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

Following the career of one relatively unknown First World War general, Lord Horne, this book adds to the growing literature that challenges long-held assumptions that the First World War was a senseless bloodbath conducted by unimaginative and incompetent generals. Instead it demonstrates that men like Horne developed new tactics and techniques to deal with the novel problems of trench warfare and in so doing seeks to re-establish the image of the British generals and explain the reasons for the failures of 1915-16 and the successes of 1917-18 and how this remarkable change in performance was achieved by a much maligned group of senior officers. Horne's important career and remarkable character sheds light not only on the major battles in which he was involved; the progress of the war; his relationships with his staff and other senior officers; the novel problems of trench warfare; the assimilation of new weapons, tactics and training methods; and the difficulties posed by the German defences, but also on the attitudes and professionalism of a senior British commander serving on the Western Front. Horne's career thus provides a vehicle for studying the performance of the British Army in the first quarter of the Twentieth Century. It also gives an important insight into the attitudes, ethos and professionalism of the officer corps which led that army to victory on the Western Front, exposing not only its flaws but also its many strengths. This study consequently provides a judgment not only on Horne as a personality, innovator and general of great importance but also on his contemporaries who served with the British Armies in South Africa and France during an era which saw a revolution in military affairs giving birth to a Modern Style of Warfare which still prevails to this day.

Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August is a spellbinding history of the fateful first month when Britain went to war. War pressed against every frontier. Suddenly dismayed, governments struggled and twisted to fend it off. It was no use . . . Barbara Tuchman's universally acclaimed, Pulitzer prize-winning account of how the first thirty days of battle determined the course of the First World War is to this day revered as the classic account of the conflict's opening. From the precipitous plunge into war and the brutal and bloody battles of August 1914, Tuchman shows how events were propelled by a horrific logic which swept all sides up in its unstoppable momentum. 'Dazzling' Max Hastings 'Magnificent' Guardian 'Fascinating, splendid, glittering. One of the finest works of history' New York Times 'A brilliant achievement' Sunday Telegraph

How does a democratic government conscript citizens, turn them into soldiers who can fight effectively against a highly trained enemy, and then somehow reward these troops for their service? In "Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America, " Jennifer D. Keene argues that the doughboy experience in 1917-18 forged the U.S. Army of the twentieth century and ultimately led to the most sweeping piece of social-welfare legislation in the nation's history--the G.I. Bill.

Keene shows how citizen-soldiers established standards of discipline that the army in a sense had to adopt. Even after these troops had returned to civilian life, lessons learned by the army during its first experience with a mass conscripted force continued to influence the military as an institution. The experience of going into uniform and fighting abroad politicized citizen-soldiers, Keene finally argues, in ways she asks us to ponder. She finds that the country and the conscripts--in their view--entered into a certain social compact, one that assured veterans that the federal government owed conscripted soldiers of the twentieth century debts far in excess of the pensions the Grand Army of the Republic had claimed in the late nineteenth century.

German general Hermann Balck (1897--1982) was considered to be one of World War II's greatest battlefield commanders. His brilliantly fought battles were masterpieces of tactical agility, mobile counterattack, and the technique of Auftragstaktik, or "mission command." However, because he declined to participate in the U.S. Army's military history debriefing program, today he is known only to serious students of the war. Drawing heavily on his meticulously kept wartime journals, Balck discusses his childhood and his career through the First and Second World Wars. His memoir details the command decision-making process as well as operations on the ground during crucial battles, including the Battle of the Marne in World War I and his incredible victories against a larger and better-equipped Soviet army at the Chir River in World War II. Balck also offers observations on Germany's greatest generals, such as Erich Ludendorff and Heinz Guderian, and shares his thoughts on international relations, domestic politics, and Germany's place in history. Available in English for the first time in an expertly edited and annotated edition, this important book provides essential information about the German military during a critical era in modern history.

