The American drive towards victory on the Western Front
This unique Leonaur book brings together 'The Turn of the Tide by Jennings Wise, ' an excellent history of some of the decisive battles fought by American forces on the Western Front in 1918, and the separately published portfolio of first-rate illustrations of the American Expeditionary Force in action during that period by Jean Berne-Bellecour. By the end of 1914 the die was cast in Europe for a war of stalemate on the Western Front. Inevitably generals on both sides sought battlefield solutions, but the lines remained almost static, with the armies grappling over entrenched positions of barbed-wire fringed mud. Inevitably the realisation came that this was a true war of attrition. There would be no decisive manoeuvre and the outcome would be determined by which nations would run out of men, materials and food first. Germany could see how the allies depended upon supplies from the United States of America and deployed its U-Boat wolf-packs to the Atlantic Ocean to disrupt shipping. By 1917 this strategy was close to success and the allied cause was in jeopardy. There can be little doubt that American entry into the war was the key to Allied victory. Both men and materials arrived, crossing the ocean protected by the might of a naval presence that only the USA could now muster. After three years of neutrality, the Americans-it has to be said-came not to fight the war, but to win it. This was an industrial war as no previous war had been, and this book traces the fiercely contested battles that became iconic for the Americans who served in Europe. Here are the battles of the summer of 1918 including the taking of Cantigny, the battles of Chateau Thierry and the famous Belleau Wood, Hill 204 and the counter-offensive which was the Second Battle of the Marne. This book includes many battlefield maps to assist the modern reader.
Leonaur editions are newly typeset and are not facsimiles; each title is available in softcover and hardback with dustjacket; our hardbacks are cloth bound and feature gold foil lettering on their spines and fabric head and tail bands.

Routledge Library Editions: Germans in Australia comprises three previously out-of-print books by Jurgen Tampke and examines the experiences of Germans in Australia, as explorers, migrants and enemies. Germans made up the second-largest immigrant group in Australia, and these books look at their roles in exploring the country, helping develop the economy and society, and as the enemy in the First World War.

The poetry of the Great War is among the most powerful ever written in the English language. Unique for its immediacy and searing honesty, it has made a fundamental contribution to our understanding of and response to war and the suffering it creates. Widely acclaimed as an indispensable guide to the Great War poets and their work, Out of Battle explores in depth the variety of responses from Rupert Brook, Ford Madox Ford, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Issac Rosenberg and Edward Thomas to the events they witnessed. Other poets discussed are Hardy, Kipling, Charles Sorely, Ivor Gurney, Herbert Read, Richard Aldington and David Jones. For the second edition of Out of Battle , a substantial new preface has been added together with an appendix on the unresolved problems concerning the Owen manuscripts. An updated bibliography provides useful guidance for further reading.

Two accounts of men of the Legion during the First World War
The French Foreign Legion has earned its reputation in acts of heroism and aggression, in tenacious actions of resistance and in the spilling of much blood. It has always been recognised as a home for the dispossessed, criminals and soldiers of fortune, so among its ranks could be found hard men from a multitude of backgrounds and numerous nations. The Legion has been typified by the fierce loyalty of its men, its esprit de corps and its undying allegiance to the nation which had taken them under its protection. France has, however, always exacted a high price for its patronage. The Legion has habitually been asked to demonstrate that it is equal to its laurels and it has constantly been placed in the 'post of honour'-that bloody ground where the fighting is hardest and death more certain. In the warfare of the Western Front during the Great War that likelihood of annihilation was multiplied by the lethal nature of the battleground and losses were horrendous for Legion regiments-sometimes as high as one man killed out of three or four engaged. Yet still men flocked to the Legion's ranks. This book offers accounts of the experiences of two such men as they fought for the cause of France in the trenches. Each piece is comparatively short so they have been joined together in this special Leonaur good value edition.
Leonaur editions are newly typeset and are not facsimiles; each title is available in softcover and hardback with dustjacket; our hardbacks are cloth bound and feature gold foil lettering on their spines and fabric head and tail bands.

