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Books > History > World history > From 1900 > First World War
Tails from the Great War throws a spot light on the experience of
creatures great and small during the First World War, vividly
telling their stories through the incredible archival images of the
Mary Evans Picture Library. The enduring public interest in Michael
Morpurgo's tale of the war horse reveals an enthusiasm for the
animal perspective on war, but what of the untold stories of the
war dog, the trench rat or even the ship's pig? Through unrivalled
access to rarely seen illustrated wartime magazines, books and
postcards, discover the sea lions who were trained to detect
submarines, and witness the carcass of the 61ft mine-destroying
wonder whale. Meet the dog that brought a sailor back from the
brink of death, and inspired a Hollywood legend. See how depictions
of animals were powerfully manipulated by the propaganda machine on
both sides, and how the presence of animals could bring much needed
and even lifesaving companionship and cheer amid the carnage of
war.As the centenary of the Great War is commemorated all over the
world, take a timely journey via the lens of Mary Evans wartime
images, and marvel at the often overlooked but significant
contribution and experience of animals at war. By turns
astonishing, heart-warming and occasionally downright bizarre,
Tails from the Great War champions the little-known story of the
bison, the chameleon, the canary et al in wartime.
Once assumed to be a driver or even cause of conflict,
commemoration during Ireland's Decade of Centenaries came to occupy
a central place in peacebuilding efforts. The inclusive and
cross-communal reorientation of commemoration, particularly of the
First World War, has been widely heralded as signifying new forms
of reconciliation and a greater "maturity" in relationships between
Ireland and the UK and between Unionists and Nationalists in
Northern Ireland. In this study, Jonathan Evershed interrogates the
particular and implicitly political claims about the nature of
history, memory, and commemoration that define and sustain these
assertions, and explores some of the hidden and countervailing
transcripts that underwrite and disrupt them. Drawing on two years
of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Belfast, Evershed explores
Ulster Loyalist commemoration of the Battle of the Somme, its
conflicted politics, and its confrontation with official
commemorative discourse and practice during the Decade of
Centenaries. He investigates how and why the myriad social,
political, cultural, and economic changes that have defined
postconflict Northern Ireland have been experienced by Loyalists as
a culture war, and how commemoration is the means by which they
confront and challenge the perceived erosion of their identity. He
reveals the ways in which this brings Loyalists into conflict not
only with the politics of Irish Nationalism, but with the
"peacebuilding" state and, crucially, with each other. He
demonstrates how commemoration works to reproduce the intracommunal
conflicts that it claims to have overcome and interrogates its
nuanced (and perhaps counterintuitive) function in conflict
transformation.
This is a definitive account of the Austro-Hungarian Royal and
Imperial Army during the First World War. Graydon A. Tunstall shows
how Austria-Hungary entered the war woefully unprepared for the
ordeal it would endure. When the war commenced, the Habsburg Army
proved grossly under strengthen relative to trained officers and
manpower, possessing obsolete weapons and equipment, and with the
vast majority of its troops proved inadequately trained for modern
warfare. Well over one million Habsburg troops mobilized creating
an enormous logistical challenge of forging an army from the
diverse cultures, languages, economic and educational backgrounds
of the Empire's peoples. Graydon A. Tunstall shows how the army
suffered from poor strategic direction and outdated tactics and
facing a two-front offensive against both Russia and Serbia. He
charts the army's performance on the battlefields of Galicia,
Serbia, Romania, the Middle East and Italy through to its ultimate
collapse in 1918.
When the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service merged
on 1 April 1918, to form the Royal Air Force, the new command
needed to have its own gallantry medals to distinguish itself from
the Army and the Royal Navy. Thus the new Distinguished Flying
Cross came into being. Not that this new award (along with the
Distinguished Flying Medal for non-commissioned personnel) came
into immediate use, but as 1918 progressed, awards that earlier
might have produced the Military Cross or Distinguished Service
Cross, became the Distinguished Flying Cross. By the end of WWI a
large number of DFCs and First Bars had been awarded, but only
three Second Bars had been promulgated for First War actions.
