Best of
World-War-I

2003

The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response


Peter Balakian - 2003
    Using rarely seen archival documents and remarkable first-person accounts, Balakian presents the chilling history of how the Turkish government implemented the first modern genocide behind the cover of World War I. And in the telling, he resurrects an extraordinary lost chapter of American history.Awarded the Raphael Lemkin Prize for the best scholarly book on genocide by the Institute for Genocide Studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice/CUNY Graduate Center.

Jutland 1916: Death in the Grey Wastes


Peter Hart - 2003
    It was a climactic encounter, the culmination of a fantastically expensive naval race between the two countries, and expectations on both sides were high. For the Royal Navy's Grand Fleet, there was the chance to win another Trafalgar. For the German High Seas Fleet, there was the opportunity to break the British blockade and so change the course of the war. But Jutland was a confused and controversial encounter. Tactically, it was a draw; strategically, it was a British victory.Naval historians have pored over the minutiae of Jutland ever since. Yet they have largely ignored what the battle was actually like for its thousands of participants. Full of drama and pathos, of chaos and courage, JUTLAND, 1916 describes the sea battle in the dreadnought era from the point of view of those who were there.

Intimate Voices from the First World War


Sarah Wallis - 2003
    Intimate Voices from the First World War fills in the gaps in the history of the world's first global confrontation with excerpts from recently uncovered letters and diaries of those on the front lines and their friends at home. In their reflections on the vastness of the enterprise of war, these combatants, victims, and eyewitnesses re-create the scope of the conflict with immediacy and tenderness. Written with the frankness and intimacy of words not intended for public eyes -- full of private passions, prejudices, humor, and vivid insights -- these communiqués speak to us directly from within the war itself and from all sides of the conflict. These marvelous historical narratives not only immerse readers in an ongoing dialogue about the meaning of human conflict but also serve as reminders of the individual perspectives and beliefs that sometimes get overlooked during times of global strife.

A War In Words


Svetlana Palmer - 2003
    This was a young person's war and these people record their experiences with all the immediacy and passion of youth. They talk to us directly from within the war itself and from all sides of the conflict -- from the testimony of a Serbian teenager, one of Franz Ferdinand's assassins, to the final entry from a French soldier as he revisits a battlefield in 1919, realising he and the rest of the world have changed irrevocably. Most of these letters and diaries have never been published in English before. They were uncovered during extensive research across twenty-eight countries for the major ten-part series THE FIRST WORLD WAR, broadcast on Channel 4 in autumn 2003. The series will introduce many of the characters who appear in this book and will, like the book, recount the complex history of the war though the lives of the individuals caught up in it.

The Illusion of Victory: America in World War I


Thomas Fleming - 2003
    Thomas Fleming tells this story through the complex figure of Woodrow Wilson, the contradictory president who wept after declaring war, devastated because he knew it would destroy the tolerance of the American people, but who then suppressed freedom of speech and used propaganda to excite America into a Hun-hating mob. This is tragic history: inexperienced American military leaders drove their troops into gruesome slaughters; progressive politics were put on hold in America; an idealistic president's dreams were crushed because of his own negligence. Wilson's inability to convince Congress to ratify U.S. membership in the League of Nations was one of the most poignant failures in the history of the American presidency, but even more heartrending were Wilson's concessions to his bitter allies in the Treaty of Versailles. In exchange for Allied support of the League of Nations, he allowed an unfair peace treaty to be signed, a treaty that played no small role in the rise of National Socialism and the outbreak of World War II. Thomas Fleming has once again created a masterpiece of narrative American history. This incomparable portrait shows how Wilson sacrificed his noble vision to megalomania and single-mindedness, while paying homage to him as a visionary whose honorable spirit continues to influence Western politics.

First World War Poems


Andrew Motion - 2003
    With a generous selection of our best-loved war poets, First World War Poems also returns lesser known pieces to the light, and extends the selection right through to the present day - so that poems produced by the war give way historically to poems about the war. This mesmerizing book reminds us how the poetry of that time has, more than any art form, come to stand testament to the grief and outrage occasioned by World War I.

