World War I

Besides being Veterans Day, today is also Armistice Day, to commemorate World War I ended on November 11th, 1918.  Here are ten books about The Great War.

The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East by Eugene L. Rogan - By 1914 the powers of Europe were sliding inexorably toward war, and they pulled the Middle East along with them into one of the most destructive conflicts in human history. 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. 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 postwar settlement led to the partition of Ottoman lands, laying 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.

The Great War: A Combat History of the First World War by Peter Hart - World War I altered the landscape of the modern world in every conceivable arena. Millions died; empires collapsed; new ideologies and political movements arose; poison gas, warplanes, tanks, submarines, and other technologies appeared. "Total war" emerged as a grim, mature reality.In The Great War, Peter Hart provides a masterful combat history of this global conflict. Focusing on the decisive engagements, Hart explores the immense challenges faced by the commanders on all sides. He surveys the belligerent nations, analyzing their strengths, weaknesses, and strategicimperatives. Russia, for example, was obsessed with securing an exit from the Black Sea, while France - having lost to Prussia in 1871, before Germany united - constructed a network of defensive alliances, even as it held a grudge over the loss of Alsace-Lorraine.Hart offers deft portraits of the commanders, the prewar plans, and the unexpected obstacles and setbacks that upended the initial operations. He concentrates on the Western and Eastern fronts, but also pays attention to important peripheral events, such as the war at sea, the fighting inMesopotamia and Palestine, and the Italian front. In the Great War, for the first time, warfare ceased to consist of armies hunting for each other across the landscape and meeting in brief, decisive battles; now continuous lines stretched from the Channel to the Alps, from the Alps to the Adriatic.Hart also examines the changing weapons and tactics, from pioneering British tanks to Germany's devastating infiltration techniques. In the final analysis, Hart argues that France provided the bulwark of the forces and determination that defeated the Central Powers, but Britain tipped the balance,with the crucial help of American intervention.Coming just in time for the centennial of 1914, The Great War provides the definitive one-volume account of the twentieth century's defining event.

The Greatest Day in History: How, on the Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month, the First World War Finally Came to an End by Nicholas Best - World War I did not end neatly with the Germans' surrender. After a dramatic week of negotiations, military offensives, and the beginning of a Communist revolution, the German Imperial regime collapsed. The Allies eventually granted an armistice to a new German government, and at 11:00 on November 11, the guns officially ceased fire--but only after 11,000 more casualties had been sustained. The London Daily Express proclaimed it "the greatest day in history.”
Nicholas Best tells the story in sweeping, cinematic style, following a set of key participants through the twists and turns of these climactic events, and sharing the impressions of eyewitnesses including Adolf Hitler, Charles de Gaulle, Harry S. Truman, Anthony Eden, and future famous generals MacArthur, Patton, and Montgomery.

Hundred Days: The Campaign That Ended World War I by Nick Lloyd - In the late summer of 1918, after four long years of senseless, stagnant fighting, the Western Front erupted. The bitter four-month struggle that ensued-- known as the Hundred Days Campaign-- saw some of the bloodiest and most ferocious combat of the Great War, as the Allies grimly worked to break the stalemate in the west and end the conflict that had decimated Europe. In Hundred Days, military historian Nick Lloyd leads readers into the endgame of World War I, showing how the timely arrival of American men and materiel-- as well as the bravery of French, British, and Commonwealth soldiers-- helped to turn the tide on the Western Front. Many of these battle-hardened troops had endured years of terror in the trenches, clinging to their resolve through poison-gas attacks and fruitless assaults across no man's land. Finally, in July 1918, they and their American allies did the impossible-- they returned movement to the Western theater. Using surprise attacks, innovative artillery tactics, and swarms of tanks and aircraft, they pushed the Germans out of their trenches and forced them back to their final bastion: the Hindenburg Line, a formidable network of dugouts, barbed wire, and pillboxes. After a massive assault, the Allies broke through, racing toward the Rhine and forcing Kaiser Wilhelm II to sue for peace.

The Last of the Dougboys: The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War by Richard Rubin - In 2003, 85 years after the armistice, it took Richard Rubin months to find just one living American veteran of World War I. But then, he found another. And another. Eventually he managed to find dozens, aged 101 to 113, and interview them. All are gone now.
A decade-long odyssey to recover the story of a forgotten generation and their Great War led Rubin across the United States and France, through archives, private collections, and battlefields, literature, propaganda, and even music. But at the center of it all were the last of the last, the men and women he met: a new immigrant, drafted and sent to France, whose life was saved by a horse; a Connecticut Yankee who volunteered and fought in every major American battle; a Cajun artilleryman nearly killed by a German aeroplane; an 18-year-old Bronx girl "drafted" to work for the War Department; a machine-gunner from Montana; a Marine wounded at Belleau Wood; the 16-year-old who became America's last WWI veteran; and many, many more.
They were the final survivors of the millions who made up the American Expeditionary Forces, nineteenth-century men and women living in the twenty-first century. Self-reliant, humble, and stoic, they kept their stories to themselves for a lifetime, then shared them at the last possible moment, so that they, and the World War they won - the trauma that created our modern world - might at last be remembered. You will never forget them. The Last of the Doughboys is more than simply a war story: It is a moving meditation on character, grace, aging, and memory.

