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Author: John Terraine
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
ISBN: 9781474609708
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
At the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 Captain J. L. Jack was serving with the First Cameronians, one of the earliest British regiments to arrive in France. Almost every day while serving in France and Flanders, Jack kept a secret diary. This diary is unique. It presents the detail of a regular officer's life at war during virtually the whole of the First World War on the Western Front. Jack was witness not only to the horror and wretchedness of much that happened in the trenches but also to the bravery and spirit that kept the British soldiers in the line going through to the momentous battles of 1918 and final victory. Poignant and moving, as well as describing the reality of war on the Western Front, these diaries have been edited and linked with commentaries by the distinguished military historian John Terraine.
Author: John Terraine
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
ISBN: 9781474609708
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
At the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 Captain J. L. Jack was serving with the First Cameronians, one of the earliest British regiments to arrive in France. Almost every day while serving in France and Flanders, Jack kept a secret diary. This diary is unique. It presents the detail of a regular officer's life at war during virtually the whole of the First World War on the Western Front. Jack was witness not only to the horror and wretchedness of much that happened in the trenches but also to the bravery and spirit that kept the British soldiers in the line going through to the momentous battles of 1918 and final victory. Poignant and moving, as well as describing the reality of war on the Western Front, these diaries have been edited and linked with commentaries by the distinguished military historian John Terraine.
Author: James Lochhead Jack
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780304353200
Category : World War, 1914-1918
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Author: Elizabeth A. Sudduth
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 9781570035906
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 428
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Book Description
Bruccoli Great War Collection at the University of South Carolina: An Illustrated Catalogue provides a reference tool for the study of one of the great watershed moments in history on both sides of the Atlantic serving historians, researchers, and collectors.
Author: Peter Hart
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190872993
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 481
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Book Description
Author of The Great War, as well as celebrated accounts of the battles of the Somme, Passchendaele, Jutland, and Gallipoli, historian Peter Hart now turns to World War One's final months. Much has been made of-and written about-August 1914. There has been comparatively little focus on August 1918 and the lead-up to November. Because of the fixation on the Great War's opening moves, and the great battles that followed over the course of the next four years, the endgame seems to come as a stunning anticlimax. At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918 the guns simply fell silent. The Last Battle definitively corrects this misperception. As Hart shows, a number of factors precipitated the Armistice. After four years of bloodshed, Germany was nearly bankrupt and there was a growing rift between the military High Command and political leadership. But it also remained a determined combatant, and France and Great Britain had equally been stretched to their limits; Russia had abandoned the conflict in the late winter of 1918. However complex the causes of Germany's ultimate defeat, Allied success on the Western Front, as Hart reveals, tipped the scales-the triumphs at the Fifth Battle of Ypres, the Sambre, the Selle, and the Meuse-Argonne, where American forces made arguably their greatest contribution. The offensives cracked the Hindenburg Line and wore down the German resistance, precipitating collapse. Final victory came at great human cost and involved the combined efforts of millions of men. Using the testimony of a range of participants, from the Doughboys, Tommies, German infantrymen, and French poilus who did the fighting, to those in command during those last days and weeks, Hart brings intimacy and sweep to the events that led to November 11, 1918.
Author: Paddy Griffith
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300066630
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 310
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Book Description
Historians have portrayed British participation in World War I as a series of tragic debacles, with lines of men mown down by machine guns, with untried new military technology, and incompetent generals who threw their troops into improvised and unsuccessful attacks. In this book a renowned military historian studies the evolution of British infantry tactics during the war and challenges this interpretation, showing that while the British army's plans and technologies failed persistently during the improvised first half of the war, the army gradually improved its technique, technology, and, eventually, its' self-assurance. By the time of its successful sustained offensive in the fall of 1918, says Paddy Griffith, the British army was demonstrating a battlefield skill and mobility that would rarely be surpassed even during World War II. Evaluating the great gap that exists between theory and practice, between textbook and bullet-swept mudfield, Griffith argues that many battles were carefully planned to exploit advanced tactics and to avoid casualties, but that breakthrough was simply impossible under the conditions of the time. According to Griffith, the British were already masters of "storm troop tactics" by the end of 1916, and in several important respects were further ahead than the Germans would be even in 1918. In fields such as the timing and orchestration of all-arms assaults, predicted artillery fire, "Commando-style" trench raiding, the use of light machine guns, or the barrage fire of heavy machine guns, the British led the world. Although British generals were not military geniuses, says Griffith, they should at least be credited for effectively inventing much of the twentieth-century's art of war.