Italy and the Cultural Politics of World War I dialogues with the variety of texts recently published to commemorate the Great War. It explores Italian socialist pacifism, the role of women during the conflict and a dominant cultural movement, Futurism, whose leader, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, glorified war and enlisted in the fight. Other soldiers created documents about the war that differ from the heroic and virile endeavor that Marinetti placed at the center of his works on war. Italy and the Cultural Politics of World War I pays attention to the representations of the soldiers through an analysis of their letters, dominated by descriptions of the terrible hunger they suffered. In contrast, popular film absorbed the cultural lessons in Marinetti's writings and represented soldiers as modernist heroes in comedies and dramas. However, film did not shy away from representing cowards who could only be baffoons and fools in propaganda films. In another medium, the concern was to publish texts that would serve the fighting soldier and inform readers about ideological and historical motivations for the conflict. The publishing industry supported national propaganda efforts. Only socialism could endanger anti-war publication, but after its initial opposition to the conflict, socialists occupied a neutral position. Italian socialism still remained the only European socialist party that did not renege its pacifism in order to embrace nationalism and the war, but it was also not in favor of actions that would sabotage in the Italian war industry. ltalian socialism is only one feature of Italian culture that was dramatically changed during the war. WWI impacted every aspect of Italian and of European cultures. For instance, as an essay in Italy and the Cultural Politics of World War I explores, the war industry needed workers. The solution was to bring Chinese men France to contribute in the war effort. After the war, they moved to other countries and in Milan, Italy, they founded one of the oldest Chinatowns in Europe, dramatically changing the human landscape of Italy as they later moved to other Italian cities. Italy and the Cultural Politics of World War I supplies essential research articles to the construction of an inclusive portrayal of WWI and Italian culture by deepening our understanding of the transformative role it played in 20th century Italy and Europe.

On His Majesty's Secret Service
The Duke of Wellington famously said that the art of war was discovering what you don't know by what you do-guessing what was on the other side of the hill. The best way to know what was over that hill was to send someone to look for you. The duke was no stranger to scouts, spies and intelligence officers and knew their value. As important as the spying itself was the need to stop enemy agents employed in the same work. By the later 19th century the means by which intelligence work could be undertaken was as a result of developments in communication, transport and technology in all its forms becoming more sophisticated. Countermeasures likewise became more difficult and complex. The decision made by many governments was to formalise the operations of espionage and counterespionage agents into dedicated services. This book, by a member of the British Secret Service, offers an essential insight into intelligence activities during the Great War. The narrative includes the riveting personal experiences and anecdotes of other agents, touches upon the methods used including codes and locating minelayers, and gives an overview of the secret service organisations operating at that time; it concludes with an examination of the 'Casement Affair.' For those interested in the world of the proto-Bond against Imperial Germany this is a highly entertaining read.
Leonaur editions are newly typeset and are not facsimiles; each title is available in softcover and hardback with dustjacket; our hardbacks are cloth bound and feature gold foil lettering on their spines and fabric head and tail bands.

The Shelf2Life WWI Memoirs Collection is an engaging set of pre-1923 materials that describe life during the Great War through memoirs, letters and diaries. Poignant personal narratives from soldiers, doctors and nurses on the front lines to munitions workers and land girls on the home front, offer invaluable insight into the sacrifices men and women made for their country. Photographs and illustrations intensify stories of struggle and survival from the trenches, hospitals, prison camps and battlefields. The WWI Memoirs Collection captures the pride and fear of the war as experienced by combatants and non-combatants alike and provides historians, researchers and students extensive perspective on individual emotional responses to the war.

This lyrical memoir offers a fresh look inside the trauma of war and captivity during the First World War, with resonance for today's world.Georges Connes was a young literature graduate when he was drafted and served in the infamous and bloody battle of Verdun. A survivor, he was captured by the Germans in June 1916 and became a prisoner of war until his repatriation in January 1919. In the Second World War, he was active in the French Resistance, was arrested and detained, and ultimately went into hiding. After the war, he served as the interim mayor of Dijon before returning to his academic life as a professor of British and American literature.Connes referred to his time as a POW as 'The Other Ordeal', recognizing that the most important suffering continued for those who had to endure the 'firing, blood and mud' of war. Connes focuses on the human aspects of war, which are all too easy to forget in the age of mass media. He passionately argues against the predominant black and white view of 'us versus them' to unearth the complexities of war. Rather than demonizing his German captors, for example, he describes individual examples of gratuitous acts of kindness.Connes offers a pacifist, internationalist perspective on war. A survivor of two of the greatest conflicts in modern history, Connes remained optimistic about humanity. This voice of hope provides insight not only into the First World War but into the contemporary world.

