Clash of Fleets is an operational history that records every naval engagement fought between major surface warships during World War I. Much more than a catalog of combat facts, Clash of Fleets explores why battles occurred; how the different navies fought; and how combat advanced doctrine and affected the development and application of technology. The result is a holistic overview of the war at sea as it affected all nations and all theaters of war. A work of this scope is unprecedented. Organized into seven chapters, the authors first introduce the technology, weapons, ships, and the doctrine that governed naval warfare in 1914. The next five chapters explore each year of the war and are subdivided into sections corresponding to major geographic areas. This arrangement allows the massive sweep of action to be presented in a structured and easy to follow format that includes engagements fought by the Austro-Hungarian, British, French, German, Ottoman, and Russian Navies in the Adriatic, Aegean, Baltic, Black, Mediterranean, and North Seas as well as the Atlantic, India, and Pacific Oceans. The role of surface combat in the Great War is analyzed and these actions are compared to major naval wars before and after. In addition to providing detailed descriptions of actions in their historical perspectives, O'Hara and Heinz advance several themes, including the notion that World War I was a war of navies as much as a war of armies. They explain that surface combat had a major impact on all aspects of the naval war and on the course of the war in general. Finally, Clash of Fleets illustrates that systems developed in peace do not always work as expected in war, that some are not used as anticipated, and that others became unexpectedly important. There is much for today's naval professional to consider in the naval conflict that occurred a century ago.

While Belgium is bleeding and hoping, while Poland suffers and dreams of liberation, while Serbia is waiting for redemption, there is a little country the soul of which is torn to pieces - a little country that is so remote, so remote that her ardent sighs cannot be heard. It is the country of perpetual sacrifice, the country that saw Abraham build the altar upon which he was ready to immolate his only son, the country that Moses saw from a distance, stretching in beauty and loveliness, - a land of promise never to be attained, - the country that gave the world its symbols of soul and spirit. Palestine! No war correspondents, no Red Cross or relief commi-ttees have gone to Palestine, because no actual fighting has taken place there, and yet hundreds of thousands are suffering there that worst of agonies, the agony of the spirit.

Why did millions of men agree to fight the most horrific war in history? And go on doing it, in many cases, for years? The question of consent is one of the many issues of the Great War that still haunt us today.
The soldiers of 1914-1918 created a large body of newspapers and magazines by, for and about themselves. Often misleadingly called 'trench journals', these rich archival sources have received surprisingly little sustained scholarly attention. Through the first comprehensive investigation and analysis of the English language trench periodicals of the war - British, Canadian, Australia, New Zealand and American - The Soldiers' Press presents a cultural interpretation of the means and methods through which consent was negotiated between the trenches and the home front.
The few existing book-length studies tend to use trench newspapers as sources of information to answer historical questions. The Soldiers' Press treats soldier journalism on its own terms and provides a new answer to one lasting conundrum of World War I.

Four families in the Great War 1914-1918. Foreword by Charles Messenger

In this book, Philip Payton provides a vivid insight into the experiences of regional Australia during the Great War of 1914-18. Alighting upon 'old Kio', the copper-mining communities of South Australia's northern Yorke Peninsula, he describes the relationship between the 'homefront' and the 'battlefront' half-a-world away. He draws an intimate portrait of Australia at war, from the lives (and deaths) of local soldiers-all volunteers-in the trenches far from home to the myriad reactions and activities of those in a community struggling to grasp the enormity of the situation in which it found itself. The book shows how community cohesion was fractured by increasing tensions and divisions, not least over the Conscription debate, as the war dragged on. And it shows how those volunteer soldiers fared in each of the great battles in which the Australians participated-from Gallipoli to the Western Front and the heady days of 1918.

