Best of
World-War-I

2015

The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East


Eugene Rogan - 2015
    But in the aftermath of the assassination in Sarajevo, the powers of Europe were sliding inexorably toward war, and not even the Middle East could escape the vast and enduring consequences of one of the most destructive conflicts in human history. The Great War spelled the end of the Ottomans, unleashing powerful forces that would forever change the face of the Middle East.In The Fall of the Ottomans, award-winning historian Eugene Rogan brings the First World War and its immediate aftermath in the Middle East to vivid life, uncovering the often ignored story of the region's crucial role in the conflict. Bolstered by German money, arms, and military advisors, the Ottomans took on the Russian, British, and French forces, and tried to provoke Jihad against the Allies in their Muslim colonies. Unlike the static killing fields of the Western Front, the war in the Middle East was fast-moving and unpredictable, with the Turks inflicting decisive defeats on the Entente in Gallipoli, Mesopotamia, and Gaza before the tide of battle turned in the Allies' favor. The great cities of Baghdad, Jerusalem, and, finally, Damascus fell to invading armies before the Ottomans agreed to an armistice in 1918.The postwar settlement led to the partition of Ottoman lands between the victorious powers, and laid the groundwork for the ongoing conflicts that continue to plague the modern Arab world. A sweeping narrative of battles and political intrigue from Gallipoli to Arabia, The Fall of the Ottomans is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the Great War and the making of the modern Middle East.

War Hero: The Unlikely Story of A Stray Dog, An American Soldier and the Battle of Their Lives


Stephan Talty - 2015
    Unbeknownst to Donovan, the little terrier he found hiding under the bundle that night would go on to save the lives of countless American soldiers on the battlefields of France and change the way wars are fought. In "War Hero," acclaimed historian Stephan Talty (author of A Captain's Duty) tells an unforgettable tale of friendship, loyalty and survival set against the carnage of the Great War.Rags’ exploits made him famous back in America, where he became one of the inspirations for the modern “war dog.” He led parades down Broadway, accepted a handful of medals and became more popular than some 5-star generals. But it’s a private story that's at the heart of "War Hero": the unbreakable bond formed between a homesick soldier and a Parisian mutt who had no place in the world until he found one in the trenches of the Meuse-Argonne.Stephan Talty is the author of two previous bestselling Singles, The Secret Agent and Operation Cowboy. His writing has been published in the New York Times, GQ, the Irish Times and Men's Journal. His most recent book is Under the Same Sky: From Starvation in North Korea to Salvation in America.Cover design by Adil Dara.

Monash


Grantlee Kieza - 2015
    General Sir John Monash attends a glittering banquet to dine with the King of England and the likes of Woodrow Wilson, Winston Churchill and Rudyard Kipling. Just four months earlier, the commander of the Australian Corps had been knighted in a battlefield, a long way from the streets of Melbourne where this son of a long line of Polish rabbis had grown up. Field Marshal Montgomery would declare decades later that Monash was the best general to serve on the Western Front. How had this notorious ladies' man, who harboured private thoughts about the futility of war and had never fired a shot in anger, come to be feted by the British establishment as well as his countrymen back home? In this essential biography of a most unlikely folk hero, Grantlee Kieza paints a lively portrait of an outsider who shaped modern Australia through his energy, drive and ambition, his military brilliance and his vision.

The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 1908 - 1923


Sean McMeekin - 2015
    As Sean McMeekin shows us in this revelatory new history of what he calls the “wars of the Ottoman succession,” we know far less than we think. The Ottoman Endgame brings to light the entire strategic narrative that led to an unstable new order in postwar Middle East—much of which is still felt today.The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Modern Middle East draws from McMeekin’s years of groundbreaking research in newly opened Ottoman and Russian archives. With great storytelling flair, McMeekin makes new the epic stories we know from the Ottoman front, from Gallipoli to the exploits of Lawrence in Arabia, and introduces a vast range of new stories to Western readers. His accounts of the lead-up to World War I and the Ottoman Empire’s central role in the war itself offers an entirely new and deeper vision of the conflict. Harnessing not only Ottoman and Russian but also British, German, French, American, and Austro-Hungarian sources, the result is a truly pioneering work of scholarship that gives full justice to a multitiered war involving many belligerents. McMeekin also brilliantly reconceives our inherited Anglo-French understanding of the war’s outcome and the collapse of the empire that followed. The book chronicles the emergence of modern Turkey and the carve-up of the rest of the Ottoman Empire as it has never been told before, offering a new perspective on such issues as the ethno-religious bloodletting and forced population transfers which attended the breakup of empire, the Balfour Declaration, the toppling of the caliphate, and the partition of Iraq and Syria—bringing the contemporary consequences into clear focus.Every so often, a work of history completely reshapes our understanding of a subject of enormous historical and contemporary importance. The Ottoman Endgame is such a book, an instantly definitive and thrilling example of narrative history as high art.