Despite the substantial output of revisionist scholarship over the last decade reappraising the performance of the British Army on the Western Front during the First World War, there still remains a stubborn perception that its commanders were incompetent, inflexible and unimaginative. Whilst much ink has been spilled vilifying or defending individual commanders, or looking for overarching trends and 'learning curves', this is the first work to examine systematically the vertical nature of command - that is the transmission of plans from the high-command down through the rank structure to the front line. Through such an investigation, a much more rounded measure of the effectiveness of British commanders can be gained; one moves the argument beyond the overly simplistic 'casualties to ground gained' equation that is usually offered. The Battle of Fromelles (19-20 July 1916) was selected as the case study as it was relatively small in scale, in the right period, and retains sufficient primary sources available to sustain the analysis. It also witnessed the first time Australian forces were used in offensive operations on the Western Front, and thus looms large in wider Commonwealth perceptions of 'Bumbling British Generals'. The book follows the progress of the battle plan from its inception in the strategic designs of the supreme commander down through the various intermediate level commands at operational and tactical headquarters until it became the orders that sent the infantry forward into the attack. In so doing it provides a unique insight into the strengths and weaknesses of British command structure, allowing a much more scholarly judgement of its overall effectiveness.

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.

The First World War was a transformative experience for women, facilitating their entry into new spaces and alternative spheres of activity, both on the home front and on the edges of danger zones in Europe and beyond. The centenary of the conflict is an appropriate moment to reassess what we choose to remember about women's roles and responsibilities in this period and how women recorded their experiences. It is timely to (re)consider the narratives of women's involvement not only as nurses, VADs and mourning mothers, but as pacifist campaigners, poets, war correspondents and contributors to developing genres of war writing. This interdisciplinary volume examines women's representations of wartime experience across a wide range of genres, including modernist fiction, ghost stories, utopia, poetry, life-writing and journalism. Contributors provide fresh perspectives on women's written responses to the conflict, exploring women's war work, constructions of femininity and the maternal in wartime, and the relationship between feminism, suffrage and pacifism. The volume reinforces the importance of the retrieval of women's wartime experience, urging us to rethink what we choose to commemorate and widening the presence of women in the expanding canon of war writing. This book was originally published as a special issue of Women's Writing.

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.

Originally published in 1920. The 231st Infantry Brigade, with which this diary is chiefly concerned, came into extence in January 1917, at a time when its compoent parts were engaged in the campaign against the Senussi, distributed in the Western Desert of Egypt and the Oases, from Sollum to Dakhala. The diary opens on October 1st 1917, when the preparations for the simultaneous attacks on Beersheba and Gaza were nearing completion.

Are science and technology independent of one another? Is technology dependent upon science, and if so, how is it dependent? Is science dependent upon technology, and if so how is it dependent? Or, are science and technology becoming so interdependent that the line dividing them has become totally erased? This book charts the history of technoscience from the late nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century and shows how the military-industrial-academic complex and big science combined to create new examples of technoscience in such areas as the nuclear arms race, the space race, the digital age, and the new worlds of nanotechnology and biotechnology.

The year 1916 has recently been identified as "a tipping point for the intensification of protests, riots, uprisings and even revolutions." Many of these constituted a challenge to the international pre-war order of empires, and thus collectively represent a global anti-imperial moment, which was the revolutionary counterpart to the later diplomatic attempt to construct a new world order in the so-called Wilsonian moment. Chief among such events was the Easter Rising in Ireland, an occurrence that took on worldwide significance as a challenge to the established order. This is the first collection of specialist studies that aims at interpreting the global significance of the year 1916 in the decline of empires.

The First World War was a period of turbulent and unprecedented political upheaval that witnessed contrasting fortunes for Britain's major political parties. This book demonstrates how the Conservative Party was able to respond effectively in these years by refining a wartime patriotism that ensured its unity as a party, helped define its electoral fortunes and shaped ideological cohesion. Concepts of patriotism determined not only attitudes to the prosecution of the war, to voluntary and forced military enlistment, but also to class politics, Irish Unionism, democratic reform and the relationship between citizen and state. Fundamental conclusions about modern Conservatism emerge: its organic ideological genesis into a property-defending party; its peculiar willingness and capacity to adapt not only to the immense challenges of 'total war', but also to the new political climate awakened by the conflict. Conservatism was therefore at once flexible and ideological. Filling the historiographical gap created by an overemphasis upon its rival Liberal and Labour parties, and using previously unused party sources, this study sheds new light on many aspects of the war, of Conservative Party history and its regeneration following three disastrous general election defeats in succession, and of British politics in the twentieth century.

"More dramtatic than fiction...THE GUNS OF AUGUST is a magnificent narrative--beautifully organized, elegantly phrased, skillfully paced and sustained....The product of painstaking and sophisticated research."
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
Historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Barbara Tuchman has brought to life again the people and events that led up to Worl War I. With attention to fascinating detail, and an intense knowledge of her subject and its characters, Ms. Tuchman reveals, for the first time, just how the war started, why, and why it could have been stopped but wasn't. A classic historical survey of a time and a people we all need to know more about, THE GUNS OF AUGUST will not be forgotten.

