Book Description
What is it like to be in battle? John Keegan, a senior instructor at Sandhurst, the British Military Academy, speaks for soldiers who were present in the fray.
For examples, Keegan selects Agincourt in 1415, Waterloo in 1815, and the Somme in 1916. What is common about them, what is different? Agincourt was hand-to-hand combat, thrust and cut--a fearful and personal encounter. At Waterloo, 400 years later, the battle was still largely personal. As it swayed back and forth, men on opposite sides came to recognize the same individuals they had fought off in previous charges.
Keegan closes his book with the Somme. For him it stands as the distillation of wars in the industrial age: long-distance killing of faceless men by others who merely activate the instruments of destruction.
Customer Reviews:
Reads like a PhD Thesis.......2007-09-21
I have read many recent historical works of John Keegan including has book on WWI and the Price of Admiralty. I enjoyed them both. So, I was very disappointed when I tried to get into the Face of Battle. The language was so stilted, the use of commas and long run-on sentences going in differnet directions was so painful that I almost stopped reading it. The book has an excellent premise: how to describe three important battles in three very differnt centuries from the perspective of the soldiers actually doing the fighting rather than the 10,000 foot view employed by contemporary military historians who were not participants in the battle. Unfortunately, Keegen spends the first third of the book explaining what a good military historian (like himself) can or should do, focusing on the unique quality of British military historians (they are less biased because the wars were mainly fought on someone else's soil. The book improves as he gets into the battles of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme, but a good editor could have made this a much better read. I realize this book was written in 1978, so perhaps it was, at the time it was written, in line with Keegan's academic proclivities. Not a book I would recommend to anyone other than an academic.
Post Graduate Military History .......2007-05-06
THis work lives up to the highest academic standards that I have come to expect of Keegan.He provides new insights in three epic battles ,He wets your appetite for history ,he makes it real and interesting
A classic.......2006-11-23
Keegan puts you on the scene at Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme. One of the earliest departures from the bird's eye, general's view, The Face of Battle captures the battles from a physical, sensory, even biological perspective. Keegan creates a model for historians to assess the ebb and flux of the battle by providing an almost socratic approach to combat inquiry.
My personal favorite is the narration of Agincourt. In this battle, the author looks at the reality of whether bodies could pile up as high as they are reputed to have done along the line of contact. He examines the effectiveness of arrows and notes that at the range given the primary effect would have been to enrage the adversary's horses and not, as is often thought, to inflict casualties. Especially fascinating was the brutal crush of fellow soldiers pressing the forward ranks into the "funnel" created by the forest, which made anything other than forward movement nearly impossible. Similarly, he captures the mayhem created in the ranks by returning cavalry, after a failed charge. And let us not forget, it isn't very easy to relieve oneself in a full suit of plate, especially with dysentary!
Engrossing.......2006-11-12
A fine worm's eye view of battle. The author has painstakingly recreated what it was like for a soldier on the field of Agincourt, Waterloo and the battle of the Somme. It's a grand tutorial in basic tactics.
Mr. Keegan's Opus.......2006-10-06
This is the first work that I and most others discovered Mr. Keegan's great mind for military history. It is an overview of the evolution of warfare from the middle ages to the present but more than that it seeks to answer the question of what motivates the common soldier to fight instead of following his instinct to run. Mr. Keegan's admiration and adoption of the common soldier's lot is moving and commendable in itself. He brings out the hero in the common man and for that all us common men can thank him.
Book Description
From one of our most distinguished historians, an authoritative and vivid account of the devastating World War I battle that claimed more than 300,000 lives
At 7:30 am on July 1, 1916, the first Allied soldiers climbed out of their trenches along the Somme River in France and charged out into no-man’s-land toward the barbed wire and machine guns at the German front lines.
By the end of this first day of the Allied attack, the British army alone would lose 20,000 men; in the coming months, the fifteen-mile-long territory along the river would erupt into the epicenter of the Great War. The Somme would mark a turning point in both the war and military history, as soldiers saw the first appearance of tanks on the battlefield, the emergence of the air war as a devastating and decisive factor in battle, and more than one million casualties (among them a young Adolf Hitler, who took a fragment in the leg). In just 138 days, 310,000 men died.
