This is a compelling account of the First World War. It offers clear analysis of the war on land, sea, and air, and considers the impact of the war on Europe's civilian population. Issues addressed include the relationship between war and industrialisation, trench warfare, the long term effects of the war on changing social structures, and economic and demographic consequences. The main text is supplemented by a rich selection of primary source material (from songs, soldiers' slang, to diary accounts).

The mainly forgotten story of the British and Australian tunnellers and their work on the Belgian Coast during the Great War. Based on historical documents, military archives, regimental records, testimonies and more than 350 photographs and pictures, the book covers the fighting around the Belgian coastal town of Nieuwpoort. Kristof Jacobs explores the presence of British and Australian soldiers at the Ijzer estuary in the build up to Third Ypres and highlights the work in the dunes including that of the Royal Engineers, the Dorset Regiment, the 135th Siege Battery, 2nd Australian Tunnelling Company and Operation Hush and the diary of Major W. E. Buckingham. First-hand accounts are included throughout and complimented with the story of eighteen-year old Bert Fearns (1898-1997) a veteran from the 2nd/6th Bn Lancashire Fusiliers who ended up in Nieuwpoort in 1917. It was his story that first inspired the research for this book by Jacobs.

The final part of the Lion and the Rose trilogy detailing the TF battalions of the King's Own Royal Lancaster Regiment in the Great War. Established in August 1914, the 2/5th spent the next thirty months in England perfecting their ability to `form fours'; engaged in almost every sort of training other than that which they would need at the Front. When they deployed to France in February 1917, they were pitted against an aggressive and experienced foe. This book tells the story of their struggle to learn the skills necessary to survive in the pitiless arena of modern warfare and their progress to become the fighting equals of any by the end of the war. With no history written for either 57 Division or the 2/5th, this book-based on dozens of contemporary and unpublished sources, tells their story for the first time. The book contains sketch maps of the sectors the battalion fought in and accurate coordinates for all positions; previously unpublished photographs of men from the battalion; the most complete battalion roll yet compiled and narrates the individual parts played by 1,000 of the officers and men during the war.

Canada's Great War, 1914-1918: How Canada Helped Save the British Empire and Became a North American Nation describes the major role that Canada played in helping the British Empire win the greatest war in history-and, somewhat surprisingly, resulted in Canada's closer integration not with the British Empire but with its continental neighbor, the United States. When Britain declared war against Germany and Austria-Hungary in August 1914, Canada was automatically committed as well because of its status as a Dominion in the British Empire. Despite not having a say in the matter, most Canadians enthusiastically embraced the war effort in order to defend the Empire and its values. In Canada's Great War, 1914-1918, historian Brian Douglas Tennyson argues that Canada's participation in the war weakened its relationship with Britain by stimulating a greater sense of Canadian identity, while at the same time bringing it much closer to the United States, especially after the latter entered the war. Their wartime cooperation strengthened their relationship, which had been delicate and often strained in the nineteenth century. This was reflected in the greater integration of their economies and the greater acceptance in Canada of American cultural products such as books, magazines, radio broadcasting and movies, and was symbolized by the astonishing American response to the Halifax explosion in December 1917. By the end of the war, Canadians were emerging as a North American people, no longer fearing close ties to the United States, even as they maintained their ties to the British Commonwealth. Canada's Great War, 1914-1918 will interest not only Canadians unaware of how greatly their nation's participation in the First World War reshaped its relationship with Britain and the United States, but also Americans unacquainted with the magnitude of Canada's involvement in the war and how that contribution drew the two nations closer together.

This book charts ideas European intellectuals (mostly from Great Britain, France, Germany and Italy) put forward to solve the problem of war during the first half of the twentieth century: a period that began with the Anglo-Boer war and that ended with the explosion of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Such ideas do not belong to a homogeneous tradition of thought, but can be understood as a unique discourse that takes different characteristics according to the point of view of each author and of the specific historical situation.

Much has been written on the centenary of the First World War. However, no book has yet explored the tragedy of the conflict from a theological perspective. Life after Tragedy fills that gap. Taking their cue from the famous British army chaplain Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy, seven central essays, all by authors associated with the cathedral where Studdert Kennedy first preached to troops, examine aspects of faith that featured in the war, such as the notion of 'home', poetry, theological doctrine, preaching, social reform, humanitarianism, and remembrance. Each essay applies its reflections to the life of faith today, thus representing a highly original contribution to the history of the First World War in general and the work of Studdert Kennedy in particular. They provide wider theological insight into how, in the contemporary world, 'life' and tragedy, likewise God and suffering, can be integrated.This book will accordingly be of considerable interest to historians, both of the war and of the church; to communities commemorating the war; and to all those who wrestle with current challenges to faith.