Snoopy Vs. the Red Baron


Charles M. Schulz - 2015
    the Red Baron collects all of Schulz's beloved strips starring Snoopy as the famous World War I flying ace in his perennial battles with the infamous Red Baron of Germany."Ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty or more / the bloody Red Baron was rollin' up the score / Eighty men died tryin' to end that spree / of the bloody Red Baron of Germany...In the nick of time, a hero arose / A funny-looking dog with a big black nose"Including both dailies and Sundays, Snoopy Vs. the Red Baron follows the valiant and indefatigable Snoopy as, time after time in his doghouse/Sopwith Camel, he braves the wrath of his unseen aerial foe. The brave little beagle's epic battles are brought to thrilling cartoon life. "He flew into the sky to seek revenge / But the Baron shot him down / "Curses, foiled again!" The Snoopy and Red Baron encounters were some of the most inspired—and most popular—episodes in all of Peanuts and among the stories most beloved by children and adults alike.

First Over There: The Attack on Cantigny, America's First Battle of World War I


Matthew J. Davenport - 2015
    Army's 1st Division climbed from their trenches, charged across the shell-scarred French dirt of no-man's-land, and captured the hilltop village of Cantigny from the grip of the German Army. Those who survived the enemy machine-gun fire and hand-to-hand fighting held on for the next two days and nights in shallow foxholes under the sting of mustard gas and crushing steel of artillery fire.Thirteen months after the United States entered World War I, these 3,500 soldiers became the first "doughboys" to enter the fight. The operation, the first American attack ever supported by tanks, airplanes, and modern artillery, was ordered by the leader of America's forces in Europe, General John "Black Jack" Pershing, and planned by a young staff officer, Lieutenant Colonel George C. Marshall, who would fill the lead role in World War II twenty-six years later.Drawing on the letters, diaries, and reports by the men themselves, Matthew J. Davenport's First Over There tells the inspiring, untold story of these soldiers and their journey to victory on the Western Front in the Battle of Cantigny. The first American battle of the "war to end all wars" would mark not only its first victory abroad, but the birth of its modern Army.

Voices from the Front: An Oral History of the Great War


Peter Hart - 2015
    In Voices from the Front, oral historian Peter Hart brings together accounts from across the conflict, from soldiers, sailors and airmen, from officers and privates alike. In the course of his research, he talked to men who saw their friends die in front of them, who were seriously wounded themselves, men who refused to fight on principle and those whose indomitable spirit carried them through thick and thin. Sometimes they were there at crucial turning points in the war - going over the top in the slaughter of the Somme in 1916 or punching through the German lines to victory in 1918 - and sometimes they sweated, toiled and suffered on a forgotten front, thousands of miles from home.In the vein of The Beauty and the Sorrow, this is the First World War seen through the eyes of the men who experienced it for themselves.

Anne: The Green Gables Complete Collection: Golden Illustrated Classics (Comes with a Free Audiobook)


L.M. Montgomery - 2015
    Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert, siblings in their fifties and sixties, had decided to adopt a boy from the orphanage to help Matthew run their farm. They live at Green Gables, their Avonlea farmhouse on Prince Edward Island. Through a misunderstanding, the orphanage sends Anne Shirley.

Highlanders Without Kilts


D. Dauphinee - 2015
     In 1917, the world was embroiled in a terrible war, the likes of which had never been seen nor imagined. Canada, still a dominion of Great Britain, was early in the fight and sent seven-and-a half percent of its population to fight for King and Country, ultimately contributing a force of more than 600,000 soldiers, nurses and chaplains. In April of that year, the entire Canadian Expeditionary Force, fighting together for the first time, battled their way to the top of Vimy Ridge in northern France. In December, the city of Halifax was rocked by a devastating accidental explosion that caused 9000 casualties. Highlanders Without Kilts is the story of one Nova Scotia battalion’s odyssey, and one family’s dreadful loss. From the unspeakable death and destruction came a nation’s altered sense of self and a newborn path to its future.