My Fellow Soldiers: General John Pershing and the Americans Who Helped Win the Great War by Andrew Carroll - Draws on a rich trove of both little-known and newly uncovered letters and diaries to create a marvelously vivid and moving account of the American experience in World War I, with General John Pershing featured prominently in the foreground. Andrew Carroll's intimate portrait of General Pershing, who led all of the American troops in Europe during World War I, is a revelation. Given a military force that, on the eve of its entry into the war, was downright primitive compared with the European combatants, the general had to surmount enormous obstacles to build an army and ultimately command millions of U.S. soldiers. But Pershing himself--often perceived as a harsh, humorless, and wooden leader--concealed inner agony from those around him: almost two years before the United States entered the war, Pershing suffered a personal tragedy so catastrophic that he almost went insane with grief and remained haunted by the loss for the rest of his life, as private and previously unpublished letters he wrote to family members now reveal. Before leaving for Europe, Pershing also had a passionate romance with George Patton's sister, Anne. But once he was in France, Pershing fell madly in love with a young painter named Micheline Resco, whom he later married in secret. Woven throughout Pershing's story are the experiences of a remarkable group of American men and women, both the famous and the unheralded, including Harry Truman, Douglas MacArthur, William "Wild Bill" Donovan, Teddy Roosevelt, and his youngest son, Quentin. The chorus of these voices, which begins with the first Americans who enlisted in the French Foreign Legion as well as those who flew with the Lafayette Escadrille, makes the high stakes of this epic American saga piercingly real, demonstrating the War's profound impact on the individuals who served--both during the conflict and in the years after--with extraordinary humanity and emotional force.

Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War I by Alexander Watson - A comprehensive analysis of the war efforts of the primary Central Powers, Germany and Austria-Hungary.
For Germany and Austria-Hungary the First World War started with high hopes for a rapid, decisive outcome. Yet despite the initial halting of a brutal Russian invasion, the Central Powers' war plans soon unraveled. Germany's attack on France failed, Austria-Hungary's armies suffered catastrophic losses at Russian and Serbian hands, and 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 mobilized 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. 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 mobilization 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. This book is an essential contribution to understanding the last century of European history.--From publisher description.

The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 by Christopher M. Clark - Drawing on new scholarship, Clark offers a fresh look at World War I, focusing not on the battles and atrocities of the war itself, but on the complex events and relationships that led a group of well-meaning leaders into brutal conflict.
Clark traces the paths to war in a minute-by-minute, action-packed narrative that cuts between the key decision centers in Vienna, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Paris, London, and Belgrade, and examines the decades of history that informed the events of 1914 and details the mutual misunderstandings and unintended signals that drove the crisis forward in a few short weeks.
Meticulously researched and masterfully written, Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers is a dramatic and authoritative chronicle of Europe’s descent into a war that tore the world apart.

To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 by Adam Hochschild - World War I stands as one of history’s most senseless spasms of carnage, defying rational explanation. In a riveting, suspenseful narrative with haunting echoes for our own time, Adam Hochschild brings it to life as never before. He focuses on the long-ignored moral drama of the war’s critics, alongside its generals and heroes. Thrown in jail for their opposition to the war were Britain’s leading investigative journalist, a future winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and an editor who, behind bars, published a newspaper for his fellow inmates on toilet paper. These critics were sometimes intimately connected to their enemy hawks: one of Britain’s most prominent women pacifist campaigners had a brother who was commander in chief on the Western Front. Two well-known sisters split so bitterly over the war that they ended up publishing newspapers that attacked each other.
Today, hundreds of military cemeteries spread across the fields of northern France and Belgium contain the bodies of millions of men who died in the “war to end all wars.” Can we ever avoid repeating history?

World War I: The Definitive Visual History: From Sarajevo to Versailles by R. G. Grant - 2014 marks the centennial of the start of World War I -- DK will mark the occasion with the publication of World War I: The Definitive Visual Guide, a vividly illustrated, in-depth account of the Great War.
Written by historian R. G. Grant, and created by DK's award-winning editorial and design team, World War I charts the developments of the war from a global perspective. Using illustrated timelines, detailed maps, and personal accounts, readers will see the oft-studied war in a new light. Key episodes are set clearly in the wider context of the conflict, in-depth profiles look at the key generals and political leaders, and full-color photo galleries showcase the weapons, inventions, and new technologies that altered the course of history.
A vivid portrait of the confrontation on land, sea, and sky, World War I: The Definitive Visual Guide offers readers a bold and thoughtful new look at this complex and explosive moment in history.