, was neither inevitable not inescapable; nor perhaps was it necessary at all. Using a substantial archive of official and private records, Trevor Wilson and Robin Prior provide a full account of the campaign. The book examines the political dimension at a level which has hitherto been absent from accounts of "Third Ypres". It establishes what did occur, the options for alternative action, and the fundamental responsibility for the carnage.

Prior and Wilson consider the shifting ambitions and stratagems of the high command, examine the logistics of war, and assess what the available manpower, weaponry, technology and intelligence could realistically have hoped to achieve. And they explore the experience of the men on the ground in the light—whether they knew it or not—of what was never going to be accomplished.

Author: Dennis E. Showalter
Archon Books

In August 1914, at Tannenberg in East Prussia, the German 8th Army under Hindenburg and Ludendorff won a stunning victory over two Russian armies. In this richly textured account of the greatly outnumbered German army's defeat of the Russian forces, Showalter, a history professor at Colorado College, provides a thorough historical and cultural context; examines the tactical, operational and strategic aspects of this decisive WW I battle; and clears up many of the myths associated with it. Among them: that Russian General Rennenkampf was "unwilling" to come to the aid of Samsonov's beleaguered 2nd Army; that the 2nd Army was "annihilated"; that the typical Russian soldier was "a uniformed primitive."

Showalter judiciously analyzes Tannenberg's long-range effect on German military thinking, showing, for instance, that the victory led the Wehrmacht to underestimate Russian capabilities during the planning of Operation Barbarossa in 1941. This is a scholarly military study of the highest caliber, written in a crisp and lively style that should attract the general reader as well as the military specialist.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Author: Bryan Cooper and Judy Wheeler
Irish Academic Press

The Tenth Division is unique. It was the first Irish division raised and sent to the Front by Ireland: in fact it was the first Division of Irishmen that ever existed in the British Army. In the Tenth Division, Unionist and Nationalist, Catholic and Protestant, lived, fought and died side by side like brothers. Made up entirely of men who had no military experience, the Tenth Divison was to take part in some of the bloodiest episodes of the War ñ at Suvla Bay and Anzac Cove.

Author: Wolfgang Fleischer
Schiffer Publishing, Ltd.

Shown are the various caliber mortars used by the German infantry during World Wars I & II., over 70 b/w photographs, 8 1/2" x 11"

Author: Alejandro de Quesada
Illustrator: Peter Dennis
Osprey (Raid)

On March 9, 1916, troops under the command of Pancho Villa attacked Columbus, New Mexico and its local detachment of the US 13th Cavalry Regiment, killing 18 people and burning the town. Six days later, on orders from President Woodrow Wilson, General John J. "Black Jack" Pershing led an expeditionary force of 4,800 men into Mexico to capture Villa. What followed was a series of skirmishes, battles, and chases through the wild and uncharted Mexican countryside. While the Americans failed in their ultimate purpose of catching Villa, they did kill two of his top lieutenants. This book charts the progress of the entire enterprise, covering the dusty marches and the bitter gunfights in the streets of small border towns, analyzing the successes and failures of this unique military expedition.


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