Brief by his standards, but essentially heroic. Shakespeare might have seen it as a tragedy with splendid bit-parts for buffoons and brigands and lots of graveyard scenes. Those thigh bones you occasionally see rearing out of the yellow earth of Gully ravine, snapped open so that they look like pumice, belong to a generation of young men who on this peninsula first lost their innocence and then their lives, and maybe something else as well...'Gallipoli remains one of the most poignant battlefronts of the First World War and L. A. Carlyon's monumental account of that campaign has been rightfully acclaimed and a massive bestseller in Australia. Brilliantly told, supremely readable and deeply moving, Gallipoli brings this epic tragedy to life and stands as both a landmark chapter in the history of the war and a salutary reminder of all that is fine and all that is foolish in the human condition.

    Brimming with lucid analysis, elegant character sketches, and geopolitical pathos, it is essential reading.'Between January and July 1919, after "the war to end all wars," men and women from around the world converged on Paris to shape the peace. Center stage, for the first time in history, was an American president, Woodrow Wilson, who with his Fourteen Points seemed to promise to so many people the fulfillment of their dreams. Stern, intransigent, impatient when it came to security concerns and wildly idealistic in his dream of a League of Nations that would resolve all future conflict peacefully, Wilson is only one of the larger-than-life characters who fill the pages of this extraordinary book. David Lloyd George, the gregarious and wily British prime minister, brought Winston Churchill and John Maynard Keynes. Lawrence of Arabia joined the Arab delegation. Ho Chi Minh, a kitchen assistant at the Ritz, submitted a petition for an independent Vietnam.For six months, Paris was effectively the center of the world as the peacemakers carved up bankrupt empires and created new countries. This book brings to life the personalities, ideals, and prejudices of the men who shaped the settlement. They pushed Russia to the sidelines, alienated China, and dismissed the Arabs. They struggled with the problems of Kosovo, of the Kurds, and of a homeland for the Jews.The peacemakers, so it has been said, failed dismally; above all they failed to prevent another war. Margaret MacMillan argues that they have unfairly been made the scapegoats for the mistakes of those who came later. She refutes received ideas about the path from Versailles to World War II and debunks the widely accepted notion that reparations imposed on the Germans were in large part responsible for the Second World War.A landmark work of narrative history, Paris 1919 is the first full-scale treatment of the Peace Conference in more than twenty-five years. It offers a scintillating view of those dramatic and fateful days when much of the modern world was sketched out, when countries were created--Iraq, Yugoslavia, Israel--whose troubles haunt us still.Winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize, the PEN Hessell Tiltman Prize and the Duff Cooper Prize

    In a radical new interpretation, leading military historian Gary Sheffield argues that while the war was tragic, it was not futile; and, although condemned as 'lions led by donkeys', in reality the British citizen army became the most effective fighting force in the world, which in 1918 won the greatest series of battles in British history.A challenging and controversial book, FORGOTTEN VICTORY is based on twenty years of research and draws on the work of major scholars. Without underestimating the scale of the human tragedy or playing down the disasters, it explodes many myths about the First World War, placing it in its true historical context.

    The New York Times Book Review acclaimed Keegan as "the best military historian of our day," and the Washington Post called the book "a grand narrative history [and] a pleasure to read." Now Keegan gives us a lavishly illustrated history of the war, brilliantly interweaving his narrative--some of it derived from his classic work and some of it new--with a brilliant selection of photograps, paintings, cartoons and posters drawn from archives across Europe and America, some published here for the first time. These images take us into the heart of battles that have become legend: Ypres, Gallipoli, Verdun, the Somme. They show us the generals' war and the privates' war--young soldiers, away from home for the first time, coming of age under fire. We see how a civilization at the height of its power and influence crippled itself as the faith in progress, rationalism and liberalism that had prevailed in Europe since the Enlightenment was shattered. We see how four empires--the German, the Russian, the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman--collapsed, and how the seeds for the Second World War were planted. Keegan tells how ambition, mistrust and failures of diplomacy and communication all played a part in allowing this conflict to set ablaze what was then the world's most prosperous society. And he describes how the effects of this war lasted long after it ended; its ghosts still haunt Europe today. An Illustrated History of the First World War carries us across the Europe of nearly a century ago, revealing the devastation, camaraderie, political machinations and battlefield maneuverings that changed the world. It presents the essential cast of that cataclysmic drama, from the decision makers at the top--Haig, Joffre, Hindenberg, Pershing--to the troops in the trenches. Through its unique amalgam of pictorial and narrative brilliance, the book illuminates the war as no other work has done.

