This is a major new history of the British army during the Great War written by three leading military historians. Ian Beckett, Timothy Bowman and Mark Connelly survey operations on the Western Front and throughout the rest of the world as well as the army's social history, pre-war and wartime planning and strategy, the maintenance of discipline and morale and the lasting legacy of the First World War on the army's development. They assess the strengths and weaknesses of the army between 1914 and 1918, engaging with key debates around the adequacy of British generalship and whether or not there was a significant 'learning curve' in terms of the development of operational art during the course of the war. Their findings show how, despite limitations of initiative and innovation amongst the high command, the British army did succeed in developing the effective combined arms warfare necessary for victory in 1918.

Over 185,000 British military servicemen were captured by the Germans during the First World War and incarcerated as prisoners of war (POWs). In this original investigation into their experiences of captivity, Wilkinson uses official and private British source material to explore how these servicemen were challenged by, and responded to, their wartime fate. Examining the psychological anguish associated with captivity, and physical trials, such as the controlling camp spaces; harsh routines and regimes; the lack of material necessities; and, for many, forced labour demands, he asks if, how and with what effects British POWs were able to respond to such challenges. The culmination of this research reveals a range of coping strategies embracing resistance; leadership and organisation; networks of support; and links with 'home worlds'. British Prisoners of War in First World War Germany offers an original insight into First World War captivity, the German POW camps, and the mentalities and perceptions of the British servicemen held within.

Using a broad variety of textual and visual sources, Latin America and the First World War goes beyond traditional diplomatic history and analyzes the global dimension of the history of the Great War. Filling a significant gap in transnational histories of the war, Stefan Rinke addresses political, social, and economic aspects as well as the cultural impact of the war on Latin America and vice versa. Rinke's meticulous research is based on sources from the nineteen independent states of the entire subcontinent and promises to be the most comprehensive examination to date of Latin America before, during, and immediately after the war.

The Amazon History Book of the Year 2013 is a magisterial chronicle of the calamity that befell Europe in 1914 as the continent shifted from the glamour of the Edwardian era to the tragedy of total war. In 1914, Europe plunged into the 20th century's first terrible act of self-immolation - what was then called The Great War. On the eve of its centenary, Max Hastings seeks to explain both how the conflict came about and what befell millions of men and women during the first months of strife. He finds the evidence overwhelming, that Austria and Germany must accept principal blame for the outbreak. While what followed was a vast tragedy, he argues passionately against the 'poets' view', that the war was not worth winning. It was vital to the freedom of Europe, he says, that the Kaiser's Germany should be defeated. His narrative of the early battles will astonish those whose images of the war are simply of mud, wire, trenches and steel helmets. Hastings describes how the French Army marched into action amid virgin rural landscapes, in uniforms of red and blue, led by mounted officers, with flags flying and bands playing. The bloodiest day of the entire Western war fell on 22 August 1914, when the French lost 27,000 dead. Four days later, at Le Cateau the British fought an extraordinary action against the oncoming Germans, one of the last of its kind in history. In October, at terrible cost they held the allied line against massive German assaults in the first battle of Ypres.The author also describes the brutal struggles in Serbia, East Prussia and Galicia, where by Christmas the Germans, Austrians, Russians and Serbs had inflicted on each other three million casualties. This book offers answers to the huge and fascinating question 'what happened to Europe in 1914?', through Max Hastings's accustomed blend of top-down and bottom-up accounts from a multitude of statesmen and generals, peasants, housewives and private soldiers of seven nations. His narrative pricks myths and offers some striking and controversial judgements. For a host of readers gripped by the author's last international best-seller 'All Hell Let Loose', this will seem a worthy successor.

2017 is the 100th anniversary of America's declaration of war against Germany. Many historians take a diminutive stance regarding America's involvement but it cannot be underestimated by any means. It was the reason that brought Germany to it is knees and forced them to accept an armistice that was a victory of sorts achieved over the German forces and their allies. There is global renewed interest in World War One. All the protagonists are long dead but many of their relatives are still with us. This volume will draw you into the whole experience from the home front to the hell of the trenches. These are the voices of those who were never heard but their suffering and their involvement was total and uncompromising, and now finally they can breathe again. They are not forgotten.

Glasgow men on the Western Front
As every student of the Great War is aware, the escalating scale of the conflict on the Western Front required the formation of new battalions-a new citizen army formed to be equal to the size of the challenge. This is the unit history of one of them, The Seventeenth Highland Light Infantry (Glasgow Chamber of Commerce) Battalion. As its name suggests it was but one of many additional battalions raised in Scotland which would bear the name of an old regiment of the British Army in this case the 71st Foot, the HLI. Many of these battalions, particularly those raised in large urban centres, took on the character of their place and community of origin. This battalion's sister unit, the Sixteenth, for example was styled, 'The Glasgow Boy's Brigade' Battalion. The Glasgow men were dispatched to France and into the trenches with all its hardships, grinding routine and frequent raiding. The battalion served through the Battle of the Somme and went on the see action around Hulluch, Beaumont-Hamel and the Ypres Salient among others. This invaluable book also contains honours and award rolls making it invaluable for genealogists. Available in softcover and hard over with dust jacket.