In this vivid, deeply researched account of one history’s most destructive battles, historian Martin Gilbert tracks the Battle of the Somme through the experiences of footsoldiers (known to the British as the PBI, for Poor Bloody Infantry), generals, and everyone in between. Interwoven with photographs, journal entries, original maps, and documents from every stage and level of planning, The Somme is the most authoritative and affecting account of this bloody turning point in the Great War.
Customer Reviews:
Great Work by a distinguished historian.......2007-06-08
I have read a number of Martin Gilbert's works including this fine book and his great biography of Winston Churchill. I am visiting the Somme battlefield over the Labor Day weekend and found this to be excellent reading in preparation for that visit. I also highly recommend Lynn MacDonald's book on the same subject with lots of first person accounts of the battle. The Somme is the greatest tragedy in all of British military history.
A humane approach to History .......2007-05-01
Martin Gilbert does in this book something similar to what he does in his work on the Holocaust. He does not content himself with drawing the big picture, and speaking only of the generals, and the troop-movements and the political powers behind this which dictate the operations. He instead goes down to the level of the individual soldier, to the level of the squad, to the level at which most of those actually fighting the battle see and experience it. He tells the story of individuals who were everything to their own families but of no great significance in the calculations of the Generals. He too provides us with documents containing their own eye- witness reports. He provides samples of the poetry and personal reflections. He tells stories of heroism and bravery, and gives credit to those who truly bore the brunt of the battle. He depicts the horrors of the war, and the sufferings of the soldiers.
This is a kind of history much different from that most of us grew up with while reading our textbooks. It seems somehow more humane and real.
A Beautiful Tribute to all the Brave Men who Fought and Died.......2007-02-08
When I first saw that this book was released, I thought to myself - another book on the Somme, why? After reading this, I can answer that question, more than any book on that battle and even on the First World War, this is a beautiful book written about and for all the brave men who fought and died in that tragic battle. This book focuses on the men who fought and the men who died there. Thousands of them died - the names of 73,355 are on the Thiepval Monument to the missing. The events that led to the death of many of them are in this book, and the reasons that they are missing are mentioned also. More than any other book that I've read on the First World War, this one led me to understand the utter waste and tragedy of this war and this battle. Also, this book clearly leads one to understand just a little the horror that was involved with trench warfare: the mud that caused soldiers to get stuck and sink into it, the rats that ate on dying men's flesh, the dead bodies that were all around causing soldiers to be numb to this. Also, this book lays out the stupidity of the generals, especially General Haig. They continual desire to slog it out to get minimal results were the cause of these tragedies. If you want to understand at least a little bit the experiences of the brave soldiers in the First World War, this book does a good job of sharing that.
Death in Droves.......2007-01-30
Needless slaughter in war is a neither anything particularly new nor simply a relic of the distant past. However World War I provides some epic examples of this senseless carnage as new weapons met outdated battle tactics. Generals and politicians who played foolishly with human lives must shoulder much blame (some things never change) for the unfathomable death rates. The Battle of the Somme is perhaps the best illustration of this death in droves.
Martin Gilbert is one of Great Britain's finest writers of popular history having authored especially important and accessible books on Winston Churchill and the World War II. His "The Somme: Heroism and Horror in the First World War" is another in the rich pantheon contributions he's made to the layman's understanding of 20th century warfare.
The particular strength of this latest addition is how Gilbert humanizes the war, making it more about the men who fought (bravely and otherwise) and died. While always providing the big picture of the whys and wherefore of military leaders and politicians on both sides, the focus is on the men in the trenches. We meet specific individuals, some whose names will be familiar (Robert Graves, Charles Dickens' grandson, J.R.R Tolkien to name a few) and others heretofore anonymous. By hearing their stories their exploits become all the more heroic or their deaths all the more tragic.
In the middle of World War I the allies, principally British General Sir Douglas Haig decided that "a big push" in the area of the Somme would be just the ticket to drive the German lines back and mark the beginning of the end for the Huns. While in the long run the allies certainly benefitted from the months long campaign, the short term gains were minimal and those came at a horrific cost of human life.
Gilbert goes beyond the numbers of the dead and wounded in telling the stories of the soldiers and their trials and tribulations. It was not just the constant threat of death or maiming, there was mud, rats, toilet facilities (or lack thereof), constant enemy shelling (how did the noise not drive them all mad?) and more.