Beneath Flanders Fields: The Tunnellers' War 1914-18


Peter Doyle - 2003
    Few on the surface knew of the barbaric and claustraphobic work of the tunnellers, who not only suffered from mine explosions but regularly encountered hazardous gas and waterlogged ground. The result of over twenty-five years of research, Beneath Flanders Fields reveals how this intense underground battle was fought and won. The authors give the first full account of mine warfare in World War I through the words of the tunnellers themselves as well as plans, drawings, and previously unpublished archive photographs, many in colour. Beneath Flanders Fields also shows how military mining evolved. The tunnellers constructed hundreds of deep dugouts that housed tens of thousands of troops. Often electrically lit and ventilated, these tunnels incorporated headquarters, cookhouses, soup kitchens, hospitals, drying rooms, and workshops. A few dugouts survive today, a final physical legacy of the Great War, and are seen for the first time in photographs in Beneath Flanders Fields.

Rommel and His Art of War


Erwin Rommel - 2003
    Illustrated with 120 photographs Carries the reader from the Alps in WWI to North Africa in WWII With many photographs taken by Rommel himself

America and the Armenian Genocide of 1915


Jay Murray Winter - 2003
    The essays in this collection examine how Americans learned of this catastrophe and tried to help its victims. Knowledge and compassion, however, were not enough to stop the killings, and a terrible precedent was born in 1915. The Armenian genocide has haunted the U.S. and other Western countries throughout the twentieth century.

The Eye of War: Words and Photographs from the Front Line


John Keegan - 2003
    An exceptional photographic history of the changing face of war and combat photo journalism through the last 150 years fully illustrated with over 200 photographs

September Evening: The Life and Final Combat of the 48-Victory Ace Werner Voss


Barry Diggens - 2003
    At the time of his death he was considered by many, friend and foe alike, to be Germany's greatest ace and, had he lived, he would almost certainly have overtaken Manfred von Richthofen's victory total by early spring 1918. Voss is perhaps best remembered for his outstanding courage, his audacity in the air and the prodigious number of victories he achieved before being killed in one of the most swash-buckling and famous dogfights of the Great War; a fight involving James McCudden and 56 Squadron RFC, the most successful Allied scout squadron.Yet the life of Voss and the events of that fateful day in September are surrounded by mystery and uncertainty and even now aviation enthusiasts continue to ask questions about him almost on a daily basis.Barry Diggens was determined to find out the truth and his book unearths and analyses every scrap of information concerning this extraordinary young man. His conclusions are sometimes controversial but his evidence persuasive and this study will be welcomed by, and be of great interest to, the aviation fraternity worldwide.Includes an excellent photographic section.

The Mammoth Book of Eyewitness World War I: Over 280 First-Hand Accounts of the War to End All Wars


Jon E. Lewis - 2003
    It slaughtered a generation of young men; claimed limbs, wounded souls; drenched battlefields in blood; made sad legends of the Western Front, Gallipoli, and Jutland, and made heroes of poets; farmers, and factory workers. Clerks it made into Tommies, doughboys, or the Hun. And in this new Mammoth volume the voices of such eyewitnesses to history as these are heard again. So are the words of generals, statesmen, and kings. From the trenches in Flanders to the staff rooms of the Imperial German Army, with the Land Girls in England and U-boat crews in the Atlantic, alongside T. E. Lawrence in Arabia's desert and the Red Baron in the air—with a variety of extracts from letters, speeches, memoirs, diaries, and dispatches, this gripping collection covers each year and every facet of World War I. Among its wide range of witnesses are King George V, Robert Graves, Leon Trotsky, Erwin Rommel, Ernst Junger, Ernest Hemingway, American aviator Eddie Rickenbacker; and Winston S. Churchill. The pieces in this volume compose a stirring human drama of the conflict that redrew the map of the modern world and determined the political course of the twentieth century.

