Ruthless Warfare (1998) demonstrates how close the First World War came to Australia. It has been argued that Australia was manipulated against its interests into action in WW1 by London - this unpublished collection of documents from the military division of the German Archives shows that this was not the case. The German Navy expected a major confrontation with the British Empire, both in the North Sea and further afield. German cruisers were expected to make a significant contribution in the Indian Ocean and the Western Pacific, pinning down British naval forces and thus undermining the British fleet's supremacy in the Atlantic. The damage and disruption to imperial trade would have had serious consequences for Australia, and these German plans also meant that a significant military intelligence system was active in the Antipodes.

This early novel on Fighting France is both expensive and hard to find in its first edition. Chapters include; The look of Paris - In Argonne - In Lorraine and the Vosges - In the North - In Alcase and The tone of France. Extensively illustrated throughout this is a fascinating novel of the period and still an interesting read today. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Essays examining the rift between British and German intellectual and cultural traditions before 1914 and its effect on events. This volume of essays examines the perceived rift between the British and German intellectual and cultural traditions before 1914 and how the resultant war of words both reflects and helped determine historical, political, and, ultimately, military events. This vexed symbiosis is traced first through a survey of popular fiction, from alarmist British and German "invasion novels" to the visions of Erskine Childers and Saki and even P.G. Wodehouse; contrastingly, the "mixed-marriage novels" of von Arnim, Spottiswoode, and Wylie are considered. Further topics include D. H. Lawrence's ambivalent relationship with Germany, Carl Sternheim's coded anti-militarism, H. G. Wells's and Kurd Lasswitz's visions of their countries under Martian invasion, Nietzsche as the embodiment of Prussian warmongering, and the rise in Germany of anglophobic, anti-Spencerian evolutionism. Case histories of the positions of German andEnglish academics in regard to the conflict round out the volume. Contributors: Iain Boyd White, Helena Ragg-kirkby, Rhys Williams, Ingo Cornils, Nicholas Martin, Gregory Moore, Stefan Manz, Andreas Huther, Holger Klein Fred Bridgham is Senior Lecturer in the Department of German at the University of Leeds.

"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.

This book challenges current thinking about the outbreak of World War I and the course of German foreign policy since Bismarck's chancellorship. In 1914, Germany's opening offensives against France were to be accompanied by a simultaneous offensive by her ally, Austria-Hungary, against Russia. The Austrian offensive was intended to hold the Russians until Germany defeated the French-six weeks, no more. Then, the German army would turn east to support the Austrians. The Austrian offensive was a catastrophic failure. After only days of fighting Russia, Germany was obliged to send troops to support Austria lest she capitulate while most of the German army was still in France. The Austrian army's severe deficiencies were a constant drain on the German effort throughout the war. After the war, German memoirists and historians claimed that the German leadership had been unaware of these deficiencies before the war broke out. These claims have been accepted by historians down to today. The book presents recently re-discovered documentary evidence that the German general staff and Germany's political leadership had known of the Austrian army's weaknesses for decades before the war. The book also reveals a new perspective of Bismarck's diplomacy beginning shortly after he engineered the Dual Alliance between the two countries in 1879. It demonstrates that as early as 1882 Bismarck became aware that the Austrian army was far weaker than assumed when he concluded the alliance. It was primarily his concern about Austria's weakness that spurred Bismarck's energetic diplomacy, seeking alliances and understandings with other countries in the region, and which became the main consideration that guided his foreign policy from then on. For if Austria suffered a defeat, Germany would find itself alone between two dangerous powers: France and Russia. The consequences of his policies resulted in peace down to his departure in 1890. His successors, for a variety of reasons addressed in the book, were not as careful, ignored Austria's weaknesses despite the warnings of the military attaches, and permitted Austria to become involved in a war. The result was tragically foreseeable.

In October 1911, Winston S. Churchill was an accomplished young Liberal politician who, as the newly appointed First Lord of the Admiralty, still wore his ambition and emotion on his sleeve. Robert L. Borden was the new Canadian Prime Minister, less emotional and much older than Churchill. They became companions in an attempt to provide naval security for the British Empire as a naval crisis loomed with Germany. Their scheme for Canada to provide three Dreadnought battleships for the Royal Navy as part of an Imperial squadron was hotly debated by the Canadian Parliament and rejected by the Senate. It was one of the most divisive debates in Canadian parliamentary history. Churchill invested considerable time and effort in trying to deliver the scheme and even believed he might need to resign when it failed. The decision had great implications for the future, leading to the crises in shipbuilding foreshadowing the outbreak of WW1.