Before WWII erupted, only four more Second Bars had been awarded,
for actions largely in what we would now call the Middle East. By
the end of the WWII, awards of the DFC and First Bars had
multiplied greatly, but only fifty Second Bars had been awarded
(and Gazetted), making fifty-seven in all between 1918 and 1946. To
this can be added three more, awarded post-WWII, between 1952-1955,
making a grand total of sixty. Still a significantly small number
of members of this pretty exclusive 'club'. Within the covers of
this book recorded for the first time together are the
mini-biographies of all those sixty along with the citations that
accompanied their awards, or in some cases the recommendations for
them. Also recorded are citations for other decorations such as the
Distinguished Service Order, et al. The recommendations were often
longer than the actual citations themselves, and during periods of
large numbers of all types of awards, these citations did not make
it into the London Gazette, recording name of the recipient only.
As the reader will discover, the range of airmen who received the
DFC and Two Bars, cover most of the ambit of WWII operations, be
they fighter pilots, bomber pilots, night-fighter aircrew, aircrew
navigators, engineers, etc, or reconnaissance pilots. Each has
interesting stories, proving, if proof be needed, their gallantry
in action.
During the First World War the old medieval City of Ypres was the
centre of one of the most notorious battlefields of war: the Ypres
Salient. As early as 22 November 1914, the most famous monuments of
the town, the Cloth Hall and St Martin's Church, were ablaze. Over
the following four years, the entire town centre would be wiped off
the map. In the winter of 1918-1919, a man on a horse was able to
look right across the town. There remained just a few houses more
or less still upright here and there. During the war, the whole
population of Ypres fled or, from May 1915, was forcibly evacuated.
But the first residents were already returning several weeks before
the armistice. Those willing to return found themselves living in a
totally destroyed town where all but nothing remained. They used
fragments of the debris and abandoned war machinery to build their
first homes. Ten years after the armistice, it looked like the town
had never been witness to any war. Practically all houses had been
rebuilt. Today Ypres is generally considered one of the best
examples of post-conflict reconstruction. Full of stories of
resilience and regeneration, this walk - which lasts about 2 hours
- takes you by the most typical examples of Ypres' post-war
architecture, but also shows the most striking deviations.
The centenary of the outbreak of the First World War may be
commemorated by some as a great moment of national history. But the
standard history of Britain's choice for war is far from the truth.
Using a wide range of sources, including the personal papers of
many of the key figures, some for the first time, historian Douglas
Newton presents a new, dramatic narrative. He interleaves the story
of those pressing for a choice for war with the story of those
resisting Britain's descent into calamity. He shows how the
decision to go to war was rushed, in the face of vehement
opposition, in the Cabinet and Parliament, in the Liberal and
Labour press, and in the streets. There was no democratic decision
for war. The history of this opposition has been largely erased
from the record, yet it was crucial to what actually happened in
August 1914. Two days before the declaration of war four members of
the Cabinet resigned in protest at the war party's manipulation of
the crisis. The government almost disintegrated. Meanwhile large
crowds gathered in Trafalgar Square to hear the case for neutrality
and peace. Yet this cry was ignored by the government. Meanwhile,
elements of the press, the Foreign Office, and the Tory Opposition
sought to browbeat the government into a quick decision. Belgium
had little to do with it. The key decision to enter the war was
made before Belgium was invaded. Those bellowing for hostilities
were eager for Britain to enter any war in solidarity with Russia
and France - for the future safety of the British Empire. In
particular Newton shows how Prime Minister H. H. Asquith, Foreign
Minister Sir Edward Grey, and First Lord of the Admiralty Winston
Churchill colluded to pre-empt the decisions of Cabinet, to
manipulate the parliament, and to hurry the nation toward
intervention by any means necessary.
An eye-opening interpretation of the infamous Gallipoli campaign
that sets it in the context of global trade. In early 1915, the
British government ordered the Royal Navy to force a passage of the
Dardanelles Straits-the most heavily defended waterway in the
world. After the Navy failed to breach Turkish defenses, British
and allied ground forces stormed the Gallipoli peninsula but were
unable to move off the beaches. Over the course of the year, the
Allied landed hundreds of thousands of reinforcements but all to no
avail. The Gallipoli campaign has gone down as one of the great
disasters in the history of warfare. Previous works have focused on
the battles and sought to explain the reasons for the British
failure, typically focusing on First Lord of the Admiralty Winston
Churchill. In this bold new account, Nicholas Lambert offers the
first fully researched explanation of why Prime Minister Henry
Asquith and all of his senior advisers-the War Lords-ordered the
attacks in the first place, in defiance of most professional
military opinion. Peeling back the manipulation of the historical
record by those involved with the campaign's inception, Lambert
shows that the original goals were political-economic rather than
military: not to relieve pressure on the Western Front but to
respond to the fall-out from the massive disruption of the
international grain trade caused by the war. By the beginning of
1915, the price of wheat was rising so fast that Britain, the
greatest importer of wheat in the world, feared bread riots.