Yet the soldiers seem such an intelligent and reflective group and as if to illustrate this Gilbert intersperses his account with soldiers poems (all by soldiers who fought at the Somme), many of which are hauntingly beautiful. It creates a powerful illustration of how many rich young minds were shut down far too early or permanently scarred.
Gilbert's own writing is spare and conservative, a style well suited to a subject of this nature. Photos and a bounty of excellent maps are noteworthy.
"The Somme..." is both an important addition to the bookshelf of those well-versed in World War I and an excellent book for anyone keen on sampling what the war was like.
An Honest, Well-Meant Failure.......2006-12-11
A better title for this book would be, "A Guide to the Military Cemeteries of the Somme and the Heroes Buried There." You can find small books like this in almost every military-themed park. However, they are seldom written by first-rate historians by Martin Gilbert, who should have had better things to do with his time.
The background information on the campaign is about as detailed as any other historical account on this scale, but I read through the entire thing without feeling I'd gained any insight as to why these generals, these soldiers, these cultures, and these nationalities put themselves through this horror. Gilbert seems unwilling to criticize, analyze, or to put any kind of scholarly context to his story. Most of the book is an endless series of he did this, it was awful, he died, he was buried here.
Even as a popular history, The Somme leaves a lot to be desired. When I read accounts of, say, Chickamauga, Gettysburg, or Shiloh, important battles in the American Civil War, I expect--and almost always get--enough description to understand or feel what made these crucial and dramatic confrontations different from each other. Almost all of what Gilbert has to say about the Somme Offensive could be applied to any of a hundred battles on the Western Front in World War I.
At a more sophisticated level, I hoped to learn something from this book about a great historical tragedy, one that had profound effects on British society and history when it happens, and, I expect, still does today. However, I will have to find another book that actually addresses those topics.
Too bad, too bad, too bad. The Somme scarred an entire generation and an entire society. This story needs to be better told and someone else will have to do the job.
Book Description
By drawing on a very large number of German sources, many of them previously unpublished, Jack Sheldon throws new light on a familiar story. In an account filled with graphic descriptions of life and death in the trenches, the author demonstrates that the dreadful losses of 1st July were a direct consequence of meticulous German planning and preparation.
Although the Battle of the Somme was frequently a close-run affair, poor Allied co-ordination and persistence in attacking weakly on narrow fronts played into the hands of the German commanders, who were able to rush forward reserves, maintain the overall integrity of their defenses and so continue a successful delaying battle until the onset of winter ultimately neutralized the considerable Allied superiority in men and material.
Customer Reviews:
the german army on the somme 1914-1916.......2006-10-07
This book is a must for anyone interested in the Great War, I have read much on the Allied side but very little from the German army viewpoint. This is a wonderful book my only disappointment would be Sheldon's lack of maps. His maps were lacking, it would have been helpful to have some detail maps of the battle region.
Superb Research but organization could be better.......2006-07-03
Jack Sheldon, a retired British infantry officer, provides an original and ground-breaking look into the other side of First World War trench combat in The German Army on the Somme 1914-1916. Although the Somme Campaign has been described many times before - memorably by Martin Middlebrook - it has usually been from a British perspective. However, the author was able to make use of a wide variety of German-language materials, ranging from after-action reports, contemporary diaries and post-war memoirs to develop a composite view of how the German Army experienced combat on the Somme. Furthermore, this book is not only about the well-covered battles in July 1916 but ranges back to the early actions in this area against the French in 1914-15 and extends to the final actions of November-December 1916. This book is a must for any serious student of the First World War. Unfortunately, poor organization and inadequate maps have hindered the author's ability to deliver this treasure trove of information to the reader and make this book virtually unfathomable for the general reader.