The Gulag Archipelago: Volume II Section I: Destructive-Labor Camps, The Soul, Barbed Wire


Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - 2015
    Solzhenitsyn's gripping epic masterpiece, the searing record of four decades of Soviet terror and oppression,

Seasons Of War


Christopher Lee - 2015
    I remember the landing on the beach and the days of my time on the peninsula and returning home from war, the past and the present coming together in my mind over the years. I remember the beauty of the ugly place.Packed into tiny boats, Michael, his brother Dan and their mates think only of what is to come. These young Australians miss home, hate the enemy and are choking in fear.After the surreal panic of that first dawn charge up the Turkish beaches, when nothing is as they were told, they dig in. For the next eight months, each will play his part in the epic battle of Gallipoli.Trying to survive in the lottery of close warfare and watching as the seasons change, Michael comes to wonder whether the men he fights are so different from himself. Wedged in the trenches, soldiers of both sides will be irrevocably changed by two relentless forces – the turning seasons and the grinding machine of war. Even if they survive, what will they become?This powerfully lyrical novel by acclaimed screenwriter Christopher Lee (writer of the TV series Gallipoli) takes us to the heart of the diggers' experience. It brings to life the kind of truth that only fiction can – what it was like to be in those trenches, and how the character of the nation transformed when Gallipoli changed these men.

The Innocence of Kaiser Wilhelm II


Christina Croft - 2015
    Was he, though, truly responsible for the catastrophe of the First World War, or was he in fact a convenient scapegoat, blamed for a conflict which he desperately tried to avoid?

The Last Cavalryman: The Life of General Lucian K. Truscott, Jr.


Harvey Ferguson - 2015
    “He could have eaten a ham like Patton for breakfast any morning and picked his teeth with the man’s pearl-handled pistols.” Not one merely to act the part of commander, Mauldin remembered, “Truscott spent half his time at the front—the real front—with nobody in attendance but a nervous Jeep driver and a worried aide.” In this biography of Lucian K. Truscott, Jr., author Harvey Ferguson tells the story of how Truscott—despite his hardscrabble beginnings, patchy education, and questionable luck—not only made the rank of army lieutenant general, earning a reputation as one of World War II’s most effective officers along the way, but was also given an honorary promotion to four-star general seven years after his retirement. For all his accomplishments and celebrated heroic action, Truscott was not one for self-aggrandizement, which may explain in part why historians have neglected him until now. The Last Cavalryman, drawing on personal papers only recently made available, gives the first full picture of this singular man’s extraordinary life and career. Ferguson describes Truscott’s near-accidental entry into the U.S. Cavalry (propelled by Pancho Villa’s 1916 raids) and his somewhat halting rise through the ranks—aided by fellow cavalryman George S. Patton, Jr., who steered him into the nascent armored force at the right time. The author takes us through Truscott’s service in the Second World War, from creating the U.S. Army Rangers to engineering the breakout from Anzio and leading the “masterpiece” invasion of southern France. Ferguson finishes his narrative by detailing the general’s postwar work with the CIA, where he acted as President Dwight Eisenhower’s eyes and ears within the agency. A compelling story in itself, this biography of Lucian K. Truscott, Jr.—a cavalryman to the last—fills out an important chapter in American military history.

Above and Beyond: The Incredible Story of Frank Luke Jr., Arizona's Medal of Honor Flying Ace of the First World War


Keith Warren Lloyd - 2015
    This book should be required reading for anyone interested in American history--or for readers looking for a book they won't be able to put down." - Tom McCarthy, author of "The Greatest Medal of Honor Stories Ever Told." Above and Beyond is the incredible true story of Frank Luke Jr. Born in Phoenix, Arizona in 1897, Luke was an adventurous young man who was an avid hunter and outdoorsman. When America entered the First World War in 1917, Luke became a fighter pilot in the newly-formed U.S. Army Air Service and was soon serving with a combat squadron in France. Seen as a "high-strung, excitable boy," scorned by his squadron mates and frequently at odds with his commanders, "Above and Beyond" tells the story of how Luke soon became one of the most revered fighter aces on the Western Front. Exhibiting great audacity and skill in combat, he quickly racked up an impressive number of air-to-air victories, many of them against heavily-defended observation balloons which few pilots dared to attack. "Above and Beyond" chronicles Luke's most daring mission of all on September 29, 1918, which cost him his life, and for which he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.