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.

The execution of British matron Edith Cavell by occupying German forces was portrayed by the allies as one of the key atrocities of the Great War. This book recovers and interprets the worldwide reaction to Cavell's death, exploring its contextual relationship within imperial and international history, as well women's history and gender history.

During a pivotal few months in the middle of the First World War all sides-Germany, Britain, and America-believed the war could be concluded. Peace at the end of 1916 would have saved millions of lives and changed the course of history utterly. Two years into the most terrible conflict the world had ever known, the warring powers faced a crisis. There were no good military options. Money, men, and supplies were running short on all sides. The German chancellor secretly sought President Woodrow Wilson's mediation to end the war, just as British ministers and France's president also concluded that the time was right. The Road Less Traveled describes how tantalizingly close these far-sighted statesmen came to ending the war, saving millions of lives, and avoiding the total war that dimmed hopes for a better world. Theirs was a secret battle that is only now becoming fully understood, a story of civic courage, awful responsibility, and how some leaders rose to the occasion while others shrank from it or chased other ambitions. "Peace is on the floor waiting to be picked up!" pleaded the German ambassador to the United States. This book explains both the strategies and fumbles of people facing a great crossroads of history. The Road Less Traveled reveals one of the last great mysteries of the Great War: that it simply never should have lasted so long or cost so much.

From the Treaty of Versailles to the 2018 centenary and beyond, the history of the First World War has been continually written and rewritten, studied and contested, producing a rich historiography shaped by the social and cultural circumstances of its creation. Writing the Great War provides a groundbreaking survey of this vast body of work, assembling contributions on a variety of national and regional historiographies from some of the most prominent scholars in the field. By analyzing perceptions of the war in contexts ranging from Nazi Germany to India's struggle for independence, this is an illuminating collective study of the complex interplay of memory and history.

The motorised wheels of war begin to turn
In 1914 as the B. E. F was quickly hurried to the battle lines-by whatever means possible-British troops were amused to see familiar commercial vehicles trundle past, resplendent with their colourful advertisements for household products. The French civilian population was equally amused, bemused and occasionally confused by this incongruous sight. The Great War, with powered flying machines, submarines, motor transport and tanks, was the first major mechanised war. The invention of the internal combustion engine metamorphosed the waging of war. Motor transport could efficiently move both men and materials, the dispatch rider was no longer the glittering aide-de-camp but a drab, goggled corporal on a motorcycle, and weapons of destruction could be carried behind the steel plating of motorised armoured cars and tanks. This subject fascinates those interested in the history of modern warfare and to mark the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the Leonaur Editors have compiled this special three-in-one book about the Great War from the perspective of 'the motor.' The first title here is an excellent overview of the subject, accompanied by useful illustrations and diagrams, which covers each aspect of the motor at war. Next is a manufactures catalogue with detailed views and elevations of the very commercial vehicles that carried British troops to the front in 1914. The final piece is an extract about motor transport and armoured vehicles in the first decades of the 20th century. This is a useful reference guide for all military vehicle enthusiasts.
Leonaur editions are newly typeset and are not facsimiles; each title is available in softcover and hardback with dustjacket; our hardbacks are cloth bound and feature gold foil lettering on their spines and fabric head and tail bands.

This book deals with an aspect of the Great War that has been largely overlooked: the war reportage written based on British and American authors' experiences at the Western Front. It focuses on how the liminal experience of the First World War was portrayed in a series of works of literary journalism at different stages of the conflict, from the summer of 1914 to the Armistice in November 1918. Sara Prieto explores a number of representative texts written by a series of civilian eyewitness who have been passed over in earlier studies of literature and journalism in the Great War. The texts under discussion are situated in the 'liminal zone', as they were written in the middle of a transitional period, half-way between two radically different literary styles: the romantic and idealising ante bellum tradition, and the cynical and disillusioned modernist school of writing. They are also the product of the various stages of a physical and moral journey which took several authors into the fantastic albeit nightmarish world of the Western Front, where their understanding of reality was transformed beyond anything they could have anticipated.

An intimate narrative history of World War I told through the stories of twenty men and women from around the globe--a powerful, illuminating, heart-rending picture of what the war was really like.
In this masterful book, renowned historian Peter Englund describes this epoch-defining event by weaving together accounts of the average man or woman who experienced it. Drawing on the diaries, journals, and letters of twenty individuals from Belgium, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, Venezuela, and the United States, Englund's collection of these varied perspectives describes not a course of events but "a world of feeling." Composed in short chapters that move between the home front and the front lines, "The Beauty and Sorrow" brings to life these twenty particular people and lets them speak for all who were shaped in some way by the War, but whose voices have remained unheard.