The German Army on the Somme 1914-1916 is organized into nine chapters, two of which deal with the fighting in this sector in 1914-1915, then one that deals with activity in this area during January-June 1916, one chapter for 1 July 1916 alone, and then each succeeding chapter covers one month of 1916. Overall, this chronological organization works well for a campaign narrative of this length. The author also provides two short appendices on the German Army and sources used, as well as a detailed order of battle for all German divisions that fought on the Somme. This work rests on eyewitness accounts, most of which come from junior officers although there are a fair number of NCOs and common soldiers represented. Most of the accounts are from infantry soldiers, but there are a few from artillerymen and aviators. Many of these accounts are vivid and gripping, depicting trench warfare in all its facets. Some of the more interesting accounts cover night trench raids, escape and evasion from behind enemy lines, several desperate last-ditch stands and capture/escape. From the German point of view, we see the effects of Allied superiority in artillery and airpower that limit the German ability to move troops and supplies up to the front that sounds much like 1944. The German troops were also more impressed with French troops at this stage of the war than British, who were generally regarded as inexperienced amateurs. Throughout the book, the omni-presence of Allied artillery fire and the weakness of German artillery to respond is driven home again and again. It is also clear that the German infantryman had become a bomber rather than a rifleman by this point in the war; in one counterattack each soldier in a company is given ten hand grenades. The translations are generally very good and the author is to be applauded for assembling this vast assortment of accounts into a cogent format.
A review of the German Army on the Somme by Jack Sheldon.......2005-11-12
The book describes the Somme campaign up to the end of 1916 through the eyes of German officers and soldiers. Much of the text is apportioned to translations of German firsthand accounts that the author has sifted into a structure framed by his own commentary which provides the background information and supplementary knowledge to complete the picture. The first hand accounts are impressive in themselves for they have lost none of the vitality in translation by the author, himself a product of the German Staff College, and very much retain the expression and idiom that their German authors would have used. The eye witnesses record their experiences and events in factual terms which combine humanity with humour in even the darkest moments such as the medical party covering the dead in No Man's Land with quicklime and being sworn at when they accidentally start to cover the men of one of their own patrol parties too.
The chapters lead the reader chronologically through the campaign capturing the mood of the German defenders. The eye witness accounts record the artillery dominance and initial allied air superiority making all movement extremely hazardous and forcing the defenders to live deep underground with the inherent dangers of being buried alive by British delayed fuse 380 mm (15") heavy artillery shells. The German soldiers frustration at being pinned down is expressed in their longing for `Tommy' to attack and the opportunity to return the favour in kind. Despite this underlying tension the accounts reveal that when the two sides did come face to face in capture or injury the prevailing attitude by both sides was one of fair play.
The author sets the eyewitness accounts in the wider context of the strategy of General von Falkenhayn, Chief of the German General Staff, and the changes that were effected after his removal in August 1916. His policy of not giving up ground was unsustainable and with his replacement, Field Marshal von Hindenburg, came a concept albeit not immediately recognisable as such, of mobile defence. The text is well supported with footnotes and the Appendices contain further useful backgound information including a detailed description of the composition and structure of the German Army in 1914.
This book provides a fascinating insight into the German Army during this fiercely contested campaign and many of the characteristics and qualities of the German Army today are evident in the accounts of the servicemen of that time. The reader is whisked around the battlefield and installed in a German front row seat at the centre of the action. Whether historian or current observer, this vivid account is a study of Germans as much as a tribute to the soldiers of the Somme.
Customer Reviews:
Very Well Done.......2007-02-15
If there was a single day during World War I that illustrates the absolute stupidity of the high level brass it was the opening day of the Somme, July 1st, 1916.
The commanders of the British forces had seen what modern weapons would do. They had had observers at the American Civil War and seen the results of frontally attacking dug in defenders. They ignored the reports because they were only colonials and the British red coats had more spirit, training, elan and everything else. They had seen the Boar War, and should have confirmed for themselves that modern equipment favored the defense. At the Battle of Colenso the British suffered 1,126 casualties to the Boar's 40.
Anyway at the Somme the British charged into the German machine guns and British suffered 57,470 casualties in the first day.
This book covers the Battle of the Somme. It wtarts with a prelude explaining how the battle came about. Then about half the book covers the battle itself. And the final quarter shows what the area looks like now and discusses the legacy of the battle.
The book is beautifully done, profusely illustrated with pictures taken at the time and recently. Some of the pictures show the British soldiers stepping off to the attack carrying their full kit of spare clothes, mess gear, sleeping gear, a total of 66 pounds of stuff.
Highly Recommended.
Book Description
The first day of the Somme is still on record as having the largest number of deaths in any one day in any war. This book explores the myths of this infamous battle, and the use of mines, tunnels, gas and flame-throwers by the British in combination with innovative tactics such as smoke. Andrew Robertshaw analyses the first day of the battle, explaining how British tactics developed as a result of the experience of the Somme, and provides an overview of the events along the entire front line, examining the actions of two British Corps, VIII at Serre and XIII at Montauban.