For God and Kaiser: The Imperial Austrian Army, 1619-1918


Richard Bassett - 2015
    Bassett shows how the Imperial Austrian Army, time and again, was a decisive factor in the story of Europe, the balance of international power, and the defense of Christendom. Moreover it was the first pan-European army made up of different nationalities and faiths, counting among its soldiers not only Christians but also Muslims and Jews. Bassett tours some of the most important campaigns and battles in modern European military history, from the seventeenth century through World War I. He details technical and social developments that coincided with the army’s story and provides fascinating portraits of the great military leaders as well as noteworthy figures of lesser renown. Departing from conventional assessments of the Habsburg army as ineffective, outdated, and repeatedly inadequate, the author argues that it was a uniquely cohesive and formidable fighting force, in many respects one of the glories of the old Europe.

Easterleigh Hall at War


Margaret Graham - 2015
    With its army of volunteers and wounded servicemen, cook Evie Forbes is determined that everyone will be properly provided for, despite the threat of rationing and dwindling supplies. All the while she waits for letters from her fiancé and beloved brother, fighting on the Western Front. Then the worst happens – a telegram arrives with shattering news. And Evie wonders if she’ll have the strength to carry on…

Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form


Paul K. Saint-Amour - 2015
    But can the anticipation of violence be a form of violence as well? Tense Future argues that it can-that twentieth-century war technologies and practices, particularly the aerial bombing of population centers, introduced non-combatants to acoercive and traumatizing expectation. During wartime, civilians braced for the next raid; during peacetime they braced for the next war. The pre-traumatic stress they experienced permeates the century's public debates and cultural works. In a series of groundbreaking readings, Saint-Amourillustrates how air war prophets theorized the wounding power of anticipation, how archive theory changed course in war's shadow, and how speculative fiction conjured visions of a civilizational collapse that would end literacy itself. And in this book's central chapters, he shows us how Ford MadoxFord, Robert Musil, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and other interwar modernist writers faced the memory of one war and the prospect of another, some by pitting their fictions' encyclopedic scale and formal turbulence against total war, others by conceding war's inevitability while refusing to longfor a politically regressive peace.Total war: a conflict that exempts no one, disregarding any difference between soldier and civilian. Tense Future forever alters our understanding of the concept of total war by tracing its emergence during the First World War, its incubation in air power theory between the wars, and above all itsprofound partiality. For total war, during most of the twentieth century, meant conflict between imperial nation states; it did not include the violence those states routinely visited on colonial subjects during peacetime. Tacking back and forth between metropole and colony, between world war andpolice action, Saint-Amour describes the interwar refashioning of a world system of violence-production, one that remains largely intact in our own moment of perpetual interwar.

The First World War: Unseen Glass Plate Photographs of the Western Front


Carl De Keyzer - 2015
    Due to the crude film cameras used at the time, the look of the Great War has traditionally been grainy, blurred, and monochrome—until now. The First World War presents a startlingly different perspective, one based on rare glass plate photographs, that reveals the war with previously unseen, even uncanny, clarity. Scanned from the original plates, with scratches and other flaws expertly removed, these oversized reproductions offer a wealth of unusual moments, including scenes of men in training, pictures of African colonial troops on the Western front, landscapes of astonishing destruction, and postmortem portraits of Belgian soldiers killed in action. Readers previously familiar with only black-and-white or sepia-toned prints of the hostilities will be riveted by the book’s many authentic color photographs, products of the early autochrome method. From children playing war games to a wrenching deathbed visit, these images are extraordinary not only for their subject matter, but also for the wide range of emotions they evoke. Accompanied by a preface from celebrated writer Geoff Dyer and an essay by historian David Van Reybrouck, the photographs here serve both as remarkable witnesses to the everyday life of warfare and as dramatic works of art in their own right. These images, taken by some of the conflict’s most gifted photographers, will radically change how we visualize the First World War.