World War I was obviously one of the most important events of the 20th century. It was also a crucial period in Leon Trotsky's political biography. This work is an examination of Trotsky's writings of 1914-1917 and the context in which they were produced. Its findings challenge Trotsky's autobiography and the standard account by Isaac Deutscher. Trotsky's war time journalism is shown to be of continuing relevance to contemporary issues ranging from European unity to ethnic cleansing in the Balkans.

In this provocative study, Hazel Hutchison takes a fresh look at the roles of American writers in helping to shape national opinion and policy during the First World War. From the war's opening salvos in Europe, American writers recognized the impact the war would have on their society and sought out new strategies to express their horror, support, or resignation. By focusing on the writings of Henry James, Edith Wharton, Grace Fallow Norton, Mary Borden, Ellen La Motte, E. E. Cummings, and John Dos Passos, Hutchison examines what it means to be a writer in wartime, particularly in the midst of a conflict characterized by censorship and propaganda. Drawing on original letters and manuscripts, some never before seen by researchers, this book explores how the essays, poetry, and novels of these seven literary figures influenced America's public view of events, from August 1914 through the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, and ultimately set the literary agenda for later, more celebrated texts about the war.

How did WWI affect the love lives of ordinary citizens and their interactions as couples? This book focuses on how dramatic changes in living conditions affected key parts of the life course of ordinary citizens: marriage and divorce. Innovative in bringing together demographic and gender perspectives, contributions in this comparative volume draw on newly available micro-level data, as well as qualitative sources such as war diaries. In a first exploration intended to incite further research, it asks how patterns of marriage and divorce were affected by the war across Europe, and what the role of enduring change - or lack thereof - in gender relations was in shaping these patterns.

In Jewish Integration in the German Army in the First World War David J. Fine offers a surprising portrayal of Jewish officers in the German army as integrated and comfortably identified as both Jews and Germans. Fine explores how both Judaism and Christianity were experienced by Jewish soldiers at the front, making an important contribution to the study of the experience of religion in war. Fine shows how the encounter of German Jewish soldiers with the old world of the shtetl on the eastern front tested both their German and Jewish identities. Finally, utilizing published and unpublished sources including letters, diaries, memoirs, military service records, press accounts, photographs, drawings and tomb stone inscriptions, the author argues that antisemitism was not a primary factor in the war experience of Jewish soldiers.

Food is critical to military performance, but it is also central to social interaction and fundamental to our sense of identity. The soldiers of the Great War did not shed their eating preferences with their civilian clothes, and the army rations, heavily reliant on bully beef and hardtack biscuit, were frequently found wanting. Nutritional science of the day had only a limited understanding of the role of vitamins and minerals, and the men were often presented with a diet that, shortages and logistics permitting, was high in calories but low in flavour and variety. Just as now, soldiers on active service were linked with home through the lovingly packed food parcels they received; a taste of home in the trenches. This book uses the personal accounts of the men themselves to explore a subject that was central not only to their physical health, but also to their emotional survival. -- .

The First World War in Computer Games analyses the depiction of combat, the landscape of the trenches, and concepts of how the war ended through computer games. This book explores how computer games are at the forefront of new representations of the First World War.

This book is based on original research into intimidation and violence directed at civilians by combatants during the revolutionary period in Ireland, considering this from the perspectives of the British, the Free State and the IRA. The book combines qualitative and quantitative approaches, and focusses on County Kerry, which saw high levels of violence. It demonstrates that violence and intimidation against civilians was more common than clashes between combatants and that the upsurge in violence in 1920 was a result of the deployment of the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries, particularly in the autumn and winter of that year. Despite the limited threat posed by the IRA, the British forces engaged in unprecedented and unprovoked violence against civilians. This study stresses the increasing brutality of the subsequent violence by both sides. The book shows how the British had similar methods and views as contemporary counter-revolutionary groups in Europe. IRA violence, however, was, in part, an attempt to impose homogeneity as, beneath the Irish republican narrative of popular approval, there lay a recognition that universal backing was never in fact present. The book is important reading for students and scholars of the Irish revolution, the social history of Ireland and inter-war European violence.