Customer Reviews:
A Conventional Handling of a Controversial Day.......2006-07-24
Andrew Robertshaw, Director for Education at the National Army Museum in the UK, provides a well-written summary of the first day of the Anglo-French offensive on the Somme in July 1916. The writer has an excellent command of this subject which is evident throughout the narrative, although it is also evident that the primary focus is on the British experience in the battle. The first day on the Somme remains a controversial subject and this work attempts to straddle the fence with its conclusion that the attack held both "tragedy and triumph." Given the reduced graphic content of this title and the rather conventional wisdom that underpins it, this volume clearly has nothing on Martin Middlebrook's superb First Day on the Somme (1971) or Gary Sheffield's The Somme (2003).
The initial section on the origins of the campaign briefly discusses the Allied plans that contributed to the Somme, but the author omits much reference to the 1915 Battle of the Sere in the same area that shaped German defensive plans. Although the author includes Jack Sheldon's The German Army on the Somme 1914-16 in his bibliography, it is apparent that the insights about the German defensive plans were not really brought into this work. The following sections on opposing commanders (only high-level leaders) and opposing forces are rather skimpy and focus too much on the British. While the author mentions the French contribution, it seems an afterthought particularly in the order of battle, which lists every BEF battalion but only lists French divisions. Unfortunately, the Somme has become such a "British battle" in modern historiography that there seems little place left for the French, even though they enjoyed more success on 1 July 1916 than their British allies.
This volume has a significantly smaller graphic content than most other Osprey campaign series titles, with only three 2-D maps (front of the BEF June 1916; the Somme at 0730 hours 1 July; the Somme at nightfall, 1 July) and two 3-D maps (the assault on Beaumont Hamel; the assault on Montauban). The volume also includes two battle scenes by artist Peter Dennis: the attack on the Heidenkopf and the attack on La Boisselle), both of which focus on British units. The concluding sections on the Battlefield Today (touring the Somme, writing about it then talking about it on the BBC has become something of a cottage industry for many modern British historians) and the bibliography are decent, although there are no references to internet websites that might be useful.
As for the battle narrative, the author employs the useful approach of covering one corps sector at a time, starting in the north and moving south. This method of dissecting the battle is very useful for readers who just want to focus on one section and it also enjoys the advantage of uniform description. Like most historians, the author concedes that the attacks in the north were costly failures, but opines that heavy losses were expected in this sort of warfare. Furthermore, he concludes that the "tragedy" in the northern attack sectors should be balanced by the "triumph" in the southern sectors where British and French troops smashed in the German first line of defense. This is a comforting thought for the relatives of the 20,000 British fatalities on the first day - that the sacrifice had some value - but that view does not square well with the facts. While the "triumph" in the southern attack sector was noteworthy, it still did not succeed in either reaching the German second line of defense or achieving a breakthrough. Furthermore, the Battle of the Somme continued for four more months without either breaking the German army or gaining any significant amounts of terrain, meaning that the German defense achieved its objectives. I also tend to find it hard to swallow British assertions that the heavy losses on the Somme should be balanced against the experience gained by the BEF; by that logic, Colonel George Armstrong Custer learned some very valuable lessons at Little Bighorn about Indian warfare. The Somme offensive is probably best viewed as the consequence of attempting to do too much with too little; the British attacked across too wide a sector with no real main effort and with their artillery support watered down by shooting at too many targets. The BEF demonstrated at Neuve Chapelle in 1915 that it could gain ground at reasonable cost, but these lessons learned appear to have been cast aside due to political pressure to achieve `something big' on the Somme. As so often happens in modern warfare, political pressures caused military men to disregard the principles of war (e.g. concentration, mass, objective, surprise) and to mount a sloppy, over-optimistic attack at a time and place that the enemy expected.
Customer Reviews:
The Somme - Better than the rest.......2006-12-16
Havin read "The Somme: Heroism and Horror in the First World War" by Martin Gilbert, "The Somme" by Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson, and "The Somme" by Lyn MacDonald, I found MacDonald's book to be the best of the three.