Rock of the Marne: The American Soldiers Who Turned the Tide Against the Kaiser in World War I


Stephen L. Harris - 2015
    Infantry Division in the Second Battle of the Marne—where the tide of World War I was finally turned…The soldiers of the Third U.S. Infantry Division in World War I were outnumbered and inexperienced young men facing hardened veterans, but their actions proved to be a turning point during the last German offensive of World War I.In stopping three German divisions from crossing the Marne River, these heroic American soldiers blocked the road to Paris east of Château-Thierry, helped save the French capital and, in doing so, played a key role in turning the tide of the war. The Allies then began a counteroffensive that drove the enemy back to the Hindenburg Line, and four months later the war was over.Rock of the Marne follows the Third Division’s Sixth Brigade, which took the brunt of the German attack. The officers, many of them West Pointers and elite Ivy Leaguers, fighting side-by-side with enlisted men—city dwellers and country boys, cowboys and coal miners who came from every corner of America along with newly planted immigrants from Europe—answered their country’s call to duty.This is the gripping true account of one of the most important—yet least explored—battles of World War I.INCLUDES PHOTOS

The Secret War on the United States in 1915: A Tale of Sabotage, Labor Unrest, and Border Troubles


Heribert von Feilitzsch - 2015
    German agents in the U.S. firebombed freighters on the high seas, incited labor unrest, fomented troubles along the Mexican-American border, and damaged or destroyed dozens of American factories and logistics installations. The German secret war against the United States in 1915, its discovery and publication, combined with the disastrous sinking of the Lusitania in May of that year, did much to prepare the American public to finally accept joining the Entente powers against Germany in 1917. This is the story of a group of German agents in the United States, who executed this mission.

Marked for Death: The First War in the Air


James Hamilton-Paterson - 2015
    Nearly forgotten in the war's massive overall death toll, some 50,000 aircrew would die in the combatant nations' fledgling air forces.The romance of aviation had a remarkable grip on the public imagination, propaganda focusing on gallant air 'aces' who become national heroes. The reality was horribly different. Marked for Death debunks popular myth to explore the brutal truths of wartime aviation: of flimsy planes and unprotected pilots; of burning nineteen-year-olds falling screaming to their deaths; of pilots blinded by the entrails of their observers.James Hamilton-Paterson also reveals how four years of war produced profound changes both in the aircraft themselves and in military attitudes and strategy. By 1918 it was widely accepted that domination of the air above the battlefield was crucial to military success, a realization that would change the nature of warfare forever.

Serbia and the Balkan Front, 1914: The Outbreak of the Great War


James Lyon - 2015
    James Lyon demonstrates how blame for the war's outbreak can be placed squarely on Austria-Hungary's expansionist plans and internal political tensions, Serbian nationalism, South Slav aspirations, the unresolved Eastern Question, and a political assassination sponsored by renegade elements within Serbia's security services. In doing so, he portrays the background and events of the Sarajevo Assassination and the subsequent military campaigns and diplomacy on the Balkan Front during 1914.The book details the first battle of the First World War, the first Allied victory and the massive military humiliations Austria-Hungary suffered at the hands of tiny Serbia, while discussing the oversized strategic role Serbia played for the Allies during 1914. Lyon challenges existing historiography that contends the Habsburg Army was ill-prepared for war and shows that the Dual Monarchy was in fact superior in manpower and technology to the Serbian Army, thus laying blame on Austria-Hungary's military leadership rather than on its state of readiness.Based on archival sources from Belgrade, Sarajevo and Vienna and using never-before-seen material to discuss secret negotiations between Turkey and Belgrade to carve up Albania, Serbia's desertion epidemic, its near-surrender to Austria-Hungary in November 1914, and how Serbia became the first belligerent to openly proclaim its war aims, Serbia and the Balkan Front, 1914 enriches our understanding of the outbreak of the war and Serbia's role in modern Europe. It is of great importance to students and scholars of the history of the First World War as well as military, diplomatic and modern European history.