The World Crisis is considered by many to be Winston S. Churchill's literary masterpiece. Published across five volumes between 1923 and 1931, Churchill here tells the story of The Great War, from its origins to the long shadow it cast on the following decades. At once a history and a first-hand account of Churchill's own involvement in the war, The World Crisis remains a compelling account of the conflict and its importance. The third volume of The World Crisis covers the climax and the end of the war, from 1916-1918. Churchill here explores some of the most important moments of the conflict, including the battles of Verdun, Jutland, Passchendaele and the Somme as well as the American entry into the war that marked the beginning of its end. Churchill here also recounts his time on the front line during his brief exile from political office and his return to government in Lloyd-George's wartime coalition as Minster of Munitions.

The Indian Army was one of the most important colonial institutions that the British created. From its humble origins as a mercantile police force to a modern contemporary army in the Second World War, this institution underwent many transitions. This book examines the Indian Army during the later colonial era from the First Afghan War in 1839 to Indian independence in 1947. During this period, the Indian Army developed from an internal policing force, to a frontier army, and then to a conventional western style fighting force capable of deployment to overseas' theaters. These transitions resulted in significant structural and doctrinal changes in the army. The doctrines, and tactics honed during this period would have a dramatic impact upon the post-colonial armies of India and Pakistan. From civil-military relations to fighting and structural doctrines, the Indian and Pakistani armies closely reflect the deep-seated impact of decades of evolution during the late colonial era.

The Avant-Garde in Interwar England addresses modernism's ties to tradition, commerce, nationalism, and spirituality through an analysis of the assimilation of visual modernism in England between 1910 and 1939. During this period, a debate raged across the nation concerning the purpose of art in society. On one side were the aesthetic formalists, led by members of London's Bloomsbury Group, who thought art was autonomous from everyday life. On the other were England's so-called medieval modernists, many of them from the provincial North, who maintained that art had direct social functions and moral consequences. As Michael T. Saler demonstrates in this fascinating volume, the heated exchange between these two camps would ultimately set the terms for how modern art was perceived by the British public.
Histories of English modernism have usually emphasized the seminal role played by the Bloomsbury Group in introducing, celebrating, and defining modernism, but Saler's study instead argues that, during the watershed years between the World Wars, modern art was most often understood in the terms laid out by the medieval modernists. As the name implies, these artists and intellectuals closely associated modernism with the art of the Middle Ages, building on the ideas of John Ruskin, William Morris, and other nineteenth-century romantic medievalists. In their view, modernism was a spiritual, national, and economic movement, a new and different artistic sensibility that was destined to revitalize England's culture as well as its commercial exports when applied to advertising and industrial design.
This book, then, concerns the busy intersection of art, trade, and national identity in the early decades of twentieth-century England. Specifically, it explores the life and work of Frank Pick, managing director of the London Underground, whose famous patronage of modern artists, architects, and designers was guided by a desire to unite nineteenth-century arts and crafts with twentieth-century industry and mass culture. As one of the foremost adherents of medieval modernism, Pick converted London's primary public transportation system into the culminating project of the arts and crafts movement. But how should today's readers regard Pick's achievement? What can we say of the legacy of this visionary patron who sought to transform the whole of sprawling London into a post-impressionist work of art? And was medieval modernism itself a movement of pioneers or dreamers? In its bold engagement with such questions, The Avant-Garde in Interwar England will surely appeal to students of modernism, twentieth-century art, the cultural history of England, and urban history.

The World Crisis is considered by many to be Winston S. Churchill's literary masterpiece. Published across five volumes between 1923 and 1931, Churchill here tells the story of The Great War, from its origins to the long shadow it cast on the following decades. At once a history and a first-hand account of Churchill's own involvement in the war, The World Crisis remains a compelling account of the conflict and its importance. The second volume of Churchill's history covers 1915 - the first full year of a conflict that most of the antagonists had expected to be over in a matter of months. Churchill here covers the intractable deadlock on the western front, the use of tanks and gas on the battlefields and the unsuccessful attempts by both sides to break through. In addition, Churchill also considers his own involvement in the Dardanelles campaign (Gallipoli).

