Author: Alan H. Smith
Publisher: Casemate Publishers
ISBN: 1526714671
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
Alan Smith's Allenby's Gunners tells the story of artillery in the highly successful World War I Sinai and Palestine campaigns. Following Gallipoli and the reconstitution of the AIF, a shortage of Australian gunners saw British Territorial artillery allotted to the Australian Light Horse and New Zealand Mounted Rifle brigades. It was a relationship that would prove highly successful and Allenby's Gunners provides a detailed and colorful description of the artillery war, cavalry and infantry operations from the first battles of Romani and Rafa, through the tough actions of Gaza, the Palestine desert, Jordan Valley and Amman to the capture of Jerusalem. The story concludes with the superb victory of Megiddo and the taking of Damascus until the theater armistice of 1918.Smith Covers the trials and triumphs of the gunners as they honed their art in one of the most difficult battlefield environments of the war. The desert proved hostile and unrelenting, testing the gunners, their weapons and their animals in the harsh conditions. The gunners' adversary, the wily and skillful Ottoman artillerymen, endured the same horrendous conditions and proved a tough and courageous foe.The light horsemen and gunners also owed much to the intrepid airmen of the AFC and RFC whose tactical and offensive bombing and counter-battery work from mid-1917 would prove instrumental in securing victory. This is an aspect of the campaign that is seamlessly woven throughout as the action unfolds.The Sinai and Palestine campaigns generally followed a pattern of heavy losses and setbacks for an initial period before allied forces eventually prevailed. This is a highly descriptive volume that tells and oft-neglected story and fills the gap in the record of a campaign in which Australians played a significant role. It is a welcome addition to the story of the Australians in the Middle Eastern campaigns of World War I.
Author: William Westerman
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1922265837
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 391
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Book Description
The Great War confronted Australia’s fledgling field and garrison artillery forces with a seemingly insurmountable challenge: to rapidly raise, prepare, deploy and engage in history’s most lethal war to date. By 1915, the Australian artillery entered into a bloody contest of learning and adaptation against resourceful and resolute opponents, where the stakes would be measured in thousands of soldiers’ lives. Far from popularly-held views of the Great War as one of stalemate and stagnation, Clash of the Gods of War: Australian Artillery and the Firepower Lessons of the Great War reveals a dynamic and rapidly evolving battle-scape, as artillery planners on each side sought to combine innovative concepts, technology and tactics into victory. The book draws on an unparalleled array of perspectives on artillery and firepower, presented by Australian and international experts and practitioners over four years during the Firepower: Lessons from the Great War seminar series, commemorating the Centenary of Anzac. From Anzac Cove to the Hindenburg Line, Clash of the Gods of War tells a gripping Australian story of the Great War through the lens of artillery – the most lethal and influential arm of the war – and considers the legacy that its evolutionary journey holds for warfare today.
Author: Damien Finlayson
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1925520358
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 478
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Book Description
Few soldiers on the Western Front had heard of the Australian Electrical and Mechanical Mining and Boring Company, even after it had been renamed the ‘Alphabet Company’ by an AIF wag. Yet many knew the work of this tiny unit which numbered fewer than 300 at full strength. Despite its small size, the Alphabet Company’s influence was enormous and spanned the entire British sector of the Western Front, from the North Sea to the Somme. The Lightning Keepers: the AIF’s Alphabet Company in the Great War is the story of the ‘Alphabeticals’ who, led by Major Victor Morse, DSO, operated and maintained pumps, generators, ventilation fans, drilling equipment and other ingenious devices in extreme circumstances. Given the horrendous conditions in which the troops lived and fought, this equipment was desperately needed, as were the men who operated it in the same, often nightmarish setting. This is the first account of the dynamic little unit that was the Alphabet Company, a unit that has been neglected by history for a century. It is the story of the men, their machinery and the extraordinary grit they displayed in performing some of the most difficult tasks in a war noted for the horrific conditions in which it was waged. They do not deserve to be forgotten.