Meanwhile Russia, the greatest exporter of wheat in the world and
Britain's ally in the east, faced financial collapse. Lambert
demonstrates that the War Lords authorized the attacks at the
Dardanelles to open the straits to the flow of Russian wheat,
seeking to lower the price of grain on the global market and
simultaneously to eliminate the need for huge British loans to
support Russia's war effort. Carefully reconstructing the
perspectives of the individual War Lords, this book offers an
eye-opening case study of strategic policy making under pressure in
a globalized world economy.
At the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, the international community
came together to find a way forward in the aftermath of the First
World War. The conference is often judged a failure, as the
resulting Treaty of Versailles did not bring long-term peace with
Germany. By following the activities of British delegate and
wartime Minister of Blockade Lord Robert Cecil, this book examines
the struggles and successes of the conference, as delegates from
around the world grappled with the economic, political and
humanitarian catastrophes overwhelming Europe in 1919. After the
Great War describes, for the first time, the significant role of
economic warfare at the Peace Conference and in the post-war
settlement. Lord Cecil's sometimes difficult partnership with US
President Woodrow Wilson forged a new, permanent, international
diplomatic organization - the League of Nations - and supplied it
with the power to create collective blockades against aggressive
states. Leaders of the Allied economic war before the Armistice
became, in Paris, leaders of humanitarian-minded international
outreach to their former enemies in Germany and Austria. After the
Great War promotes a new understanding of these underappreciated
internationalists in Paris, many of whom transitioned into leading
the League of Nations even before the Peace Conference ended. Often
derided as an idealistic fantasy, international peace enforced by
economic sanctions appeared a realistic possibility when the Treaty
was signed at the end of June 1919.
This study is the first thorough analysis of the extent of the
opposition to the Great War in Wales, and is the most extensive
study of the anti-war movement in any part of Britain. It is,
therefore, a significant contribution to our understanding of
people's responses to the conflict, and the difficulty of
mobilising the population for total war. The anti-war movement in
Wales and beyond developed quickly from the initial shock of the
declaration of war, to the civil disobedience of anti-war activists
and the industrial discontent excited by the Russian Revolution and
experienced in areas such as the south Wales coalfield in 1917. The
differing responses to the war within Wales are explored in this
book, which charts how the pacifist tradition of nineteenth-century
Welsh Nonconformity was quickly overturned. The two main elements
of the anti-war movement are analysed in depth: the pacifist
religious opposition, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and the
Nonconformist dissidents who were particularly influential in north
and west Wales; and the political opposition concentrated in the
Independent Labour Party and among the radical left within the
South Wales Miners' Federation.
"Exceptional military history worthy of its heroic subject."
-Matthew J. Davenport In the vein of Band of Brothers and American
Sniper, a riveting history of Alvin York, the World War I legend
who killed two dozen Germans and captured more than 100, detailing
York's heroics yet also restoring the unsung heroes of his patrol
to their rightful place in history-from renowned World War I
historian James Carl Nelson. October 8, 1918 was a banner day for
heroes of the American Expeditionary Force. Thirteen men performed
heroic deeds that would earn them Medals of Honor. Of this group,
one man emerged as the single greatest American hero of the Great
War: Alvin Cullum York. A poor young farmer from Tennessee,
Sergeant York was said to have single-handedly killed two dozen
Germans and captured another 132 of the enemy plus thirty-five
machine guns before noon on that fateful Day of Valor. York would
become an American legend, celebrated in magazines, books, and a
blockbuster biopic starring Gary Cooper. The film, Sergeant York,
told of a hell-raiser from backwoods Tennessee who had a
come-to-Jesus moment, then wrestled with his newfound Christian
convictions to become one of the greatest heroes the U.S. Army had
ever known. It was a great story-but not the whole story. In this
absorbing history, James Carl Nelson unspools, for the first time,
the complete story of Alvin York and the events that occurred in
the Argonne Forest on that day. Nelson gives voice, in particular,
to the sixteen "others" who fought beside York. Hailing from big
cities and small towns across the U.S. as well as several foreign
countries, these soldiers included a patrician Connecticut farmer
whose lineage could be traced back to the American Revolution, a
poor runaway from Massachusetts who joined the Army under a false
name, and a Polish immigrant who enlisted in hopes of expediting
his citizenship. The York Patrol shines a long overdue spotlight on
these men and York, and pays homage to their bravery and sacrifice.