While Gilbert's book is a general history which provides a broad overview of the battle, it is not able to convey the movement of the battle. MacDonald's use of maps, as well as her step by step approach in describing battle is much easier to follow.
In addition, MacDonald lavishes the book with detailed accounts by survivors. It is not a rarity to find entire paragraphs, rather than sentence long quotes, taken directly from the individual soldier's words. This is incredibly welcome as it gives the reader a better understanding of what actually happened on the ground.
Prior and Wilson's book is great if one is interested in tactics. In addition, their book debunks several Somme myths which I will not go into here. Yet their work does not bring the reader into the lives of the troops or their experience outside of citing casualties.
MacDonald's book describes the establishment of the "Pals" battalions, their training and their general experience prior to the battle. In addition, she also discusses the role of the ANZAC on the Somme and gives an excellent account of their history from Galipoli to their attack on Pozieres.
While Wilson and Prior focus on tactics, Gilbert vacillates between tactics, general history and the soldier's own experiences. Wilson and Prior succeed in showing the immense planning, terrible cost and miscalculations of the battle, but fail to craft an comprehensive narrative.
While touching with its poetry and its frequent, tragic recitation of "he is listed on the Thiepval memorial," or "he is listed on the Gommecourt memorial," Gilbert's book does not make the battle more comprehensible.
MacDonald on the other hand gives a wonderful start to finish narrative of the battle in which she uses the survivor's own words to draw the reader in. In addition, MacDonald also discusses a variety of different roles from the soldiers to the Pioneer battalions to wireless operators.
Overall, while each book is worthwhile in its own right, MacDonald's is the best read for both the amateur and the historian alike.
A gripping account from the perspective of the British soldier.......2006-07-31
Few battles are as seared into the British historical consciousness as the battle of the Somme, the months-long offensive against the German trenches during the First World War. There the newly-trained divisions of "Kitchener's Army" suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties, all for advances that were often measured in yards. It was a baptism of blood, one that often depopulated villages back home of an entire generation of young men and left an indelible impression on the minds of its survivors.
Lyn Macdonald's book is a chronicle of the battle from the viewpoint of the British soldier. She begins by describing how so many of the soldiers came to be on the Somme battlefield, through their recruitment into the ranks in the weeks and months that followed the outbreak of the war. Many of them joined in groups, retaining a collective identity from their civilian life even after they put on the uniform. From there she details the meticulous preparations for the offensive, the training and planning that went into preparing these soldiers for a battle that its planners believed would break through the German lines and pave the way for victory.
The confident expectations were little match for the horrors of trench warfare, however. Instead of a dramatic breakthrough the British "Tommys" faced unrelenting slaughter, struggling to even make modest gains on the battlefield. In the weeks that followed the initial assault, the British high command threw division after division into the battle, hoping to achieve progress. Throughout each of these efforts, Macdonald captures the experience of combat - the dusty marches, the gory advances, and the reaction of the survivors to their experience. Such struggles continue, over and over, until the offensive petered out in mid-November, with Kitchener's Army all but spent as a fighting force.
Throughout the book Macdonald writes of the battle in gripping prose, supplemented throughout by a generous use of quotes from interviews with veterans who survived the battle. Together it combines to recount the experience in a manner that grabs the reader's attention, focusing it on the experience of the ordinary soldier and never letting go. Oftentimes the engagements can blur together; while this can make it difficult to distinguish one battle form another, it conveys something of the grinding nature of warfare on the Western Front. The broader strategy is also subordinated, something that further reflects the perspective of the average Tommy, who was unable to look past the enemy trenches. A more glaring absence, however, is the German side. While largely excluding the views and experiences of German soldiers helps to define them as the nameless, faceless "Jerries" that many British soldiers viewed them to be, it deprives readers of a valuable perspective of the battle, with the ability to establish just how unique the British experience was.
These criticisms should not deter readers seeking to understand the battle of the Somme. Macdonald's book is an engaging account of this seminal battle, one that engages its reader throughout the months of struggle and slaughter chronicled within its pages. It is unlikely to be bettered for the drama of its narrative, or for its ability to relate the battle as how the thousands of Tommys fought it - a valuable perspective that gives identity to the soldiers who are often reduced to mere numbers in all too many accounts.