The two-volume Life of Gregory Zilboorg is a meticulously researched biography of the Russian-American psychoanalyst Gregory Zilboorg and chronicles the period from his birth as a Jew in Tsarist Russia to his prominence as a New York psychoanalyst on the eve of the Second World War. Drawing on previously unpublished sources, including family papers and archival material, this biography offers a dramatic narrative that will appeal to general readers as well as scholars interested in the First World War, the Russian revolution, the Jewish diaspora, and the history of psychoanalysis.

Soon after the guns in Belgium and France had signalled the commencement of what would become the world's single most destructive conflict to date, the British, Ottoman, German, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, French and Belgian Empires were at war. Empires in World War I marks a turn away from the pre-eminence of the Western Front in the current scholarship, and seeks to reconstitute our understanding of this war as a truly global struggle between competing empires. Based on primary research, this book opens up new debates on the effects of the Great War in colonial arenas. The book assesses the effects of the war on Native Americans in the United States for example, as well as on the relationship between India and Pakistan, the British justice system in Palestine and the 'imperial scramble' in the Asia-Pacific region. Empires in World War I will be essential reading for students and scholars of the twentieth century.

A century after the Armistice and the associated peace agreements that formally ended the Great War, many issues pertaining to the UK and its empire are yet to be satisfactorily resolved. Accordingly, this volume presents a multi-disciplinary approach to better understanding the post-Armistice Empire across a broad spectrum of disciplines, geographies and chronologies. Through the lens of diplomatic, social, cultural, historical and economic analysis, the chapters engage with the histories of Lagos and Tonga, Cyprus and China, as well as more obvious geographies of empire such as Ireland, India and Australia. Though globally diverse, and encompassing much of the post-Armistice century, the studies are nevertheless united by three common themes: the interrogation of that transitionary 'moment' after the Armistice that lingered well beyond the final Treaty of Lausanne in 1924; the utilisation of new research methods and avenues of enquiry to compliment extant debates concerning the legacies of colonialism and nationalism; and the common leitmotif of the British Empire in all its political and cultural complexity. The centenary of the Armistice offers a timely occasion on which to present these studies.

On the 25th August 1895, Ernest Alfred Hall was born into a pioneering Australian family that lived on a 313-acre property called 'Cloverdale' near the hamlet of Beech Forest, south of the Otway Ranges, some 200 kilometres south west of Melbourne, Victoria. As a child, it seemed he would be destined for the life of a farmer in a country that was just realising its independence through Federation, yet his path was to be diverted by the cataclysmic events that befell Europe and the British Empire. So it was, that one month short of his 20th birthday, Ernest caught the train to Melbourne and enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force. At only 5' 3" he was never going to be the biggest soldier in the army, but as his father said to him, "It's not the size of the dog in the fight, son, but the size of the fight in the dog." Like so many, Ernest Hall embarked for the war to end all wars. Unlike so many, his letters and records survived. This is his story.

The First World War appears as a fault line in Britain 's twentieth-century history. Between August 1914 and November 1918 the titanic struggle against Imperial Germany and her allies consumed more people, more money and more resources than any other conflict Britain had hitherto experienced. For the first time, it opened up a Home Front that stretched into all parts of the British polity, society and culture, touching the lives of every citizen regardless of age, gender and class. Even vegetables were grown in the gardens of Buckingham Palace.

Britain and World War One throws attention on these civilians who fought the war on the Home Front. Harnessing recent scholarship, and drawing on original documents, oral testimony and historical texts, this book casts a fresh look over different aspects of British society during the four long years of war. It revisits the early war enthusiasm and the making of Kitchener 's new armies; the emotive debates over conscription; the relationships between politics, government and popular opinion; women working in wartime industries; the popular experience of war and the question of social change.

The book also explores areas of wartime Britain overlooked by recent histories, including the impact of the war on rural society; the mobilization of industry, and the importance of technology, as well as exploring responses to air raids, food and housing shortages; the challenges to traditional social and sexual mores and wartime culture. Britain and World War One is an essential book for all students and interested lay readers of the First World War.

