Recognizing that The Great War was the psychological turning point . . . for modernism as a whole, author Modris Eksteins examines the lives of ordinary people, works of modern literature, and pivotal historical events to redefine the way we look at our past and toward our future.

    It was during the carnival of 1913 that a young Stalin arrived on a mission that would launch him into the upper echelon of Russian revolutionaries, and it was here that he first collided with Trotsky. It was in Vienna that the failed artist Adolf Hitler kept daubing watercolors and spouting tirades at fellow drifters in a flophouse. Here Archduke Franz Ferdinand had a troubled audience with Emperor Franz Joseph—and soon the bullet that killed the archduke would set off the Great War that would kill ten million more. With luminous prose that has twice made him a finalist for the National Book Award, Frederic Morton evokes the opulent, elegant, incomparable sunset metropolis—Vienna on the brink of cataclysm.

    Now this critically acclaimed biography--abridged by the author--offers a portrait of the legendary modern-day knight, Arab revolt leader, British secret agent and World War I military genius. 32 pages of photographs.

    It covers areas previously left unexplored: the German Infantry's tactical heritage, the squad's evolution as a tactical unit, the use of new weapons for close combat, the role of the elite assault units in the development of new tactics, and detailed descriptions of offensive battles that provided the inspiration and testing ground for this new way of fighting. Both a historical investigation and a standard of excellence in infantry tactics, Stormtroop Tactics is required reading for professional military officers and historians as well as enthusiasts.Contrary to previous studies, Stormtroop Tactics proposes that the German Infantry adaption to modern warfare was not a straightforward process resulting from the top down intervention of reformers but instead a bottom up phenomenon. It was an accumulation of improvisations and ways of dealing with pressing situations that were later sewn together to form what we now call Blitzkrieg. Focusing on action at the company, platoon, and squad level, Stormtroop Tactics provides a detailed description of the evolution of German defensive tactics during World War I--tactics that were the direct forbears of those used in World War II.

     Just eleven years after the Wright brothers' first flight, the Royal Flying Corps set off for France, and every aspect of air-fighting had to be discovered for the first time. At the start of the First World War, the flying machine was hardly taken seriously; it was an odd, accident-prone diversion for the rich and the obsessed. Four years later when the war had ended, such had been the pace of development that almost the entire range of modern aircraft types had evolved: from fighters to bombers, from ground attack to reconnaissance. ‘The First Great Air War’ is the full, fascinating account of how a handful of men, British, French, German and Italian, young, with a love of flying and adventure, went to war. Of how tactics, planes and attitudes developed from the amateur to the professional. It is the story of air aces and individual courage, of technical innovation and the coming of age of air power. ‘A valuable history of the air war that began it all … by an ex-flyer of the Second World War who has a genuine feeling for the feats of his predecessors’ - THE BIRMINGHAM POST ‘His sympathy with the fighting man (and woman) shines out of every page’ - LIVERPOOL DAILY POST Richard Townsend Bickers volunteered for the RAF on the outbreak of the second world war and served, with a Permanent Commission, for eighteen years. He wrote a range of military fiction and non-fiction books, including ‘Torpedo Attack’, ‘My Enemy Came Nigh’, ‘Bombing Run’, ‘Fighters Up’ and ‘Summer of No Surrender’.

    A dozen stories deal with a heartbroken widower, hunters, farmers and truck drivers living in Minnesota.

    The maps in the original were all painstakingly hand-drawn in black and white, covering every aspect of the first truly global war. This book takes the information laid down by Banks and reinterprets it in full color, computer modeled cartography. The book covers the main reasons why the major powers entered the conflict, the individual battles fought along the Western Front as well as in depth coverage of the war in the east of Europe. The War at sea is mapped in great detail, including the clashes at Dogger Bank and Jutland as well as the German submarine campaigns and the first major sea borne landing at Gallipoli. The First World War saw the first extensive use of air power, maps show the routes taken by the German Zeppelin raids on eastern England as well as the Allied strategic bombing effort at the end of the war.In Arthur Banks own words:"I hope that the book will be a convenient reference work which deals with those areas where a more detailed examination in cartographical terms has long been demanded.

    Black Tom, the huge depot loaded with ammunitions destined for the Allies to use against the Central Powers, had been blown up. With terrifying suddenness, the Great War raging overseas had suddenly come to America. Witcover provides irrefutable evidence that German saboteurs were the perpetrators.