This book is an international comparative study of the British, German and French military chaplains during the First World War. It describes their role, position and daily work within the army and how the often conflicting expectations of the church, the state, the military and the soldiers effected these. This study seeks to explain similarities and differences between the chaplaincies by looking at how the pre-war relations between church, state and society influenced the work of these army chaplains.

Merry Hell is the only complete history of the 25th Canadian infantry battalion, which was recruited in the autumn and winter of 1914-15 and served overseas from spring 1915 until spring 1919. Author Robert N Clements, who served in the battalion throughout that period and rose from private to captain, wrote the story many years after the war, based on his personal memories and experiences. As such, his story reflects two unique perspectives on Canadian military history - the remarkably fresh recollections and anecdotes of a veteran, and the outlook of a man eager to share what his generation contributed to the nation's history, character, and identity. Professional military historian Brian Douglas Tennyson buttresses Clements's story with a valuable critical apparatus, including an analytical introduction that contextualizes the history and notes that explain unfamiliar points and people. Merry Hell is a captivating tale for those who enjoy stories of war and battle, and one that will entertain readers with Clements's richly colourful anecdotes and witty poems, none of which have been published before.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE HISTORICAL WRITERS' ASSOCIATION CROWN AWARDS 2022 'Compelling and often horrifying' THE TIMES Best Paperbacks of 2022 The epic, moving stories of Britain's search to recover, identify and honour the missing soldiers of the First World War By the end of the First World War, the whereabouts of more than half a million British soldiers were unknown. Most were presumed dead, lost forever under the battlefields of northern France and Flanders. In The Searchers, Robert Sackville-West brings together the extraordinary, moving accounts of those who dedicated their lives to the search for the missing. These stories reveal the remarkable lengths to which people will go to give meaning to their loss: Rudyard Kipling's quest for his son's grave; E.M. Forster's conversations with traumatised soldiers in hospital in Alexandria; desperate attempts to communicate with the spirits of the dead; the campaign to establish the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior; and the exhumation and reburial in military cemeteries of hundreds of thousands of bodies. It was a search that would span a century: from the department set up to investigate the fate of missing comrades in the war's aftermath to the present day, when DNA profiling continues to aid efforts to recover, identify and honour these men. As the rest of the country found ways to repair and move on, countless families were consumed by this mission, undertaking arduous, often hopeless, journeys to discover what happened to their husbands, brothers and sons. Giving prominence to the personal battles of those left behind, The Searchers brings the legacy of war vividly to life in a testament to the bravery, compassion and resilience of the human spirit.

"Riveting . . . Krass weaves a fascinating story of the first official attempt by the Army to capture the essence of war through the eyes and pencils of eight top American artists who were sent to the Western Front in France. A marvelous eyewitness story of the 'Big War.'"
--Col. H. A. Chenoweth, USMCR Ret., Korean War veteran, Vietnam and Gulf War combat artist, and author of "Art of War A Searing Account of World War I as Seen by the Artist"

Eighty-five years before there were embedded journalists with American armed forces in Iraq, eight brave artist-soldiers risked their lives in the trenches and battlefields to bring the reality of World War I back home.

In "Portrait of War," Peter Krass shares the heroic adventures of these men as they witnessed, explored, and depicted the trials and triumphs of the American soldier and the tragedy of war. Written with the intensity of a novel, this compelling narrative follows the artists as they marched shoulder to shoulder with the doughboys, sketching while under fire and doing their best to stay alive. Studded with examples of their remarkable work and excerpts from the artists' journals, this thrilling account places us at the front lines as surely as our television cameras do today.

By the end of World War I, 45,000 Australians had died on the Western Front. Some bodies had been hastily buried mid-battle in massed graves; others were mutilated beyond recognition. Often men were simply listed as 'Missing in Action' because nobody knew for sure. Lieutenant Robert Burns was one of the missing, and now that the guns had fallen silent his father wanted to know what had become of his son. He wasn't the only one looking for answers. A loud clamour arose from Australia for information and the need for the dead to be buried respectfully. Many of the Australians charged with the grisly task of finding and reburying the dead were deeply flawed. Each had his own reasons for preferring to remain in France instead of returning home. In the end there was a great scandal, with allegations of 'body hoaxing' and gross misappropriation of money and army possessions leading to two highly secretive inquiries. Untold until now, Missing in Action is the compelling and unexpected story of those dark days and darker deeds and a father's desperate search for his son's remains.