Over the seas and far away-the world at war
In the late summer of 1914, the eyes of the world were fixed upon Europe as seemingly unstoppable German armies simultaneously marched eastwards and westwards subduing nations and forcing their armies to retreat. This was the beginning of an industrial war without precedent which would send shockwaves across the globe. This book, specially compiled by Leonaur's editors from John Buchan's excellent writings on the First World War, concentrates on the world beyond mainland Europe in the early months of the war. Readers will discover the naval battles of Heligoland Bight, Coronel, the Falkland Islands and Dogger Bank as the Imperial German Navy tested its mettle against the might of the Royal Navy. Here are accounts of German naval raiders such as the 'Emden' and the naval bombardments of British seaside towns. German and British colonial and regular troops clashed in East and West Africa and actions were fought on the coast of China and upon remote Pacific Islands. Disaffected Boers rose in rebellion in South Africa and Germany's ally, the Ottoman Turkish Empire joined the fray making advances in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) and towards the strategically vital Suez Canal in Egypt. In 1914 this was a conflict far removed from the familiar mud, wire and trenches that have become emblematic of the First World War. This is a highly recommended overview of the world at war created especially to mark the centenary of the outbreak of hostilities; it includes many illustrations, photographs and maps.
Leonaur editions are newly typeset and are not facsimiles; each title is available in softcover and hardback with dustjacket; our hardbacks are cloth bound and feature gold foil lettering on their spines and fabric head and tail bands.

How did overseas Europeans participate in the two world wars' effort? Which were the tensions around mobilization? How did the war affect their identity and their descendants? What were their mobilization's effects on the relationship with the adopted homelands? These closely intertwined issues connect to the central argument of the book: war exerted a crucial influence on the configuration - and reconfiguration - of those European communities' national or ethnic identities and made evident their transnational nature. Through different case studies, this volume approached the multi-faceted, complex, and fluid nature of immigrant collective identities under the pressures and challenges of total wars. Contributors are: Juan Pablo Artinian, Juan Luis Carrellan Ruiz, Hernan M. Diaz, Norman Fraser Brown, Marcelo Huernos, Milagros Martinez-Flener, Norman Fraser Brown, German C. Friedmann, Maria Ines Tato, and Stefan Rinke.

During the First World War approximately 210,000 Irish men and a much smaller, but significant, number of Irish women served in the British armed forces. All were volunteers and a very high proportion were from Catholic and Nationalist communities. This book is the first comprehensive analysis of Irish recruitment between 1914 and 1918 for the island of Ireland as a whole. It makes extensive use of previously neglected internal British army recruiting returns held at The National Archives, Kew, along with other valuable archival and newspaper sources. There has been a tendency to discount the importance of political factors in Irish recruitment, but this book demonstrates that recruitment campaigns organised under the auspices of the Irish National Volunteers and Ulster Volunteer Force were the earliest and some of the most effective campaigns run throughout the war. The British government conspicuously failed to create an effective recruiting organisation or to mobilise civic society in Ireland. While the military mobilisation which occurred between 1914 and 1918 was the largest in Irish history, British officials persistently characterised it as inadequate, threatening to introduce conscription in 1918. This book also reflects on the disparity of sacrifice between North-East Ulster and the rest of Ireland, urban and rural Ireland, and Ireland and Great Britain.

Exiting war explores a particular 1918-20 'moment' in the British Empire's history, between the First World War's armistices of 1918, and the peace treaties of 1919 and 1920. That moment, we argue, was a challenging and transformative time for the Empire. While British authorities successfully answered some of the post-war tests they faced, such as demobilisation, repatriation, and fighting the widespread effects of the Spanish flu, the racial, social, political and economic hallmarks of their imperialism set the scene for a wide range of expressions of loyalties and disloyalties, and anticolonial movements. The book documents and conceptualises this 1918-20 'moment' and its characteristics as a crucial three-year period of transformation for and within the Empire, examining these years for the significant shifts in the imperial relationship that occurred and as laying the foundation for later change in the imperial system. -- .

This book explores the ramifications of 1917, arguing that it was a cataclysmic year in world history. In this volume, thirteen scholars reflect on the myriad legacies of the year 1917 as a year of war, revolution, upheaval and change. Crisscrossing the globe and drawing on a range of disciplinary approaches, from military, social and economic history to museum, memory and cultural studies, the collection highlights how the First World War remains 'living history'. With contributions on the Russian revolutions, the entry of the United States into the war, the Caucasus and Flanders war fronts, as well as on India and New Zealand, and chapters by pre-eminent First World War academics, including Jay Winter, Annette Becker, and Michael Neiberg, the collection engages all with an interest in the era and in the history and commemoration of war.