    'Blindfold and Alone' offers a definitive and complete history of one of the most controversial aspects of the First World War - the story of British soldiers executed for cowardice and desertion.

    Following the success of the author's 'Second World War in Photographs', this book showcases some 400 black-and-white photographs from the Imperial War Museum's extensive archives.

    John Horne and Alan Kramer mine military reports, official and private records, witness evidence, and war diaries to document the crimes that have long been denied: a campaign of brutality that led to the death of some 6500 Belgian and French civilians. Contemporary German accounts insisted that the civilians were guerrillas, executed for illegal resistance. In reality this claim originated in a vast collective delusion on the part of German soldiers. The authors establish how this myth originated and operated, and how opposed Allied and German views of events were used in the propaganda war. They trace the memory and forgetting of the atrocities on both sides up to and beyond World War II. Meticulously researched and convincingly argued, this book re-opens a painful chapter in European history while contributing to broader debates about myth, propaganda, memory, war crimes, and the nature of the First World War. Winner of the Fraenkel Prize for Contemporary History in 2000.

    Mother of Eagles is the culmination of the translation of the war diary, along with numerous facts and information not included in the original work. Follow the youth and wartime exploits of Manfred and Lothar, the leading German aces of World War I, through the eyes of their mother and a nation. Letters to the Baroness from each of her sons initially depict the wartime conditions on the ground, and then evolve into vivid details about the exhilaration of the hunt in the air for ever increasing numbers of enemy planes. This book will not only appeal to those interested in the Red Baron and his ace brother, Lothar, but to anyone who is interested in reading of the civilian life in Germany during the Great War.

    The Weimar Republic and the Third Reich were in the forefront of statistical innovation in the interwar decades. New ways of measuring the economy were inspired both by contemporary developments in macroeconomic theory and the needs of government. Under the Nazi regime, these statistical tools provided the basis for a radical experiment in economic planning. Based on the German example, Tooze argues for a more wide-ranging reconsideration of the history of modern economic knowledge.

    This detailed work draws on never-before published accounts recorded by the Imperial War Museum Sound Archive in London. The conflict between fighters turned into a war of its own, with new weapons, tactics, and aircraft constantly being developed to gain the upper hand.

    For six centuries the Ottoman Empire united a diverse array of religious and ethnic groups, but its dissolution into distinct states left a tradition of nationalism and ethnic enmity in much of the Balkans and Middle East which directly links to crises in the region today. The new map of the Balkans and Middle East, which was largely the product of the victorious Allies after Word War I, made little concession to practical concerns such as access to seaports, or the rights of minorities. In particular the majority of the Muslim population of the Ottoman Balkans would never be integrated into the new states as the "national" character of these states depended, in part, on the elimination of what they considered "outsiders". Only the Turkish Republic was able to thwart the plans of the conquerors by defeating military incursion.

    He argues that blacks in American society have long-suffered from a "natural coward" stereotype that is implicit in the racism propagated from America's earliest days, and often intensified as blacks slowly received freedom in American society. For instance, blacks served admirably in various wars, returned home after their service to short-term recongnition, and then soon found themselves even more seriously entrenched in a racist system because they were perceived as a threat to whites. This was true, Edgerton argues, until the Civil Rights movement and Vietnam, though the stereotypes have not been fully eradicated. In this book, Edgerton provides an accessible and well-informed tour through this little-known, but significant aspect of race in American military history.