Author: Graham Wilson
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1925520331
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 311
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Book Description
The late Graham Wilson delighted in his self-appointed role as the AIF’s myth buster. In this, his second and final volume of Bully Beef and Balderdash, he tackles another eight popularly accepted myths, exposing the ‘Water Wizard’ of Gallipoli who saved an army, dismissing the old adage that the ‘lions of the AIF’ were led by British ‘donkeys’, debunking the Gallipoli legends of the lost sword of Eureka and ‘Abdul the Terrible’, the Sultan’s champion marksman sent to dispose of AIF sniper Billy Sing, and unravelling a series of other long-standing fictions. Finally, he turns his formidable forensic mind to the ‘lost’ seven minutes at The Nek, the early cessation of the artillery barrage which led to the slaughter of the Light Horsemen immortalised in Peter Weir’s Gallipoli. Wilson’s crusade to debunk such celebrated fictions was born of the conviction that these myths do very real damage to the history of the AIF. To demythologise this nation’s Great War military history, he argues, is to encourage Australians to view the AIF’s record on its own merits. Such are these merits that they do not require any form of embellishment to shine for all time. This book is a tribute to Graham Wilson’s extraordinary passion for truth and fact and his drive to set the historical record straight.
Author: William Thomas Massey
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Middle East
Languages : en
Pages : 408
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Book Description
Author: John N. More
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Gaza, Battles of, 1917
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
Author: Ian F. W. Beckett
Publisher: Pen and Sword
ISBN: 1783034912
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316
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Book Description
An in-depth study of Douglas Haig's army commanders on the Western Front during the First World War. Assesses their careers and characters, looks critically at their performance in command and examines their relationship with their subordinates and with Haig himself. Chapters are devoted to Allenby, Byng, Birdwood, Gough, Horne, Monro, Plumer, Rawlinson and Smith-Dorrien. Offers a fascinating insight into the mentality of these men and into their methods as they sought a solution to the problem of war on the Western Front. A fascinating and original contribution to the history of the war in the trenches.Contributors include: John Bourne, Matthew Hughes, John Lee, William Philpott, Simon Robbins, Gary Sheffield, Peter Simkins, Ian F. W. Beckett, Steven J. Corvi.
Author: Raymond Savage
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Marshals
Languages : en
Pages : 396
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Book Description
Author: C. Brad Faught
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0755600592
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 249
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Book Description
Edmund Allenby, Viscount Allenby of Megiddo and Felixstowe, as he became later, was the principal British military figure in the Middle East from 1917 to 1919. He fulfilled a similar proconsular role in Egypt from the latter year until 1925. In these two roles Allenby's eight years in the Middle East were of great impact, and in probing his life an especially revealing window can be found through which to observe closely and understand more fully the history that has resulted in the terminal roil afflicting the Middle East and international affairs today. In this biography Brad Faught explores the events and actions of Allenby's life, examining his thinking on both the British Empire and the post-World War I international order. Faught brings clarity to Allenby's decisive impact on British imperial policy in the making of the modern Middle East, and thereby on the long arc of the region's continuing and controversial place in world affairs.
Author: Robin Prior
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 030023340X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 839
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Book Description
A major new account of Britain's military strategy between 1914-1945, including the two world wars and everything between The First and Second World Wars were separated by a mere two decades, making the period 1914-1945 an unprecedentedly intense and violent era of history. But how did Britain develop its complex military strategy during these wars, and how were decisions made by those at the top? Robin Prior examines the influence politicians had on military operations, in the first history to assess both world wars together. Drawing uniquely on both military and political archives and previously unexamined sources Prior explores the fraught relationships between civilian and military leaders: from Lloyd George's remarkably interventionist stance on military tactics during the First World War to Churchill's near-constant arguments with American leaders during the Second. Conquer We Must tells the complex story of this military decision-making, revealing how politicians attempted to control strategy--but had little influence on how the army, navy, and air force actually fought.