In deference to the principle that total war requires total history, Roger Chickering traces the all-embracing impact of the First World War on life in the German city of Freiburg. His book shows how the war took over every facet of life in the city, from industrial production to the supply of basic material resources, above all food and fuel. It documents the breakdown of distinctions between the home front and the fighting front, as the city fell victim to strategic bombing. It analyzes the war as a sensory experience, which could be seen, heard, felt, smelled, and tasted as it exhausted the city, drained it of residents, and eroded civic bonds among those who remained. Roger Chickering offers the most comprehensive history ever written of a German city at war. The book will appeal to urban and military historians, as well as to social and cultural historians.

The casualty rates of the First World War were unprecedented: approximately 10 million combatants were wounded from Britain, France and Germany alone. In consequence, military-medical services expanded and the war ensured that medical professionals became firmly embedded within the armed services. In a situation of total war civilians on the home front came into more contact than before with medical professionals, and even pacifists played a significant medical role. Medicine in First World War Europe re-visits the casualty clearing stations and the hospitals of the First World War, and tells the stories of those who were most directly involved: doctors, nurses, wounded men and their families. Fiona Reid explains how military medicine interacts with the concerns, the cultures and the behaviours of the civilian world, treating the history of wartime military medicine as an integral part of the wider social and cultural history of the First World War.

In historical writing on World War I, Czech-speaking soldiers serving in the Austro-Hungarian military are typically studied as Czechs, rarely as soldiers, and never as men. As a result, the question of these soldiers' imperial loyalties has dominated the historical literature to the exclusion of any debate on their identities and experiences. Men under Fire provides a groundbreaking analysis of this oft-overlooked cohort, drawing on a wealth of soldiers' private writings to explore experiences of exhaustion, sex, loyalty, authority, and combat itself. It combines methods from history, gender studies, and military science to reveal the extent to which the Great War challenged these men's senses of masculinity, and to which the resulting dynamics influenced their attitudes and loyalties.

Women 'kept the home fires burning' while their men went off to war. This is the usual image of the part played by women in the First World War, reinforced through countless posters, government exhortations and even popular songs. It is very far from the truth. As this remarkable book shows, originally published in 1987, the truth was that women showed themselves capable of undertaking many roles hitherto the sole prerogative of men, a position accepted during the emergency of war but quickly 'righted' once peace was restored: the women who had helped to win the war were displaced by the returning heroes from the Front. Diana Condell and Jean Liddiard selected more than 150 superb contemporary photographs, and these unique pictures, with extended captions and accompanying text, illustrate the many and varied roles played by women in the First World War. Many of the photographs had never been published before and they reveal dramatically the extent to which women took over the day-to-day running of society during the war. Fulfilling these roles helped to change women's perceptions of themselves and their place in the social fabric: the photographs are arranged thematically to reveal this and how society's own view of women was altered as a result. The book also tells the story of the war from the female viewpoint, assessing its effect on the women involved. It focuses in a neglected but vital part of the history of the emancipation of women and also raises questions about what sort of victory they had worked for. In quality and range this was a pioneering study. More than that, through the haunting quality of its images it creates a pathway into the mind and world of the past.

For Home and Empire is the first book to compare voluntary wartime mobilization on the Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand home fronts. Steve Marti shows that collective acts of patriotism strengthened communal bonds, while reinforcing class, race, and gender boundaries. Which jurisdiction should provide for a soldier's wife if she moved from Hobart to northern Tasmania? Should Welsh women in Vancouver purchase comforts for hometown soldiers or Welsh ones? Should Maori enlist with a local or an Indigenous battalion? Such questions highlighted the diverging interests of local communities, the dominion governments, and the Empire. Marti applies a settler colonial framework to reveal the geographical and social divides that separated communities as they organized for war.

Author Dr. Dennis Showalter is the winner of the 2018 Pritzker Military Lifetime Achievement Award! If wars were wagered on like pro sports or horse races, the Germany military in August 1914 would have been a clear front-runner, with a century-long record of impressive victories and a general staff the envy of its rivals. Germany's overall failure in the first year of World War I was surprising and remains a frequent subject of analysis, mostly focused on deficiencies in strategy and policy. But there were institutional weaknesses as well. This book examines the structural failures that frustrated the Germans in the war's crucial initial campaign, the invasion of Belgium. Too much routine in planning, command and execution led to groupthink, inflexibility and to an overconfident belief that nothing could go too terribly wrong. As a result, decisive operation became dicey, with consequences that Germany's military could not overcome in four long years.