The Russian Military Air Fleet in World War I two volume set is a prodigious scholarly endeavor, offering for the first time in the English language a close up view of Air Fleet operations and personnel. Vol.1 is a chronology of the development of aeronautics and aviation in Russia beginning in the earliest days and the eventual emergence of the Air Fleet, which is carried through to its dissolution by the Bolsheviks and the beginning of the Red Air Fleet in March 1918. There are also chapters on manufacturers, airmen badges, aviation uniforms, flight helmets, markings, flags and pennants, organizational charts, maps of the Russian and Romanian Fronts, and bibliography.

Contested Objects breaks new ground in the interdisciplinary study of material culture. Its focus is on the rich and varied legacy of objects from the First World War as the global conflict that defined the twentieth century. From the iconic German steel helmet to practice trenches on Salisbury Plain, and from the 'Dazzle Ship' phenomenon through medal-wearing, diary-writing, trophy collecting, the market in war souvenirs and the evocative reworking of European objects by African soldiers, this book presents a dazzling array of hitherto unseen worlds of the Great War. The innovative and multidisciplinary approach adopted here follows the lead established by Nicholas J. Saunders' Matters of Conflict (Routledge 2004), and extends its geographical coverage to embrace a truly international perspective. Australia, Africa, Italy, Germany, France, Belgium and Britain are all represented by a cross-disciplinary group of scholars working in archaeology, anthropology, cultural history, art history, museology, and cultural heritage. The result is a volume that resonates with richly documented and theoretically informed case studies that illustrate how the experiences of war can be embodied in and represented by an endless variety of artefacts, whose 'social lives' have endured for almost a century and that continue to shape our perceptions of an increasingly dangerous world.

In 1915-18, ANZAC and Ottoman soldiers clashed on numerous battlefields, from Gallipoli to Jerusalem. This illustrated study investigates the two sides' fighting men. The Gallipoli campaign of 1915-16 pitched the Australian and New Zealand volunteers known as the ANZACs into a series of desperate battles with the Ottoman soldiers defending their homeland. In August 1915, the bitter struggle for the high ground known as Chunuk Bair saw the peak change hands as the Allies sought to overcome the stalemate that set in following the landings in April. The ANZACs also played a key part in the battle of Lone Pine, intended to divert Ottoman attention away from the bid to seize Chunuk Bair. The Gallipoli campaign ended in Allied evacuation in the opening days of 1916. Thereafter, many ANZAC units remained in the Middle East and played a decisive role in the Allies' hard-fought advance through Palestine that finally forced the Turks to the peace table. The fateful battle of Beersheba in October 1917 pitted Australian mounted infantry against Ottoman foot soldiers as the Allies moved on Jerusalem. In this book, noted military historian Si Sheppard examines the fighting men on both sides who fought at Lone Pine, Chunuk Bair and Beersheba. The authoritative text is supported by specially commissioned artwork and mapping plus carefully chosen archive photographs.

This highly illustrated volume covers the variety of armored cars used by Czech forces during World War I, and the Russian Civil War, as well as its post-WWI use in Italy and Slovakia. Along with details of armored car design, manufacturers, construction, and variants, the book covers Czech armored unit formations and their extensive operational use during the First World War. Special sections cover vehicle camouflage and markings, technical specifications, and uniforms and biographies of noted personalities.

Despite the numerous vicious conflicts that scarred the twentieth century, the horrors of the Western Front continue to exercise a particularly strong hold on the modern imagination. The unprecedented scale and mechanization of the war changed forever the way suffering and dying were perceived and challenged notions of what the nations could reasonably expect of their military. Examining experiences of the Western Front, this book looks at the life of a soldier from the moment he marched into battle until he was buried. In five chapters - Battle, Body, Mind, Aid, Death - it describes and analyzes the physical and mental hardship of the men who fought on a front that stretched from the Belgian coast to the Swiss border. Beginning with a broad description of the war it then analyzes the medical aid the Tommies, Bonhommes and Frontschweine received - or all too often did not receive - revealing how this aid was often given for military and political rather than humanitarian reasons (getting the men back to the front or munitions factory and trying to spare the state as many war-pensions as possible). It concludes with a chapter on the many ways death presented itself on or around the battlefield, and sets out in detail the problems that arise when more people are killed than can possibly be buried properly. In contrast to most books in the field this study does not focus on one single issue - such as venereal disease, plastic surgery, shell-shock or the military medical service - but takes a broad view on wounds and illnesses across both sides of the conflict. Drawing on British, French, German, Belgian and Dutch sources it shows the consequences of modern warfare on the human individuals caught up in it, and the way it influences our thinking on 'humanitarian' activities.