The Gallipoli expedition was the bold and audacious plan of Winston Churchill, amongst others, to force the Dardanelles narrows, by sea and by land, to capture Constantinople from the Turks and to open the Black Sea to ships taking supplies and arms for the Russians on their immense German front. The campaign failed with catastrophic loss of life on all sides, but again and again, unbeknown to the Allies, they came close to achieving a goal that might have led to victory overall. This book, first published in 1956, is still regarded as the best and definitive account of the campaign. It won the Sunday Times Best Book of the Year Award as well as the inaugural Duff Cooper prize when the winner could choose who would present the award. Appropriately enough, Moorehead chose Churchill to make the presentation because the book demonstrated that the faults were not in the conception of the plan. Indeed, long after Churchill had resigned in disgrace, a new fleet was being assembled to again attempt to force the Dardanelles in 1919, which was cancelled when the war ceased and the Armistice was signed. Seen in the new light that Moorehead revealed, the Gallipoli campaign was no longer regarded as a blunder or a reckless gamble; it was the most imaginative conception of the war, and its potentialities were almost beyond reckoning. Certainly in its strictly military aspect its influence was enormous. It was the greatest amphibious operation which mankind had known up till then, and it took place in circumstances in which nearly everything was experimental: in the use of submarines and aircraft, in the trial of modern naval guns against artillery on the shore, in the manoeuvre of landing armies in small boats on a hostile coast, in the use of radio, or the aerial bomb, the landmine, and many other novel devices. These things lead on through Dunkirk and the Mediterranean landings to the invasion of Normandy in the Second World War. In 1940 there was very little the Allied commanders could learn from the long struggle against the Kaiser's armies in the trenches in France. But Gallipoli was a mine of information about the complexities of the modern war of manoeuvre, of the combined operation by land and sea and sky; and the correction of the errors made then was the basis of the victory of 1945. "the story of one of the great military tragedies of the twentieth century, which no writer has described better than Alan Moorehead." Sir Max Hastings.

This volume contains Kipling's collected of essays, poems, theories, and reminisciences on sea warfare, from submarines to destroyers, with the personal and philosophical touches that mark all of his best works. Includes "The Fringes of the Fleet," "Tales of 'the Trade'," and "Destroyers at Jutland."

At the Violet Hour argues that the literature of the early twentieth-century in England and Ireland was deeply organized around a reckoning with grievous violence, imagined as intimate, direct, and often transformative. The book aims to excavate and amplify a consistent feature of this literature, which is that its central operations (formal as well as thematic) emerge specifically in reference to violence. At the Violet Hour offers a variety of new terms and paradigms for reading violence in literary works, most centrally the concepts it names "enchanted and disenchanted violence." In addition to defining key aspects of literary violence in the period, including the notion of "violet hour," the book explores three major historical episodes: dynamite violence and anarchism in the nineteenth century, which provided a vibrant, new consciousness about explosion, sensationalism, and the limits of political meaning in the act of violence; the turbulent events consuming Ireland in the first thirty years of the century, including the Rising, the War of Independence, and the Civil War, all of which play a vital role in defining the literary corpus; and the 1930s build-up to WWII, including the event that most enthralled Europe in these years, the Spanish Civil War. These historical upheavals provide the imaginative and physical material for a re-reading of four canonical writers (Eliot, Conrad, Yeats, and Woolf), understood not only as including violence in their works, but as generating their primary styles and plots out of its deformations. Included also in this panorama are a host of other works, literary and non-literary, including visual culture, journalism, popular novels, and other modernist texts.

