The total gain - a few thousand yards of indefensible slough - cost about a million Allied lives.

    Army—roughly 5,000 soldiers, most hailing from Michigan—sailed for Europe to fight in World War I. But instead of the Western Front, these troops were headed to Archangel, Russia, a vital port city 1,000 miles northeast of Moscow. There, in the frozen subarctic, amid the chaos of the Russian Civil War, one of the most extraordinary episodes of American history unfolded. The American North Russia Expeditionary Force—self-dubbed “The Polar Bear Expedition”—was sent to fight the Red Army and aid anti-Bolshevik forces in hopes of re-opening the Eastern Front against Germany. On the 100th anniversary of the campaign, award-winning historian James Carl Nelson recreates this harrowing, dramatic military operation in which Americans and Bolsheviks fought a series of pitched battles throughout a punishing fall and winter. As the Great War officially ended in November 1918, American troops continued to battle the Red Army and an equally formidable enemy, “General Winter.” Subzero temperatures made machine guns and light artillery inoperable. In the blinding ice and snow, sentries suffered from frostbite while guarding against nearly invisible Bolos camouflaged by their white uniforms. Before the Polar Bears’ withdrawal in July 1919, more than 200 perished from battle, accidents, and the Spanish flu.But the Polar Bears’ story does not end there. Ten years later, a contingent of veterans returned to Russia to recover the remains of more than 100 of their fallen comrades and lay them to rest in Michigan, where a monument honoring their service still stands: a massive marble polar bear guarding a cross that marks the grave of a fallen soldier.The Polar Bear Expedition includes 25 black-and-white images throughout.

     By the May 1918 there were over one million American troops stationed in France and making their way to the frontlines under the leadership of General John J. Pershing. World War One had been a stalemate for the previous three years as both sides had become bogged down in trench warfare. The impact that the American Expeditionary Force made to the outcome of the First World War can never be underestimated. By the summer of 1918 American troops were providing the knockout blow in a series of fierce battles, such as at Château-Thierry, Belleau Wood, Saint-Mihiel and Argonne Forest. Although the American Expeditionary Forces had been inexperienced at 1917, by the end of the war Pershing had shaped it into a modern, efficient, and combat-tested army. Indeed, in the last of offensive of the war, known as the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, Pershing commanded his men to break-out of the confines of trench warfare and succeeded in recovering over 200 square miles of French territory from the German army. Pershing’s brilliant account of this period My Experiences in the World War was a Pulitzer Prize Winner for History in 1932 and should be essential reading for anyone interested in the American involvement of the First World War. The first volume of the memoir covers the period from Pershing’s selection as commander of the A. E. F. through to the 1918 German Spring Offensive. The second volume follows on from this and covers all of the A. E. F.’s major engagements through until their victory parade in Paris in November 1918. These two volumes have been combined and sold as one book to commemorate the centenary of the end of World War One. John J. Pershing served as the commander of the American Expeditionary Force on the Western Front in World War One. He asserted that the American forces should not be incorporated into other Allied armies but would operate as a separate unit. He was the only American to be promoted in his own lifetime to General of the Armies rank, the highest possible rank in the United States Army. His book My Experiences in the World War was first publishing in New York in 1931. He passed away in 1948.

    Many of Dublin's inhabitants wanted to weaken or terminate London's rule but there remained a vast and conflicting range of visions of that future: far more immediate was the unfolding disaster of the First World War that had put 'home rule' issues on ice for the duration. The devastating events of that Easter changed everything. Both the rising itself and-even more significantly-the ferocious British response ended any sense at all that Dublin could be anything other than the capital of an independent country, as an entire nation turned away in revulsion from the British artillery and executions. As we approach the 90th anniversary of the rebellion it is time for a new account of what really happened over those fateful few days. What did the rebels actually hope to achieve? What did the British think they were doing? And how were the events really interpreted by ordinary people across Ireland? Vivid, authoritative and gripping, Easter 1916 is a major work.