Intimate and richly detailed, The Beauty of Living begins with Cummings's Cambridge, Massachusetts upbringing and his relationship with his socially progressive but domestically domineering father. It follows Cummings through his undergraduate experience at Harvard, where he fell into a circle of aspiring writers including John Dos Passos, who became a lifelong friend. Steeped in classical paganism and literary decadence, Cummings and his friends rode the explosion of Cubism, Futurism, Imagism and other "modern" movements in the arts. As the United States prepared to enter the First World War, Cummings volunteered as an ambulance driver, was shipped out to Paris and met his first love, Marie Louise Lallemand, who was working in Paris as a prostitute. Soon after reaching the front, however, he was unjustly imprisoned in a brutal French detention centre at La Ferte-Mace. Through this confrontation with arbitrary and sadistic authority, he found the courage to listen to his own voice. Probing an underexamined yet formative time in the poet's life, this deeply researched account illuminates his ideas about love, justice, humanity and brutality. J. Alison Rosenblitt weaves together letters, journal entries and sketches with astute analyses of poems that span Cummings' career, revealing the origins of one of the twentieth century's most famous poets.

The Great War of 1914-1918 was fought on the battlefield, on the sea and in the air, and in the heart. Museums Victoria's exhibition World War I: Love and Sorrow exposed not just the nature of that war, but its depth and duration in personal and familial lives. Hailed by eminent scholar Jay Winter as "one of the best which the centenary of the Great War has occasioned", the exhibition delved into the war's continuing emotional claims on descendants and on those who encounter the war through museums today. Contributors to this volume, drawn largely from the exhibition's curators and advisory panel, grapple with the complexities of recovering and presenting difficult histories of the war. In eleven essays the book presents a new, more sensitive and nuanced narrative of the Great War, in which families and individuals take centre stage. Together they uncover private reckonings with the costs of that experience, not only in the years immediately after the war, but in the century since.

The First World War's centenary generated a mass of commemorative activity worldwide. Officially and unofficially; individually, collectively and commercially; locally, nationally and internationally, efforts were made to respond to the legacies of this vast conflict. This book explores some of these responses from areas previously tied to the British Empire, including Australia, Britain, Canada, India and New Zealand. Showcasing insights from historians of commemoration and heritage professionals it provides revealing insider and outsider perspectives of the centenary. How far did commemoration become celebration, and how merited were such responses? To what extent did the centenary serve wider social and political functions? Was it a time for new knowledge and understanding of the events of a century ago, for recovery of lost or marginalised voices, or for confirming existing cliches? And what can be learned from the experience of this centenary that might inform the approach to future commemorative activities? The contributors to this book grapple with these questions, coming to different answers and demonstrating the connections and disconnections between those involved in building public knowledge of the 'war to end all wars'.

International contributors from the fields of political science, cultural studies, history, and literature grapple with both the local and global impact of World War I on marginal communities in China, Syria, Europe, Russia, and the Caribbean. Readers can uncover the neglected stories of this World War I as contributors draw particular attention to features of the war that are underrepresented such as Chinese contingent labor, East Prussian deportees, remittances from Syrian immigrants in the New World to struggling relatives in the Ottoman Empire, the war effort from Serbia to Martinique, and other war experiences. By redirecting focus away from the traditional areas of historical examination, such as battles on the Western Front and military strategy, this collection of chapters, international and interdisciplinary in nature, illustrates the war's omnipresence throughout the world, in particular its effect on less studied peoples and regions. The primary objective of this volume is to examine World War I through the lens of its forgotten participants, neglected stories, and underrepresented peoples.

This is a comprehensive new operational military history of the Ottoman army during the First World War. Drawing from archives, official military histories, personal war narratives and sizable Turkish secondary literature, it tells the incredible story of the Ottoman army's struggle from the mountains of the Caucasus to the deserts of Arabia and the bloody shores of Gallipoli. The Ottoman army, by opening new fronts, diverted and kept sizeable units of British, Russian and French forces away from the main theatres and even sent reinforcements to Austro-Hungary and Bulgaria. Against all odds the Ottoman army ultimately achieved some striking successes, not only on the battlefield, but in their total mobilization of the empire's meagre human and economic resources. However, even by the terrible standards of the First World War, these achievements came at a terrible price in casualties and, ultimately, loss of territory. Thus, instead of improving the integrity and security of the empire, the war effectively dismantled it and created situations and problems hitherto undreamed of by a besieged Ottoman leadership. In a unique account, Uyar revises our understanding of the war in the Middle East.