This study examines what led the leaders of Austria-Hungary and Germany to launch major military offensives at the beginning of the First World War. The focus is on understanding why these two countries adopted high-risk offensive strategies during an international confrontation rather than a defensive military stance. The decision to attack or defend did not occur in a political vacuum. The leaders of Austria-Hungary and Germany adopted offensive strategies as a way to achieve their political ambitions. The offensives undertaken by Austria-Hungary and Germany in 1914 thus reflected their political goals as well as the strategic doctrines of war planners. The concluding chapter of this study explores why deterrence failed in 1914.

The beginning of the age of independent armoured fighting vehicles
This fascinating book is essential reading for those who are interested in how the battle tank came into being and the first steps that led to the creation of the leviathans of the modern battlefield. Whilst this book contains elements of the progress of allied tanks in their first actions, its principal focus is upon the development of the tank itself, its associated equipment and the process of persuading a reactionary command structure as to its potential on the field of battle. This book benefits from the inclusion of diagrams of many of the types of battle tank together with specifications of engines, gearing etc. Available in soft cover and hard cover with dust jacket for collectors.

Mersey to mud - war and Liverpool men Like many large cities, Liverpool raised a number of battalions in the Great War. Notable among them were the Pals, the Liverpool Irish and Scottish, but this book concerns the wartime history of the 9th Battalion - The Kings. Originally formed in 1859 for volunteers from the Liverpool newspaper and print industries, it was, by the outbreak of World War 1, an experienced part of the Territorial Force, but no previous experience could prepare the battalion for war on the Western Front. Once in the line, the exacting toll of modern warfare caused immediate casualties, including the commanding officer invalided home and another quickly killed in action. The King's endured gruelling life and death in the trenches to the full measure. In the course of the war the battalion fought at Aubers Ridge, Loos, the Somme, Third Ypres, Cambrai and Arras. This moving history of the battalion is essential reading for military students and genealogists since it includes a substantial Decoration Roll.

The two decades between the first and second world wars saw the emergence of nuclear physics as the dominant field of experimental and theoretical physics, owing to the work of an international cast of gifted physicists. Prominent among them were Ernest Rutherford, George Gamow, the husband and wife team of Frederic and Irene Joliot-Curie, John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton, Gregory Breit and Eugene Wigner, Lise Meitner and Otto Robert Frisch, the brash Ernest Lawrence, the prodigious Enrico Fermi, and the incomparable Niels Bohr. Their experimental and theoretical work arose from a quest to understand nuclear phenomena; it was not motivated by a desire to find a practical application for nuclear energy. In this sense, these physicists lived in an 'Age of Innocence'. They did not, however, live in isolation. Their research reflected their idiosyncratic personalities; it was shaped by the physical and intellectual environments of the countries and institutions in which they worked. It was also buffeted by the political upheavals after the Great War: the punitive postwar treaties, the runaway inflation in Germany and Austria, the Great Depression, and the intellectual migration from Germany and later from Austria and Italy. Their pioneering experimental and theoretical achievements in the interwar period therefore are set within their personal, institutional, and political contexts. Both domains and their mutual influences are conveyed by quotations from autobiographies, biographies, recollections, interviews, correspondence, and other writings of physicists and historians.

World War I and Propaganda offers a new look at a familiar subject. The contributions to this volume demonstrate that the traditional view of propaganda as top-down manipulation is no longer plausible. Drawing from a variety of sources, scholars examine the complex negotiations involved in propaganda within the British Empire, in occupied territories, in neutral nations, and how war should be conducted. Propaganda was tailored to meet local circumstances and integrated into a larger narrative in which the war was not always the most important issue. Issues centering on local politics, national identity, preservation of tradition, or hopes of a brighter future all played a role in different forms of propaganda. Contributors are Christopher Barthel, Donata Blobaum, Robert Blobaum, Mourad Djebabla, Christopher Fischer, Andrew T. Jarboe, Elli Lemonidou, David Monger, Javier Pounce,Catriona Pennell, Anne Samson, Richard Smith, Kenneth Andrew Steuer, Maria Ines Tato, and Lisa Todd.