The Enemy at His Pleasure: A Journey Through the Jewish Pale of Settlement During World War I


S. Ansky - 2003
    Ansky, the influential Jewish-Russian journalist, playwright, and politician, received a commission: to organize desperately needed relief for Jews on the borderlands, who were caught between the warring armies of Russia, Germany, and the Austrian Empire. Thus began an extraordinary four-year journey meticulously documented by Ansky, a peerless witness of his time.In daily accounts, Ansky details his struggles: to raise funds; to lobby and bribe at the tsar's court; to procure and transport food, medicine, and money to the ravaged Jewish towns, which, in the course of the war, were conquered and reconquered by Cossacks, Germans, Polish mercenaries, and Russian revolutionaries. Ansky depicts scenes of devastation-convoys of refugees, towns looted and burned to the ground, villagers taken hostage and raped, prey to all comers. Speaking to maids and ministers, farmers and recruits, doctors and profiteers, Ansky hears and sees it all, as the tsar's army disintegrates and the winds of revolution sweep across the land.A wide-ranging view of a world at war, The Enemy at His Pleasure is at once powerful and poignant, a rare and invaluable addition to the historical record.

Mud, Blood, and Poppycock: Britain and the Great War


Gordon Corrigan - 2003
    Alan Clark quoted a German general's remark that the British soldiers were 'lions led by donkeys'. But he made it up.Indeed, many established 'facts' about 1914-18 turn out to be myths woven in the 1960s by young historians on the make. Gordon Corrigan's brilliant, witty history reveals how out of touch we have become with the soldiers of 1914-18. They simply would not recognize the way their generation is depicted on TV or in Pat Barker's novels.Laced with dry humour, this will overturn everything you thought you knew about Britain and the First World War. Gordon Corrigan reveals how the British embraced technology, and developed the weapons and tactics to break through the enemy trenches.

A Good Idea of Hell: Letters from a Chasseur à Pied


Joshua K. Brown - 2003
    Robert Pellissier, born in France in 1882, had grown up in the United States and was teaching at Stanford when the Great War broke out in his homeland. Returning as a volunteer, he saw uninterrupted months of trench warfare in the Vosges mountains of Alsace, the only region where French troops actually captured German territory, a sector largely neglected in World War I literature. Pellissier’s diary and his letters to relatives in America show a panorama of this ghastly war: from the horror of being under fire with three thousand German shells falling on the French troops every day to the monotony of long quiet hours spent in cold, wet trenches. He writes of the grinding and indecisive character of the fighting in the Vosges and of the almost ritualistic shelling and limited tactical offensives, such as the attack at Steinbach in December 1914. His later letters were written from the hospital, from officer training school, and from the front at the Somme. He relays news of all the major battlefields—Flanders, Verdun, Russia, Austria, Gallipoli, Italy, Serbia, and the Suez. He also comments on the new technology that changed the nature of war: the machine gun, new airplanes, Uboats, improved artillery, barbed wire, and poison gases. Drama and a sympathetic human voice combine to make this account of a littlereported French front a valuable addition to the literature on World War I. Whether visiting the battlefields of Europe, researching the history of the war, or sitting in an armchair at home, readers will find Pellissier a reliable and personable guide.The greatnephew of Robert Pellissier and a minister by profession,

Echoes of Eagles: A Son's Search for His Father and the Legacy of America's First Fighter Pilots


Charles Woolley - 2003
     Published to coincide with the one-hundredth anniversary of the Wright Brothers' historic first flight and the birth of aviation, Echoes of Eagles is a rousing chronicle of American air combat during the first world war. In 1917, Charles H. Woolley, the author's father, enlisted in and trained as a pilot with the newly created U.S. Air Service. He and his fellow pilots of the 94th, 95th, and 49th Aero Squadrons flew at 20,000 feet in open-cockpit French biplanes, with no oxygen, no parachutes, and no radios. Death was their constant companion. This extraordinary book takes readers into the cockpits of these fragile fighter aircraft and into the souls of the men who fought for their country in a new environment-the air. The grit of muddy airfields is balanced by the women and champagne of Paris. From tales of dog-fighting with German aces to strafing enemy trenches, Echoes of Eagles describes the risks and the dangers of flight, feats of incredible heroism and acts of stunning cowardice, and the camaraderie among men dedicated to a common goal. Based on diaries and letters and never-before-published interviews with the heroes themselves, and featuring amazing photographs, this unforgettable account of America's first fighter pilots is also a son's stirring tribute to his father.