Illustrated with 25 black-and-white images, The York Patrol is a
rousing tale of courage, tragedy, and heroism.
In 1918, the U.S. Army Signal Corps sent 223 women to France at
General Pershing's explicit request. They were masters of the
latest technology: the telephone switchboard. While suffragettes
picketed the White House and President Wilson struggled to persuade
a segregationist Congress to give women of all races the vote,
these courageous young women swore the army oath and settled into
their new roles. Elizabeth Cobbs reveals the challenges they faced
in a war zone where male soldiers wooed, mocked, and ultimately
celebrated them. The army discharged the last Hello Girls in 1920,
the year Congress ratified the Nineteenth Amendment. When they
sailed home, they were unexpectedly dismissed without veterans'
benefits and began a sixty-year battle that a handful of survivors
carried to triumph in 1979. "What an eye-opener! Cobbs unearths the
original letters and diaries of these forgotten heroines and weaves
them into a fascinating narrative with energy and zest." -Cokie
Roberts, author of Capital Dames "This engaging history crackles
with admiration for the women who served in the U.S. Army Signal
Corps during the First World War, becoming the country's first
female soldiers." -New Yorker "Utterly delightful... Cobbs very
adroitly weaves the story of the Signal Corps into that larger
story of American women fighting for the right to vote, but it's
the warm, fascinating job she does bringing her cast...to life that
gives this book its memorable charisma... This terrific book pays
them a long-warranted tribute." -Christian Science Monitor "Cobbs
is particularly good at spotlighting how closely the service of
military women like the Hello Girls was tied to the success of the
suffrage movement." -NPR
During World War I, the first U.S. war in which women were
mobilized by the armed services on a mass scale, more than sixteen
thousand female personnel served overseas with the American
Expeditionary Force. Elite society women--the so-called heiress
corps--have dominated the popular perception of women's service
ever since. But Susan Zeiger shows that the majority of these
female nurses, clerical workers, telephone operators, and canteen
workers were wage-earners whose motives for enlistment ranged from
patriotism to economic self-interest, from a sense of adventure to
a desire to challenge gender boundaries.
In exploring women's experience of war, Zeiger draws from a wealth
of diaries, letters, questionnaires, oral histories, and memoirs,
as well as army records. She analyzes the ways women's wartime
service brought to light contradictions in prevailing gender
relations at the height of the campaign for women's suffrage, and
she places the stories of servicewomen in the broader context of
women's employment in the early twentieth century. At a time when
women sought to expand their personal opportunities, Zeiger argues,
the government, determined to contain the disruption to the gender
status quo, created a separate, subordinate status for women in the
military, attempting to "domesticate" and reinscribe them within
conventional roles.
Though when people discuss World War I, they usually center on the
fighting in Europe, it truly was a global war. This book examines
the role of East Asia in the conflict. It looks at how East Asian
commentators saw and interpreted the war, both in Europe and
elsewhere, and what lessons they drew from the experience for their
own societies. What influence did World War I have on East Asian
visions of the world order? Presenting scholarship by a number of
East Asian authors in English for the first time, the book greatly
expands our understanding of World War I and its effects.
An advertisement in the sheet music of the song "Goodbye Broadway,
Hello France" (1917) announces: "Music will help win the war!" This
ad hits upon an American sentiment expressed not just in
advertising, but heard from other sectors of society during the
American engagement in the First World War. It was an idea both
imagined and practiced, from military culture to sheet music
writers, about the power of music to help create a strong military
and national community in the face of the conflict; it appears
straightforward. Nevertheless, the published sheet music, in
addition to discourse about gender, soldiering and music, evince a
more complex picture of society. This book presents a study of
sheet music and military singing practices in America during the
First World War that critically situates them in the social
discourses, including issues of segregation and suffrage, and the
historical context of the war. The transfer of musical styles
between the civilian and military realm was fluid because so many
men were enlisted from homes with the sheet music while they were
also singing songs in their military training. Close musical
analysis brings the meaningful musical and lyrical expressions of
this time period to the forefront of our understanding of soldier
and civilian music making at this time.