Terrific social and military history.......2004-01-16
Ian McDonald apparently developed a passion for WWI somewhere along the way. Her other works - 1914, THEY CALLED IT PASSCHENDAELE, THE ROSES OF NO MAN'S LAND - along with this one form a tetralogy of points of view. WWI has long interested scholars in its possiblities and implications. By any measure, Germany, the strongest power, should have won. This would have taken care of Hitler, finessed Marxism and maintained the status quo of related royal rulers. Instead it was a prelude to a conflict that dwarfed the first war in every way imaginable.
The author provides us with testimony from witnesses and participants. Therefore we visit battlefields, nursing homes and churches. We hear the ribald military humor and experience the hell of war. The social context - politics, manners, the mood and demeanor of the people - all of this is presented with humor, clarity and verve. This is a testament to a time that ended a civilization that was the freest in the history of the world. The liberal (classical, not modern) idea of education, civility, honor, duty and country would soon give way to darker and more "modern" themes. These are hinted at throughout as even the common soldier realizes that the world is changed forever. Photographs, maps and drawings are included.
impressive.......2003-08-13
I found this book very impressive. It is not so much about strategy, but it is about how the soldiers fought and endured these masacres. This is one of the very few books on the first world war,where one can really get to know how this was for the men who fought it. How they suffered, and felt afraid. How they tried to stay alive and coped with these terrible terrible experiences. It is a very sad and intense book, but an important rememberance of all those young men dying in the dirt.
A Rambling Oral History.......2000-02-07
I was quite disappointed in this book. I had not read a detailed history of the battle, and only knew the basic outline from general histories of the war. This book added little to my knowledge. It gives little overall perspective of the battle. Much of it essentially an oral history, based on a number of interviews with participants. Because of this, it gives the reader a fairly good feel for the experience of the soldiers in the field, while imparting little information about the big picture. The author's background is in radio, and it shows in this book. If you know all about this battle and would like an oral history, this book may be of interest. For me, it was a major disappointment.
Average customer rating:
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Last Man Standing: The Memoirs of a Seaforth Highlander during the Great War
Norman Collins
Manufacturer: Pen and Sword
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ASIN: 0850528631 |
Book Description
While researching his excellent earlier book: Veterans of World War I, author Richard Van Emden encountered a fascinating personality of that long-ago conflict. After witnessing German naval attacks on British civilians, Norman Collins enlisted in the Seaforth Highlanders of the 51st Highland Division, even though he was under age. Collins fought at the battles of Beaumont Hamel, Arras, and Passchendaele, and was wounded several times.
Collins lived to be 100 and had an unusually detailed collection of letters, documents, illustrations and photographs. Richard Van Emden has written a moving biography of a unique personality at war, and his long life after the dramatic events of his youth.
Book Description
A joint operation between Britain and France in 1916, the battle of the Somme was an attempt to gain territory and dent Germany's military strength. By the end of the action, very little ground had been won: the Allied Forces had made just twelve kilometers. For this slight gain, a more than a million lives were lost. There were more than 400,000 British, 200,000 French, and 500,000 German casualties during the fighting. Twelve Days is a narrative of the last spell of front-line duty performed by the 2/West Yorkshires. Written by Sidney Rogerson, a young officer in µB' Company, it gives an extraordinarily honest account of twelve days during the battle of the Somme. From the terrible panic of crossing no-man's-land, to the squalid drudgery of trench life, Rogerson creates a full and evocative picture of this horrific conflict.
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Kaiserschlacht 1918: The Final German Offensive of World War One (Praeger Illustrated Military History)
Randal Gray
Manufacturer: Praeger Publishers
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0275982890 |
Book Description
The entry of the United States into World War One spelled disaster for Imperial Germany. The massive superiority in men and materials that the Americans could provide meant that if Germany had any chance of winning the war she must do so quickly. Randal Gray describes how, using special "Storm Trooper" units and high-mobility tactics, the Germans shattered the frontline, broke into open country and came within a hair's breadth of winning the war. Gray shows how the armies of 1918 had more in common with those of the 1939-42 Blitzkrieg era than to their immediate 1914 forebears. Finally, the outcome of the battle is investigated: although the British suffered 177,739 casualties, they could replace their losses in both men and material far more easily than the Germans could. Although the Kaiserschlacht was Germany's greatest tactical success of the First World War, it could not prevent her inevitable defeat.
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