Best of
World-War-I

1999

Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918


Joseph E. Persico - 1999
    The final hours pulsate with tension as every man in the trenches hopes to escape the melancholy distinction of being the last to die in World War I." "The Allied generals knew the fighting would end precisely at 11:00 A.M., yet in the final hours they flung men against an already beaten Germany. The result? Eleven thousand casualties suffered - more than during the D-Day invasion of Normandy. Why? Allied commanders wanted to punish the enemy to the very last moment, and career officers saw a fast-fading chance for glory and promotion." "Joseph E. Persico puts the reader in the trenches with the forgotten and the famous - among the latter, Corporal Adolf Hitler, Captain Harry Truman, and Colonels Douglas MacArthur and George Patton. Mainly, though, he follows ordinary soldiers' lives, illuminating their fate as the end approaches." Persico sets the last day of the war in historic context with a reprise of all that led up to it, from the 1914 assassination of the Austrian archduke, Franz Ferdinand, which ignited the war, to the raw racism black doughboys endured except when ordered to advance and die in the war's final hour.

Hornet's Sting


Derek Robinson - 1999
    For Woolley and his fellow pilots, only two things can take their mind off combat's tedious brutality: the nurses and a potent brew called "Hornet's Sting." But, as the big summer offensives begin, not even those provide any comfort...Strong, cynical, and extremely well-researched, Robinson's novel captures the reality of the air war and a pilot's life during that horrific time.

The Making of Milwaukee


John Gurda - 1999
    It's true that Milwaukee's German accent was unmistakable in the 1880s; it was the Beer Capital of the World; and it's the home of the steam shovels that dug the Panama Canal the engines that powered the New York City subway system, and the motorcycles that made Harley-Davidson an American legend.But the stereotypes don't begin to convey the richness of Milwaukee's past. They don't describe the five citizens killed by the state militia as they marched for the eight-hour day. The Jewish community leader who wrote The Settlement Cookbook. The Italian priest who led the local crusade for civil rights in the 1960s. The railroad promoter who bribed an entire state legislature. The Socialists who made Milwaukee the best-governed big city in America. Allis-Chalmers and Pabst Blue Ribbon. Summerfest and Irish Fest. Golda Meir. Carl Sandburg. Robin Yount.The Making of Milwaukee tells all those stories and a great many more. Well-written, superbly organized, and lavishly illustrated, it is sure to be the standard reference for many years to come.

The First World War


John Keegan - 1999
    A conflict of unprecedented ferocity, it abruptly ended the relative peace and prosperity of the Victorian era, unleashing such demons of the twentieth century as mechanized warfare and mass death. It also helped to usher in the ideas that have shaped our times--modernism in the arts, new approaches to psychology and medicine, radical thoughts about economics and society--and in so doing shattered the faith in rationalism and liberalism that had prevailed in Europe since the Enlightenment. With The First World War, John Keegan, one of our most eminent military historians, fulfills a lifelong ambition to write the definitive account of the Great War for our generation.Probing the mystery of how a civilization at the height of its achievement could have propelled itself into such a ruinous conflict, Keegan takes us behind the scenes of the negotiations among Europe's crowned heads (all of them related to one another by blood) and ministers, and their doomed efforts to defuse the crisis. He reveals how, by an astonishing failure of diplomacy and communication, a bilateral dispute grew to engulf an entire continent.But the heart of Keegan's superb narrative is, of course, his analysis of the military conflict. With unequalled authority and insight, he recreates the nightmarish engagements whose names have become legend--Verdun, the Somme and Gallipoli among them--and sheds new light on the strategies and tactics employed, particularly the contributions of geography and technology. No less central to Keegan's account is the human aspect. He acquaints us with the thoughts of the intriguing personalities who oversaw the tragically unnecessary catastrophe--from heads of state like Russia's hapless tsar, Nicholas II, to renowned warmakers such as Haig, Hindenburg and Joffre. But Keegan reserves his most affecting personal sympathy for those whose individual efforts history has not recorded--"the anonymous millions, indistinguishably drab, undifferentially deprived of any scrap of the glories that by tradition made the life of the man-at-arms tolerable."By the end of the war, three great empires--the Austro-Hungarian, the Russian and the Ottoman--had collapsed. But as Keegan shows, the devastation ex-tended over the entirety of Europe, and still profoundly informs the politics and culture of the continent today. His brilliant, panoramic account of this vast and terrible conflict is destined to take its place among the classics of world history.With 24 pages of photographs, 2 endpaper maps, and 15 maps in text

Devil's Own Luck: Pegasus Bridge to the Baltic 1944-45


Denis Edwards - 1999
    He brilliantly conveys what it was like to be facing death, day after day, night after night, with never a bed to sleep in nor a hot meal to go home to. This is warfare in the raw ' brutal, yet humorous, immensely tragic, but sadly, all true.

Sir John Fisher's Naval Revolution


Nicholas A. Lambert - 1999
    After examining a prodigious quantity of primary sources, Nicholas A. Lambert concludes that Admiralty decision-making was in fact driven by factors unrelated to the German building program. Winner of the Society for Military History's 2000 Distinguished Book Award, Sir John Fisher's Naval Revolution explores the intrigue and negotiations between the Admiralty and leading domestic politicians and social reformers of the day, such as Herbert H. Asquith, David Lloyd George, and Winston Churchill. Lambert also explains how Great Britain's naval leaders responded to these non-military, cultural challenges under the direction of Admiral Sir John Fisher, the service head of the Admiralty from 1904 to 1910, who believed in a radically new approach to naval defense. For mainly political reasons, however, Fisher concealed his military technological revolution and worked surreptitiously to create a new model fleet capable of protecting all of Britain's imperial interests across the globe

Lines of Fire: Women Writers of World War 1


Margaret R. Higonnet - 1999
    Lines of Fire challenges the restrictions of official history and traditional ideas of "war literature, " bringing together a rich and astonishing array of women's journalism, political treatises, diaries, and eyewitness accounts, as well as illustrations, fiction, and poetry written in response to WWI. Lines of Fire is also truly ground breaking in that it is an international anthology, including contributions not only from Great Britain and the United States, but also from France, Germany, Russia, Hungary, Belgium, India, Italy, Turkey, Africa, and the Middle East.

Pillars of Fire: The Battle of Messines Ridge June 1917


Ian Passingham - 1999
    It reassesses the reasons for Plumer's success, the implications of Haig's failure to exploit that success, and finally, the legacy of the battle.

K Boats: Steam-Powered Submarines in World War I


Don Everitt - 1999
    But no other class of warship suffered so much calamity and controversy. Authorized by Churchill, these steam-powered submarines were the best-concealed debacle in British naval history. Their crews called themselves the suicide club and in this authoritative documentary their story is vividly reconstructed.Built secretly to meet a threat that existed only in the minds of the flag officers, the so-called submersible destroyers suffered an unprecedented series of accidents from the day they began their trials. Six sank with an appalling death toll. The forty-seven men of K 13 were luckier. They were rescued after fifty-seven hours trapped underwater. During the Battle of May Island when British ships carved through their own K flotillas one night, two K boats sank, two were crippled, and a cruiser lost her bows. Then there was the mysterious disappearance of K 5 in the Atlantic. All told, not one K boat escaped. The product of two years' research, this fascinating book looks for answers to what went wrong during the series of dreadful mishaps described.