Haig's Intelligence is an important new study of Douglas Haig's controversial command during the First World War. Based on extensive new research, it addresses a perennial question about the British army on the Western Front between 1916 and 1918: why did they think they were winning? Jim Beach reveals how the British perceived the German army through a study of the development of the British intelligence system, its personnel and the ways in which intelligence was gathered. He also examines how intelligence shaped strategy and operations by exploring the influence of intelligence in creating perceptions of the enemy. He shows for the first time exactly what the British knew about their opponent, when and how and, in so doing, sheds significant new light on continuing controversies about the British army's conduct of operations in France and Belgium and the relationship between Haig and his chief intelligence officer, John Charteris.

View the Table of Contents. Read the Introduction.

aNeiberg offers an excellent primer for anyone studying the Great War. The bookas strength is its scope. As they proceed from aPart One: Causesa to aPart Six: Peacea (with most sections offering two primary and two secondary sources), readers will learn from both sides about major leaders, the home front, soldiers and officers in battle, and the politics of peace.a
--"Library Journal"

"a][A] valuable text to introduce students to the broad parameters of World War I. Students whose intellectual appetites are whetted by this collection will appreciate the extensive list of books matched to each category at the end of the book."
--"The Journal of Military History"

""The Great War of 1914-1918" is increasingly understood as the defining event of the twentieth century. . . . Neiberg has done a remarkable job of covering all the appropriate bases and tipping his intellectual hat to the major schools of thought past and present."
--Dennis Showalter, author of "Patton and Rommel: Men of War in the Twentieth Century"

"This first-rate collection of primary documents and excerpts from leading historical works on World War I allows students to enter directly into current debates surrounding the war's meaning and significance. These selections provide a window into the varied wartime experiences of statesmen, generals, women, and soldiers, challenging students to discard over-simplistic interpretations of the war."
--Jennifer D. Keene, author of "Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America"

Almost 100 years after the Treaty of Versailles was signed, World War I continues to be badly understood and greatlyoversimplified. Its enormous impact on the world in terms of international diplomacy and politics, and the ways in which future military engagements would evolve, be fought, and ultimately get resolved have been ignored. With this reader of primary and secondary documents, edited and compiled by Michael S. Neiberg, students, scholars, and war buffs can gain an extensive yet accessible understanding of this conflict. Neiberg introduces the basic problems in the history of World War I, shares the words and experiences of the participants themselves, and, finally, presents some of the most innovative and dynamic current scholarship on the war.

Neiberg, a leading historian of World War I, has selected a wide array of primary documents, ranging from government papers to personal diaries, demonstrating the war's devastating effect on all who experienced it, whether President Woodrow Wilson, an English doughboy in the trenches, or a housewife in Germany. In addition to this material, each chapter in The World War I Reader contains a selection of articles and book chapters written by major scholars of World War I, giving readers perspectives on the war that are both historical and contemporary. Chapters are arranged chronologically and by theme, and address causes, the experiences of soldiers and their leaders, battlefield strategies and conditions, home front issues, diplomacy, and peacemaking. A time-line, maps, suggestions for further reading, and a substantive introduction by Neiberg that lays out the historiography of World War I round out the book.

" Provides a day-by-day account of the action on all fronts and of the events surrounding the conflict, from the guns of August 1914 to the November 1918 Armistice and its troubled aftermath. Daily entries, topical descriptions, biographical sketches, maps, and illustrations combine to give a ready and succinct account of what was happening in each of the principal theaters of war.

To find more information about Rowman and Littlefield titles, please visit www.rowmanlittlefield.com.

On 15th April 1915, British and Dominion troops landed on the Gallipoli Peninsula. The campaign which followed lasted over eight months and cost the terrible total of nearly half a million Allied and Turkish casualties. The eventual failure of the Gallipoli campaign, after heart-breaking opportunities had been missed, was a disastrous set-back to Allied hopes. It remains one of the most engrossing and poignant tragedies in British military history. In our new edition of this classic in military writing, Robert Rhodes James was one of the first historians to work from the official archives and makes brilliant use of diaries and letters of the men who fought there and the photographs they took. Gallipoli stands the test of time, bringing vividly to life the conditions and circumstances of a campaign which has never ceased to enthral the imagination.