Originally published in 1985 The Decision to Disarm Germany offers a fresh approach to Britain's First World War and Paris Peace Conference policy on the question of German military disarmament. It offers interpretations based on extensive research into unpublished records and private papers and provides important new conclusions about British policy. The book shows the interaction of domestic concerns and strategic considerations in the wartime development of British thinking on the issue of post-war German disarmament and in the post-Armistice formulation and implementation of Britain's German disarmament policy. It establishes the crucial interrelationship in British thinking and policy between German disarmament and general disarmament. It also shows the interwar consequences of wartime attitudes and peace conference policy.

This new volume explores the history of an important, but neglected sector of the Western Front between 1914 and 1918 in the context of its portrayal in the media. The analysis sheds new light on of the role of the mass media in generating national mythologies.

The book focuses on the largely forgotten ArmentiA]res and La BassA(c)e sector, a section of the Western Front which saw fighting from many different nationalities on almost every day of the war. Through analysis of this section of the Western Front, this book examines the way the First World War was interpreted, both in official and semi-official sources as well as in the mass media, comparing what was apparently happening on the Western Front battlefield to what was reported in the newspapers. It follows the different sides as they responded to the changing nature of warfare and to each other, showing how reporting was adapted to changing perceptions of national needs.

The air aces of Imperial Germany's Luftstreitkrafte are an ever-popular subject among aviation historians, enthusiasts, war gamers, and aircraft modelers. The images of famous airmen such as Manfred von Richthofen, Ernst Udet, and Werner Voss are well known and frequently published, but the same cannot be said for all of the over 300 German airmen who achieved five or more aerial victories in the Great War. Their stories have often been published, but never have as many photographs of the aces been assembled within the pages of one volume. Of necessity these photos vary widely in style, format and quality, yet they serve to reveal a good deal of information about the pilots and the multitude of different uniforms and decorations they wore. Students of World War I aircraft will also find useful illustrations of the various machines in which these pilots attained their fame. Over 330 photographs of the aces are provided. The aces are listed in 'score' order, starting with the 'Red Baron' himself with eighty victories, and proceeding down the list to the last alphabetically ordered airman with five claims, Martin Zander. Each photograph is accompanied by a brief service history and victory total of the ace.

Aspects of British Policy and the Treaty of Versailles looks at some key issues involving British policy and the Treaty of Versailles, one of the twentieth century's most controversial international agreements. The book discusses the role of experts and the Danzig Question at the Paris Peace Conference; the establishment of diplomatic history as a field of academic research; and the role of David Lloyd George and his Vision of Post-War Europe. Contributors also look at the restitution of cultural objects in German possession, and after the war, the Treaty's impact on both Britain's enemy, Germany, and its ally, France, revealing how it profoundly affected the European balance of power. Aspects of British Policy and the Treaty of Versailles will be of great interest to scholars of diplomatic history as well as modern history and international relations more generally. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of Diplomacy & Statecraft.

The First World War was an epic event of huge proportions that lasted over four years and involved the armies of more than twenty nations, resulting in 30 million casualties, including more than 8 million killed. Set against the backdrop of this massive carnage, The Search for Negotiated Peace is the gripping story of the events that moved high profile American and European citizens, particularly women, into the international peace movement. This small, transatlantic network put forth proposals for changing the international system of negotiation. They supported non-annexationist war aims and attempted to discredit nations' secret diplomacy, militarism and narrowly nationalistic practices. Instead, they wanted to develop a 'new diplomacy.' David Patterson skillfully develops the interactions of many of the notable leaders of the movement, including Jane Addams, Aletta Jacobs, and Rosika Schwimmer, into an absorbing narrative that brings together the various strands of women's history, international diplomatic history, and peace history for the first time. The Search for Negotiated Peace is an essential read for anyone interested in the social history of World War I and the foundations of citizen activism today.