At the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the British
government realized that it had to keep the Suez Canal open at all
costs because it was the primary sea route connecting Britain to
its far-flung eastern colonies. The Suez bordered Egypt, a nominal
Turkish province, and, when Turkey became involved in the war on
Germany's side in 1915, Turkey attacked the canal. As a result the
British declared war on Turkey and began an offensive against the
Ottoman forces and their German advisers. The British, aided by
various Arab groups, swept north through Palestine, Jordan, and
Syria to Turkey's ultimate defeat in October 1918.
In "Armageddon, 1918," eminent military historian Cyril Falls
discusses the background of the World War I Middle East conflict
and relates the final, critical campaign through Palestine, along
with its notable personalities, including T. E. Lawrence, Emir
Feisal, Kress von Kressenstein, and Edmund Allenby. Falls ends with
a pertinent reflection on the subsequent history of the region,
from the formation of Iraq in 1920 through the establishment of
Israel, showing how the campaign in the Middle East brought into
the international spotlight the tangled alliances and imperialistic
and nationalistic desires that have left an indelible mark on the
region to this day.
David Herrmann's work is the most complete study to date of how
land-based military power influenced international affairs during
the series of diplomatic crises that led up to the First World War.
Instead of emphasizing the naval arms race, which has been
extensively studied before, Herrmann draws on documentary research
in military and state archives in Germany, France, Austria,
England, and Italy to show the previously unexplored effects of
changes in the strength of the European armies during this period.
Herrmann's work provides not only a contribution to debates about
the causes of the war but also an account of how the European
armies adopted the new weaponry of the twentieth century in the
decade before 1914, including quick-firing artillery, machine guns,
motor transport, and aircraft.
In a narrative account that runs from the beginning of a series
of international crises in 1904 until the outbreak of the war,
Herrmann points to changes in the balance of military power to
explain why the war began in 1914, instead of at some other time.
Russia was incapable of waging a European war in the aftermath of
its defeat at the hands of Japan in 1904-5, but in 1912, when
Russia appeared to be regaining its capacity to fight, an
unprecedented land-armaments race began. Consequently, when the
July crisis of 1914 developed, the atmosphere of military
competition made war a far more likely outcome than it would have
been a decade earlier.
New Modernist Studies, while reviving and revitalizing modernist
studies through lively, scholarly debate about historicity,
aesthetics, politics, and genres, is struggling with important
questions concerning the delineation that makes discussion fruitful
and possible. This volume aims to explore and clarify the position
of the so-called 'core' of literary modernism in its seminal
engagement with the Great War. In studying the years of the Great
War, we find ourselves once more studying 'the giants,' about whom
there is so much more to say, as well as adding hitherto
marginalized writers - and a few visual artists - to the canon. The
contention here is that these war years were seminal to the
development of a distinguishable literary practice which is called
'modernism,' but perhaps could be further delineated as 'Great War
modernism,' a practice whose aesthetic merits can be addressed
through formal analysis. This collection of essays offers new
insight into canonical British/American/European modernism of the
Great War period using the critical tools of contemporary,
expansionist modernist studies. By focusing on war, and on the
experience of the soldier and of those dealing with issues of war
and survival, these studies link the unique forms of expression
found in modernism with the fragmented, violent, and traumatic
experience of the time.
This is a rare day-to-day account by a young German squadron leader
in Jagdstaffel 35 during the grim last year of the war. Originally
published in 1933, it provides minute descriptions of kills,
losses, and the Germans' step-by-step retreat in the face of
increasingly overwhelming Allied forces in the air. Brutally honest
and vividly written, Stark's account of the end-game of the
Imperial German Army Air Service provides an intimate, front-row
glimpse of the death-throes of a once feared corps. This book also
contains reproductions of some of the author's paintings depicting
life on the Western Front.
When Great Britain and its dominions declared war on Germany in
August 1914, they were faced with the formidable challenge of
transforming masses of untrained citizen-soldiers at home and
abroad into competent, coordinated fighting divisions. The Empire
on the Western Front focuses on the development of two units,
Britain's 62nd (2nd West Riding) Division and the Canadian 4th
Division, to show how the British Expeditionary Force rose to this
challenge. By turning the spotlight on army formation and
operations at the divisional level, Jackson calls into question
existing accounts that emphasize the differences between the
imperial and dominion armies.
Written as a young man in Sedan, in eastern France, which was
occupied by the Germans in the First Wold War, Congar makes daily
entries about the War. Written from the eyes of a child, the diary
was found in his room in Paris after his death and published a few
years later. The diary comes with the drawings, maps, and poetry he
made as part of this daily entries.
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