Breaking Point of the French Army: The Nivelle Offensive of 1917


David Murphy - 2015
    He had enjoyed a meteoric rise to high command and public acclaim since the beginning of the war - he was a national hero. In return, he proclaimed he 'had the formula' that would ensure victory and end the conflict in 1917. But his offensive was a bloody and humiliating failure for France, one that could have opened the way for French defeat. This is the subject of David Murphy's penetrating, in-depth study of one of the key events in the history of the Great War. He describes how Nivelle, a highly intelligent and articulate officer, used his charm to win the support of French and British politicians, but also how he was vain and boastful and displayed no sense of operational security. By the opening of the campaign, his plan was an open secret and he had lost the ability to critically assess the operation as it developed. The result was disaster.

A Rainbow Division Lieutenant in France: The World War I Diary of John H. Taber


John H. Taber - 2015
    His diary provides a detailed narrative of a young officer maturing through his war experiences, from the voyage across the submarine filled Atlantic, to training in France, to front line combat. In a clear, unaffected voice, Taber records his dealings with superiors and enlisted men, billets in French and German towns, life in the trenches, intense shelling, machine gun fire, gas warfare, leaves to Paris, the occupation of Germany, and his return to New York.

Fall of the Double Eagle: The Battle for Galicia and the Demise of Austria-Hungary


John R. Schindler - 2015
    Schindler explains how Austria-Hungary, despite military weakness and the foreseeable ill consequences, consciously chose war in that fateful summer of 1914. Through close examination of the Austro-Hungarian military, especially its elite general staff, Schindler shows how even a war that Vienna would likely lose appeared preferable to the “foul peace” the senior generals loathed. After Serbia outgunned the polyglot empire in a humiliating defeat, and the offensive into Russian Poland ended in the massacre of more than four hundred thousand Austro-Hungarians in just three weeks, the empire never recovered. While Austria-Hungary’s ultimate defeat and dissolution were postponed until the autumn of 1918, the late summer of 1914 on the plains and hills of Galicia sealed its fate.

Stars Shall Be Bright


Cathy MacPhail - 2015
    The three children have to move in with Mrs Carter who isn't very nice, but she says they'll soon have to go into a Home. James, Belle and William see no other option than to get their Dad back, even if it means setting out for the Front all by themselves. A stunning novel set during WWI, inspired by the true story of the Quintinshill Rail Disaster.

Four Novels of the 1920s: The Glimpses of the Moon / A Son at the Front / Twilight Sleep / The Children


Edith Wharton - 2015
    The Library of America now brings together these brilliant books from the 1920s in the fifth volume of its definitive edition of Wharton’s collected works.The Glimpses of the Moon (1922) is a story of love finding its way amidst upper-class social maneuvering. Believed by some to have been an inspiration for The Great Gatsby—Fitzgerald wrote the title cards for the novel’s 1923 silent film adaptation—it follows Nick Lansing and Susy Branch, both of prominent but financially diminished New York families, as they hatch a scheme to marry in order to live off of their wedding gifts and divorce as soon as either finds a way to step up the social ladder.Inspired by a young man she met during her war relief work in France, A Son at the Front (1923) opens in Paris on July 30, 1914, as Europe totters on the brink of war. Expatriate American painter John Campton, whose only son George, having been born in Paris, must report for duty in the French army, struggles to keep his son away from the front while grappling with the moral implications of doing so. A poignant meditation on art and possession, fidelity and responsibility, A Son at the Front is Wharton’s indelible take on the war novel.A masterful satire of the Jazz Age, Twilight Sleep (1927) dissects the flapper mentality and the New York society ladies who turn to drugs, spirituality, and occultism to escape boredom and ennui. Its protagonist, Pauline Manford, studiously ignores all hints of trouble in her privileged world: rumors surrounding her spiritual guru, her daughter’s trysts with a married man, her son’s troubled marriage, her first husband’s drinking, and her second husband’s apathy, until a catastrophe threatens to involve the whole family in scandal.The Children (1928), which volume editor Hermione Lee has called “a daring and profoundly sad book . . . the most remarkable and surprising of the novels that came after The Age of Innocence,” concerns forty-six-year-old Martin Boyne, who even as he negotiates marriage to a lovely widow, unexpectedly falls under the spell of fifteen-year-old Judith Wheater and her troupe of siblings.Also included is a chronology of Wharton’s life, newly expanded from Hermione Lee’s masterful biography of Wharton, as well as helpful explanatory notes.