This book examines the British soldiers on the Western Front and how they responded to the war landscape they encountered behind the lines and at the front. Using a multidisciplinary perspective, this study investigates the relationship between soldiers and the spaces and materials of the warzone, analyzing how soldiers constructed a 'sense of place' in the hostile, unpredictable environment. Drawing upon recent developments within First World War Studies and the anthropological examination of the fields of conflict, an ethnohistorical perspective of the soldiers is built which details the various ways soldiers responded to the physical and material world of the Western Front. This study is also grounded in the wider debates on how the First World War is remembered within Britain and offers an alternative perspective on the individuals who fought in the world's first global conflagration nearly a century ago.

Germany in the Great War Illustrated - Mobilisation and the Western Advance is the first volume of a projected six-part series that details, graphically, the Central Powers - Germany and Austro-Hungary - fighting to the west during the concluding months of 1914. This superbly illustrated and highly researched book covers the schema of a 'quick victory' on the WestFront (Western Front). From preparatory build-up, to mobilisation and to subsequent annexation and occupation, (90 per cent of northern France and the Kingdom of Belgium), this title manifest the 'German' perspective - a pictorial digest. Evincing German offense against the BEF (British Expeditionary Force), French and Belgium armies at the Battle of Mons, heralding the mass exodus of British troops from region, the siege of Antwerp and the breakthrough toward Paris. Each successive chapter includes a short, introductory narrative, documenting holistically events and is accompanied by a wealth of fully captioned and rarely before seen photographs: over 500 images.

Cautious Crusade explores how Americans viewed Nazi Germany during World War II, the extent to which the public opposed the president's vision for planning both Germany's defeat and future, and how opinion and policy interacted as the Roosevelt administration grappled with various aspects of the German problem during this period.

This volume deals with the multiple impacts of the First World War on societies from South Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa, usually largely overlooked by the historiography on the conflict. Due to the lesser intensity of their military involvement in the war (neutrals or latecomers), these countries or regions were considered "peripheral" as a topic of research. However, in the last two decades, the advances of global history recovered their importance as active wartime actors and that of their experiences. This book will reconstruct some experiences and representations of the war that these societies built during and after the conflict from the prism of mediators between the war fought in the battlefields and their homes, as well as the local appropriations and resignifications of their experiences and testimonies.

For seventy years Douglas Haig had been portrayed on the one hand as the 'Butcher of the Somme' - inept, insensitive and archaic; and on the other as the 'Saviour of Britain' - noble, unselfish and heroic. This polarised, strident and ultimately inconclusive argument had resulted in Haig becoming detached from his own persona; he had become a shallow symbol of a past age to be pilloried or praised. The middle ground in the Haig debate had been as barren as No Man's Land. There should be no mystery about Haig. Certain from a very early age of his own greatness, he preserved every record of his achievements: diaries, letters, official reports etc. The opinions of his contemporaries are likewise readily available. But until this book the material had not been used to construct a complete and accurate picture. Critics and supporters have raided the historical records for evidence of the demi-god or demon and have ignored that which conflicts with their preconceptions. They have likewise raced through his early life in order to get to the war, in the process ignoring the complex process of his development as a soldier. Analyses of Haig's command have consequently been as shallow as the prevailing images of the man. After eight years of painstaking and detailed research into previously neglected sources, Gerard De Groot gave us a more complete and balanced picture. This book, originally published in 1988, which will appeal both to the general and the specialised reader, is not simply a critique of Haig's command in the war, but an exploration into his personality. Close attention to his early life and career reveals him as a creature of his society, a man who mirrored both the virtues and the faults of Edwardian Britain. What emerges is an intense, dedicated, but ultimately flawed servant of his country whose ironic fate it was to grow up in one age and to command in another.