Author: Roger Lee
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317172116
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 395
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Book Description
Despite the substantial output of revisionist scholarship over the last decade reappraising the performance of the British Army on the Western Front during the First World War, there still remains a stubborn perception that its commanders were incompetent, inflexible and unimaginative. Whilst much ink has been spilled vilifying or defending individual commanders, or looking for overarching trends and ’learning curves’, this is the first work to examine systematically the vertical nature of command - that is the transmission of plans from the high-command down through the rank structure to the front line. Through such an investigation, a much more rounded measure of the effectiveness of British commanders can be gained; one moves the argument beyond the overly simplistic ’casualties to ground gained’ equation that is usually offered. The Battle of Fromelles (19-20 July 1916) was selected as the case study as it was relatively small in scale, in the right period, and retains sufficient primary sources available to sustain the analysis. It also witnessed the first time Australian forces were used in offensive operations on the Western Front, and thus looms large in wider Commonwealth perceptions of ’Bumbling British Generals’. The book follows the progress of the battle plan from its inception in the strategic designs of the supreme commander down through the various intermediate level commands at operational and tactical headquarters until it became the orders that sent the infantry forward into the attack. In so doing it provides a unique insight into the strengths and weaknesses of British command structure, allowing a much more scholarly judgement of its overall effectiveness.
Author: David French
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191531561
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 415
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Book Description
The regimental system has been the foundation of the British army for three hundred years. This iconoclastic study shows how it was refashioned in the late nineteenth century, and how it was subsequently and repeatedly reinvented to suit the changing roles that were forced upon the army. Based upon a combination of official papers, private papers and personal reminiscences, and upon research in the National Archives, regimental museums and collections, and other depositories, this book challenges the assumptions of both the exponents and detractors of the system. The author, David French, shows that there was not one, but several, regimental systems and he demonstrates that localised recruiting was usually a failure. Many regiments were never able to draw more than a small proportion of their recruits from their own districts. He shows that regimental loyalties were not a primordial force; regimental authorities had to create them and in the late nineteenth century they manufactured new traditions with gusto, whilst in both World Wars regimental postings quickly broke down and regiments had to take recruits from wherever they could find them. French also argues that the notion that the British army was bad at fighting big battles because the regimental system created a parochial military culture is facile. This is the first book to strip away the myths that have been deliberately manufactured to justify or to condemn the regimental system and to uncover the reality beneath them. It thus illuminates our understanding of the past while simultaneously throwing glaring new light on the still continuing debate over the place of the regimental system in the modern army today.
Author: Peter E. Hodgkinson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317171918
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265
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Book Description
Recent studies of the British Army during the First World War have fundamentally overturned historical understandings of its strategy and tactics, yet the chain of command that linked the upper echelons of GHQ to the soldiers in the trenches remains poorly understood. In order to reconnect the lines of communication between the General Staff and the front line, this book examines the British army’s commanders at battalion level, via four key questions: (i) How and where resources were found from the small officer corps of 1914 to cope with the requirement for commanding officers (COs) in the expanding army; (ii) What was the quality of the men who rose to command; (iii) Beyond simple overall quality, exactly what qualities were perceived as making an effective CO; and (iv) To what extent a meritocracy developed in the British army by the Armistice. Based upon a prosopographical analysis of a database over 4,000 officers who commanded infantry battalions during the war, the book tackles one of the central historiographical issues pertaining to the war: the qualities of the senior British officer. In so doing it challenges lingering popular conceptions of callous incompetence, as well more scholarly criticism that has derided the senior British officer, but has done so without a data-driven perspective. Through his thorough statistical analysis Dr Peter Hodgkinson adds a valuable new perspective to the historical debate underway regarding the nature of British officers during the extraordinary expansion of the Army between 1914 and 1918, and the remarkable, yet often forgotten, British victories of The Hundred Days.
Author: Keith Simpson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317404122
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 160
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Book Description
This book, originally published in 1981, tells the story of the regular soldiers and reservists of the British Expeditionary Force (B. E. F.) who fought in the first six months of the First World War on the Western Front. This photographic history of the B. E. F. is unique in that the photographs were taken not by official war photographers, but either by the few press photographers who were able to get near the Front or by members of the B. E. F themselves. Complementing the photographs are many first-hand accounts of their experiences by ‘Old Contemptibles’ and an authoritative text by Keith Simpson.
Author: Anne Powell
Publisher: The History Press
ISBN: 0752496166
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 420
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Book Description
Contains a selection of prose and poetry from 38 contemporary British, Australian and New Zealand writers who fought during the Battle of the Somme. This work tells the stories of different men from different backgrounds.