    Although desperately aware of how many of their predecessors had fallen before them, nearly all stepped forward, unflinchingly, to do their duty. The average life expectancy of a subaltern in the trenches was a mere six weeks. In this remarkable book, John Lewis-Stempel focuses on the forgotten men who truly won Britain's victory in the First World War - the subalterns, lieutenants and captains of the Army, the leaders in the trenches, the first 'over the top', the last to retreat. Basing his narrative on a huge range of first-person accounts, including the poignant letters and diaries sent home or to their old schools, the author reveals what motivated these boy-men to act in such an extraordinary, heroic way. He describes their brief, brilliant lives in and out of the trenches, the tireless ways they cared for their men, and how they tried to behave with honour in a world where their values and codes were quite literally being shot to pieces.

    Share the experiences of fighting men under punishing conditions, extreme temperatures, and intense monsoon rains as they search for the enemy in the rugged mountains and teeming lowlands. Relive all the terror, humor, and sadness of one man’s tour of duty with real-life action in spectacular stunning detail.

    This is the story of the trials and exploits, the victories and defeats, of one of those units. This book takes us from the first ever assault against a terrorist ship carrying weapons of mass destruction to attack London, to the epic siege of the terrorist-held Qala-I-Janghi fortress in Afghanistan. In the interim, our half-a-dozen soldier-characters deliver suitcases stuffed with millions of dollars in cash to 'friendly' Afghan warlords; they penetrate the towering heights of the uncharted Naka Valley, where allied intelligence has identified the mother of all terrorist training camps; they fight in the labyrinthine tunnels running beneath the Afghan mountains; and they risk all to rescue their fellow soldiers from a downed aircraft stranded on a snow-blasted mountain peak. The book culminates in the single battle in which more terrorists were killed than any other in Afghanistan: the siege of Qala-I-Janghi, an ancient mud-walled fortress used to imprison the most dangerous Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters. The battle for Qala-I-Janghi would last a staggering eight days, from the moment of the first shots being fired at the start of the uprising to the hour that the fort yielded up the last Al Qaeda fighters. It is a battle in which over 500 terrorists would die - but which would also claim the life of a US serviceman and dozens of Northern Alliance allies, with scores of severely wounded British and American soldiers. And in the final denouement, this savage battlefield turns out to be populated by the most ultimately shocking enemy - John Walker Lindh, the white American Taliban who held out in the forts' bunker until the very last. At the same time as the story of the fort siege played out on TV screens all across the world, our band of British and American special forces were involved in a secret, deadly dual to rescue their fellow men - a duel that only one side could win.

    Convinced that right was on their side and fearful of the enemies that encircled them, they threw themselves resolutely into battle. Yet, despite the initial halting of a brutal Russian invasion, the Central Powers' war plans soon unravelled. Germany's attack on France failed. Austria-Hungary's armies suffered catastrophic losses at Russian and Serbian hands. Hopes of a quick victory lay in ruins.For the Central Powers the war now became a siege on a monstrous scale. Britain's ruthless intervention cut sea routes to central Europe and mobilised the world against them. Germany and Austria-Hungary were to be strangled of war supplies and food, their soldiers overwhelmed by better armed enemies, and their civilians brought to the brink of starvation. Conquest and plunder, land offensives, and submarine warfare all proved powerless to counter or break the blockade. The Central Powers were trapped in the Allies' ever-tightening ring of steel. Alexander Watson's compelling new history retells the war from the perspectives of its instigators and losers, the Germans and Austro-Hungarians. This is the story not just of their leaders in Berlin and Vienna, but above all of the people. Only through their unprecedented mobilisation could the conflict last so long and be so bitterly fought, and only with the waning of their commitment did it end. The war shattered their societies, destroyed their states and bequeathed to east-central Europe a poisonous legacy of unredeemed sacrifice, suffering, race hatred and violence. A major re-evaluation of the First World War, Ring of Steel is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the last century of European history.