The Outbreak of the War of 1914-1918


Charles William Chadwick Oman - 2015
    

Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914-1919: Official History of the Canadian Army in the First World War


G.W.L. Nicholson - 2015
    Nicholson's Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914-1919 was first published by the Department of National Defence in 1962 as the official history of the Canadian Army’s involvement in the First World War. Immediately after the war ended Colonel A. Fortescue Duguid made a first attempt to write an official history of the war, but the ill-fated project produced only the first of an anticipated eight volumes. Decades later, G.W.L. Nicholson - already the author of an official history of the Second World War - was commissioned to write a new official history of the First. Illustrated with numerous photographs and full-colour maps, Nicholson’s text offers an authoritative account of the war effort, while also discussing politics on the home front, including debates around conscription in 1917. With a new critical introduction by Mark Osborne Humphries that traces the development of Nicholson’s text and analyzes its legacy, Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914-1919 is an essential resource for both professional historians and military history enthusiasts.

Flowers from No Man's Land: Letters to Mother from the Front Lines, World War I, France


Aleeta Renée Jones - 2015
    Such is the case with Alfred Earl Jones, a private from rural California who fought in World War I, whose letters provide personal drama and are historically informative." - Peter Krass, author of Portrait of War: The U.S. Army's First Combat Artists and the Doughboys' Experience in WWI "This marvelously annotated collection of letters transports us back to the training camps, high seas, and battlefields; recounting the novelty, boredom and terror that so many young American men experienced going to war in 1917-18. These citizen-soldiers remained civilians at heart, and these letters attest to the importance of family in keeping men going at the front - offering an invaluable lesson for Americans today." - Jennifer D. Keene, author of Doughboys, the Great War and the Remaking of America (2001).

Days of Perfect Hell: The U.S. 26th Infantry Regiment in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, October-November 1918


Peter L. Belmonte - 2015
    26th Infantry Regiment jumped-off amidst a hail of shell fire and machine-gun fire to begin the final push to end World War I. For the next 39 days, with little respite, the regiment fought desperately against a determined, well-armed foe. This is the story of a single regiment in a successful, highly acclaimed Regular Army division, during the greatest American battle to date. This is not a dry recitation of facts, but an in-depth examination of a single regiment that allows the reader to appreciate the intricacies of small-unit action and the problems associated with leading platoons, companies, and battalions in battle during the Great War, while at the same time depicting the human drama associated with the terrible carnage"

Commitment and Sacrifice: Personal Diaries from the Great War


Frans Coetzee - 2015
    However, those accounts offered little by way of the intimate history, or the individualexperiences of those involved in the Great War. In Commitment and Sacrifice, Marilyn Shevin-Coetzee and Frans Coetzee provide just such an intimate look by bringing together previously unpublished diaries of five participants in the First World War and restoring to publication the diary of a sixththat has long been out of print.The six diaries address the war on the Western front and the Mediterranean, as well as behind the lines on the home front. Together, these diarists form a diverse group: John French, a British sapper who dug precarious tunnels beneath the trenches of the Western Front; Henri Desagneaux, a Frenchinfantry officer embroiled in years of bloody combat; Philip T. Cate, an idealistic American volunteer ambulance driver who sought to save lives rather than take them; Willy Wolff, a German businessman caught in England upon the war's outbreak and interned there for the duration; James DouglasHutchison, a New Zealand artilleryman fighting thousands of miles from home; and Felix Kaufmann, a German machine gunner, captured and held as a prisoner of war.Through the personal reflections of these young men, we are transported into many of the iconic episodes of the war, from the upheaval of mobilization through the great battles of Gallipoli, Verdun, and the Somme, as well as the less familiar other ordeal of internment and captivity. As members ofthe so-called Generation of 1914 (each was between nineteen and twenty-four years old), they shared an unwavering commitment to their countries' cause, and possessed a steadfast determination to persevere despite often appalling circumstances.Collectively, these diaries illuminate the sacrifices of war, whether willingly volunteered or stoically endured. That the diarists had the desire and the ingenuity to record their experiences, whether for their families, posterity, or simply their own personal satisfaction, gives readers theability to eavesdrop on horrors long past. A century later, we are fortunate that they were both willing and able to set pencil to paper.