The central focus of this book is the traumatized German war veteran. Using previously unexplored source material written by the psychologically scarred veterans themselves, this innovative work traces how some of the most vulnerable members of society, marginalized and persecuted as 'enemies of the nation,' attempted to regain authority over their own minds and reclaim the authentic memory of the Great War Under Weimar Germany and the Third Reich, the mentally disabled survivor of the trenches became a focus of debate between competing social and political groups, each attempting to construct their own versions of the national community and the memory of the war experience. Views on class, war, masculinity and social deviance were shaped and in some cases altered by the popularised debates that surrounded these traumatized members of society. Through the tortured words of these men and women, Jason Crouthamel reveals a hidden layer of protest against prevailing institutions and official memory, especially the Nazi celebration of war as the cornerstone of the 'healthy' male psyche. He also shows how these 'social outsiders' attempted to reform healthcare and reconstruct notions of 'comradeship', 'manliness' and the national community in ways that complicate the history of the veteran in this highly militarised society. By examining the psychological effects of war on ordinary Germans and the way these war victims have shaped perceptions of madness and mass violence, Crouthamel is able to illuminate potent and universal problems faced by societies coping with war and the politics of how we care for our veterans.

For much of the later nineteenth-century Britain regarded Russia as its main international rival, particularly as regarded the security of its colonial possessions in India. Yet, by 1907 Russia's political revolution, financial collapse and military defeat by Japan, transformed the situation, resulting in an Anglo-Russian rapprochement. As this book makes clear, whilst international affairs lay at the root of this new relationship, personal factors also played an important role in reversing many years of mutual animosity and suspicion. In particular the study explores the influence of the liberal anglophile Count Aleksandr Benckendorff, the Russian ambassador in London between 1903 and 1916. By 1905, Russia's multiple weaknesses required a prolonged period of external peace by eliminating frictions with the principal rival powers, Britain and Germany, while France and Britain realised that a British rapprochement with Russia would be necessary to counter Germany's power. Benckendorff, as one of the most important figures in the Russian diplomatic service, persuaded Nicholas II and his Foreign Minister, V.N. Lamsdorff, to drop their objections to various long-standing British demands in order to pave the way for a Triple Entente. Although the overarching Russian strategy was conceived as 'balancing' the imperial rivalries of Britain and Germany, numerous factors - not least Benckendorff's energetic pro-British stance - upset the scales and resulted in a stand-off with the Central Powers. Demonstrating how Benckendorff's fear of losing Britain's friendship made him oppose all Russia's efforts at improving Russo-German relations, this book underlines the pro-Entente policy's role in setting Russia on the road to war. For when the Sarajevo crisis struck; there was now no hope of appealing to German goodwill to help defuse the situation. Instead Russia's status within the Entente depended on a show of determination and strength, which lead inexorably to a disaster o

In forming the Royal Air Force on 1 April 1918, Britain created the world's first independent air service. Britain entered the First World War with less than 200 ill-assorted flying machines divided between the army and the navy, but by the end of the war the RAF mustered almost 300,000 personnel and 22, 000 aircraft. Originally published in 1986, more than 65 years after the event, the decision to form the RAF remained poorly understood and Malcolm Cooper presented the first detailed modern analysis of its creation, shedding new light on the process by which Britain entered the air age. Set against the background of the build-up of air power during the First World War, the book explains how deepening political concern at failures in home air defence, public demands for retaliatory air action against Germany, problems of mobilization and expansion in the aircraft industry, and disagreements between the existing army and navy air services combined to create the conditions for an independent air force. The author argues that the pressures of war were insufficient to give real substance to the RAF's independence and that its failure to escape from its wartime role as an ancillary service was also of crucial significance in the evolution of British air strategy in later years. Based on an extensive study of official documents and private papers and amply illustrated with contemporary photographs, this title will prove invaluable in understanding both strategic thinking in the Great War and the early development of a form of warfare which dominated military and naval operations in the twentieth century.

Why, despite the appalling conditions in the trenches of the Western Front, was the British army almost untouched by major mutiny during the First World War? Drawing upon an extensive range of sources, including much previously unpublished archival material, G.D. Sheffield seeks to answer this question by examining a crucial but previously neglected factor in the maintenance of the British army's morale in the First World War: the relationship between the regimental officer and the ordinary soldier.