The offensive on the Somme took place between July and November 1916 and is perhaps the most iconic battle of the Great War. It was there that Kitchener’s famous ‘Pals’ Battalions were first sent into
Between April 22 and May 31, 1915, Western civilization was shocked. World War I was already appalling in its brutality, but until then it had been fought on the battlefield and by rules long agreed b
Italian performance in the First World War has been generally disparaged or ignored compared to that of the armies on the Western Front, and troop morale in particular has been seen as a major weakness of the Italian army. In this first book-length study of Italian morale in any language, Vanda Wilcox reassesses Italian policy and performance from the perspective both of the army as an institution and of the ordinary soldiers who found themselves fighting a brutally hard war. Wilcox analyses and contextualises Italy's notoriously hard military discipline along with leadership, training methods and logistics before considering the reactions of the troops and tracing the interactions between institutions and individuals. Restoring historical agency to soldiers often considered passive and indifferent, Wilcox illustrates how and why Italians complied, endured or resisted the army's demands through balancing their civilian and military identities.
Postcards as a medium of correspondence became popular in the early years of the twentieth century. The fad soon became a flood as literally hundreds of thousands of postcards found their way into the
This is a major new account of the Battle of Jutland, the key naval battle of the First World War in which the British Grand Fleet engaged the German High Seas Fleet off the coast of Denmark in 1916. Beginning with the building of the two fleets, John Brooks reveals the key technologies employed, from ammunition, gunnery and fire control, to signalling and torpedoes, as well as the opposing commanders' tactical expectations and battle orders. In describing Jutland's five major phases, he offers important new interpretations of the battle itself and how the outcome was influenced by technology, as well as the tactics and leadership of the principal commanders, with the reliability of their own accounts of the fighting reassessed. The book draws on contemporary sources which have rarely been cited in previous accounts, including the despatches of both the British and German formations, along with official records, letters and memoirs.
Off to the sidelines of the brutal western front of World War I was a nasty little campaign by British and India troops sent to secure Persian oil fields. Explaining what and how this happened in the
The gripping account of the U.S. First Army’s astonishing triumph over the Germans in America’s bloodiest battle of the First World War—the Battle of the Meuse-Argonne. The Battle of the Meus
In the 1980s and early 1990s, Peter Hart, then a young oral historian at the Imperial War Museum in London, conducted 183 interviews with British World War I veterans. After the death of the last vete
The year 1916 witnessed two events that would profoundly shape both politics and commemoration in Ireland over the course of the following century. Although the Easter Rising and the Battle of the Somme were important historical events in their own right, their significance also lay in how they came to be understood as iconic moments in the emergence of Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach drawing on history, politics, anthropology and cultural studies, this volume explores how the memory of these two foundational events has been constructed, mythologised and revised over the course of the past century. The aim is not merely to understand how the Rising and the Somme came to exert a central place in how the past is viewed in Ireland, but to explore wider questions about the relationship between history, commemoration and memory.
During the Allied victory celebrations there were few who chose to raise a glass to the staff. The high cost of casualties endured by the British army tarnished the reputation of the military planners
Twenty-one-year-old Leonhard Rempe volunteered to serve Germany in 1914. By the time World War One ended, he had seen action on both major fronts, participated in the war from the back of a horse and
More than 400 photographs detail the American military experience in World War I on the ground, in the air, and at sea, from recruitment to the Armistice. This is the premier visual history of the Uni
... Well dear Jim it breaks my heart to write this letter. Our dear [brother] was killed yesterday morning at 5.30. The bullet killed him instantly and he never spoke a word. I had just left him and g
In King of Battle: Artillery in World War I a distinguished array of authors examines the centrepiece of battle in the Great War, artillery. Going beyond tables of calibres and ranges, they look at or