The Diary of Soeur Marguerite of the Sisters of Lamotte Suffering and Sacrifice in the First World War. The campaign in Flanders, with its successive battles, would be the longest of the Great War and the costliest in terms of human life. At the centre of the fearful and prolonged barrages of shelling by the military of both sides lay the town of Ypres, known for its Cloth Hall and cathedral, its butter and its lace -- now to be blasted to infamy as an indelible symbol of suffering and sacrifice and wanton destruction. The underground passageways of the towns ancient fortifications provided shelter for the trapped townspeople. In desperate circumstances courageous and selfless individuals administered medical attention, distributed food and clothing, provided milk for babies and set up orphanages and schools for children. Some of these volunteers, such as the Friends Ambulance Unit (FAU), came from afar, whilst others already formed an essential part of the moral and social fibre of the beleaguered town: these included the local priest, Camille Delaere, and the nuns who lent him their support. The cures indefatigable assistant was the young nun Soeur Marguerite of the Sisters of Lamotte, and it is her daily journal that became The Diary of an Ypres Nun. Originally published in French in 1917, this harrowing yet sometimes surprisingly humorous account of events in the besieged and battered town of Ypres was written between October 1914 and May 1915, as she worked alongside the FAU and Father Delaere, to bring comfort and succour to the suffering civilian population.

A vivid account of the opening weeks of war by a volunteer despatch rider who may have prevented a swift German victory. Of Anglo-German stock, Roger West was conflicted when the war broke out but volunteered out of the strong sense of duty that was characteristic of his class. His linguistic skills led to his being commissioned into the Intelligence Corps but he was seconded as a despatch rider to the 19th Brigade, which bore a great brunt of the fighting in the first few weeks in 1914. West was in the thick of things despite being crippled with a badly-damaged foot, often riding round the clock, delivering despatches and directing and assisting soldiers separated from their units and disoriented stragglers. Discovering that a critical bridge had been left open to the German advance he volunteered to ride back and blow it up, preventing the retreating Fifth French Army from being taken in the flank, something that could have fulfilled the Schlieffen Plan's aims and won the war for Germany.

The Friends Ambulance Unit (FAU) was created shortly after the outbreak of war. The idea of the units founder, Philip J Baker, was that it would provide young Friends (Quakers) with the opportunity to serve their country without sacrificing their pacifist principles. The first volunteers went to Belgium on 31 October 1914, under the auspices of the Joint War Committee of the British Red Cross Society and the Order of St John of Jerusalem. The FAU made a sustained contribution to the military medical services of the Allied nations, establishing military hospitals, running ambulance convoys, and staffing hospital ships and ambulance trains, treating and transporting wounded men. Determined to bring succour to all those in need, the FAU also assisted civilians trapped in the war zone and living in desperate circumstances. Nowhere was this more acute than in the besieged and battered town of Ypres where thousands sheltered in the underground passage-ways of the towns ancient fortifications -- a subterranean population, hopeless, often lightless, wrote Geoffrey Young, the Units young field commander, living on what they might and breeding disease. The Unit provided hospitals for the treatment of civilians, and worked intensively in the containment and treatment of the typhoid epidemic that swept the region, locating sufferers, providing them with medical care, and inoculating people against the disease. It played a major role in the purification of the towns contaminated drinking water, distributed milk for infants and food and clothing to the sick and needy. It helped found orphanages, made provision for schooling and organised gainful employment for refugees until, finally, it became responsible for the definitive evacuations of the civilian population.

Willing Patriots tells the story of Black Americans who served in the U.S. Army in the First World War. The book provides the reader deeply researched treatment of the organization, combat history/battle participation of all black troops including the two infantry divisions, supporting organizations of the Services Of Supply, and the special troops. Additionally, the work contains an exhaustive bibliography of primary and secondary references for each unit informing the reader of sources for further study; lavishly illustrated with nearly 300 detailed color and war-era photographs of these valorous men. These rare and previously unpublished photographs are drawn from public and private collections nationwide providing a lens into this long forgotten aspect of World War I.

The collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy at the end of World War I ushered in a period of radical change for East-Central European political structures and national identities. Yet this transformed landscape inevitably still bore the traces of its imperial past. Breaking with traditional histories that take 1918 as a strict line of demarcation, this collection focuses on the complexities that attended the transition from the Habsburg Empire to its successor states. In so doing, it produces new and more nuanced insights into the persistence and effectiveness of imperial institutions, as well as the sources of instability in the newly formed nation-states.

"Strategy and Intelligence," which brings together original essays by a number of leading authorities on various aspects of the First World War, aims both to summarise the latest literature on Britain's participation in that war and also to open up new lines of investigation. These include the role of intelligence in land and air battles; Anglo-American financial relations; Anglo-Russian and Anglo-Irish relations; the British Labour movement in the war; and the final campaigns of 1918, which led to the Allied victory. These essays are written not only for the specialist but also to be accessible to students and to the general reader.