    Together, they presided over the last years of dynastic Europe and the outbreak of the most destructive war the world had ever seen, a war that set twentieth-century Europe on course to be the most violent continent in the history of the world.Miranda Carter uses the cousins' correspondence and a host of historical sources to tell the tragicomic story of a tiny, glittering, solipsistic world that was often preposterously out of kilter with its times, struggling to stay in command of politics and world events as history overtook it. George, Nicholas and Wilhelm is a brilliant and sometimes darkly hilarious portrait of these men--damaged, egotistical Wilhelm; quiet, stubborn Nicholas; and anxious, dutiful George--and their lives, foibles and obsessions, from tantrums to uniforms to stamp collecting. It is also alive with fresh, subtle portraits of other familiar figures: Queen Victoria--grandmother to two of them, grandmother-in-law to the third--whose conservatism and bullying obsession with family left a dangerous legacy; and Edward VII, the playboy "arch-vulgarian" who turned out to have a remarkable gift for international relations and the theatrics of mass politics. At the same time, Carter weaves through their stories a riveting account of the events that led to World War I, showing how the personal and the political interacted, sometimes to devastating effect.For all three men the war would be a disaster that destroyed forever the illusion of their close family relationships, with any sense of peace and harmony shattered in a final coda of murder, betrayal and abdication.

    Yet from the moment the guns fell silent the role of non-white soldiers in the 'Great War for Civilization' was forgotten and airbrushed out by later historians.THE WORLD'S WAR quotes extensively from soldiers' diaries and other eye-witness sources, bringing to life the searing experiences of the hundreds of thousands of non-white troops whose bravery contributed to the final Allied victory.

    H. Liddell Hart is the foremost authority on World War I. In The Real War, the author has fused exhaustive research and creative brilliance with brevity and precision. Thus we have in one volume the war transformed into literature - an understandable, kaleidoscopic masterwork of military history.This 1935 hardcover edition of THE REAL WAR was updated, revised and added to somewhat, and retitled A HISTORY OF THE WORLD WAR, and a new Introduction was also added.

    For the group of ordinary men in the French Sixth Battalion, thrown together from all over France and longing for home, war is simply a matter of survival, lightened only by the arrival of their rations or a glimpse of a pretty girl or a brief reprieve in the hospital. Reminiscent of classics like Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, Under Fire (originally published in French as La Feu) vividly evokes life in the trenches: the mud, stench, and monotony of waiting while constantly fearing for one's life in an infernal and seemingly eternal battlefield.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

    It would end officially almost five years later. Unofficially, it has never ended: the horrors we live with today were born in the First World War.It left millions-civilians and soldiers-maimed or dead. And it left us with new technologies of death: tanks, planes, and submarines; reliable rapid-fire machine guns and field artillery; poison gas and chemical warfare. It introduced us to U-boat packs and strategic bombing, to unrestricted war on civilians and mistreatment of prisoners. Most of all, it changed our world. In its wake, empires toppled, monarchies fell, whole populations lost their national identities as political systems, and geographic boundaries were realigned. Instabilities were institutionalized, enmities enshrined. And the social order shifted seismically. Manners, mores, codes of behavior; literature and the arts; education and class distinctions-all underwent a vast sea change. And in all these ways, the twentieth century can be said to have been born on the morning of June 28, 1914.

    Mussolini fought in these trenches, as did most of his collaborators. But so did many of the greatest modernist writers in Italian and German - Ungaretti, Gadda, Musil.

    Mesopotamia, 1914: in the Middle East tension is escalating between the British and the Arabs. Misfit Lieutenant Harry Downe is sent to negotiate a treaty with a renegade Bedouin Sheikh, Ibn Shalan, whose tribe is attacking enemy patrols in Iraq and cutting their oil pipelines. Greedy for arms, Shalan accepts British weapons but, in return, Harry must take his daughter Furja to be his bride. The secret marriage leads to a deep love, to the anger of Shalan and the disgust of Harry's fellow officers. But war is looming, and the horrors of the battlefield threaten to destroy Harry's newfound happiness, and change his life and that of his closest friends for ever. Long Road to Baghdad is a vivid, moving, historically accurate account of a conflict between East and Western Empires, based on the wartime exploits of war hero Lieutenant Colonel Gerard Leachman.