Download or read book Germany s Western Front 1914 written by Mark Humphries and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2013-10-31 with total page 570 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This multi-volume series in six parts is the first English-language translation of Der Weltkrieg, the German official history of the First World War. Originally produced between 1925 and 1944 using classified archival records that were destroyed in the aftermath of the Second World War, Der Weltkrieg is the inside story of Germany’s experience on the Western front. Recorded in the words of its official historians, this account is vital to the study of the war and official memory in Weimar and Nazi Germany. Although exciting new sources have been uncovered in former Soviet archives, this work remains the basis of future scholarship. It is essential reading for any scholar, graduate student, or enthusiast of the Great War. This volume, the second to be published, covers the outbreak of war in July–August 1914, the German invasion of Belgium, the Battles of the Frontiers, and the pursuit to the Marne in early September 1914. The first month of war was a critical period for the German army and, as the official history makes clear, the German war plan was a gamble that seemed to present the only solution to the riddle of the two-front war. But as the Moltke-Schlieffen Plan was gradually jettisoned through a combination of intentional command decisions and confused communications, Germany’s hopes for a quick and victorious campaign evaporated.
Download or read book Defending the Ypres Front 1914 1918 written by Jan Vancoillie and published by Casemate Publishers. This book was released on 2017-09-30 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published by the Memorial Museum Passchendaele in 2016 in Dutch as Bouwen aan het front, this book examines how the German army developed field fortifications to hold what can loosely be described as the Ypres Front. With the decision by Falkenhayn in 1915 to concentrate Germanys offensive efforts largely in the east, the German defenders around Ypres set to developing their lines for semi-permanent occupation. The sub soil around the Salient generally made it difficult to construct and maintain mined (i.e. deep) dugouts—unlike on, for example the Somme, with easily worked chalk not far below the surface. The only practicable alternative was to use reinforced concrete.In this book the authors (both with many years of experience in researching and working on matters Great War, particularly the German army in Belgium) have examined in detail an impressive range of primary sources to provide a narrative of what the Germans built, how they built it (the logistical challenge was enormous) and how the designs and requirements of bunkers (for example, forward medical bunkers, artillery shelters, machine gun and observation bunkers) changed as the war progressed and as the military situation on the front dictated. There are many photographs, largely unseen by British readers, design diagrams and maps to supplement the text; whilst the activities of selected particular formations are examined in detail to provide an example of the effort that was put into the work.Additions to the Dutch edition will include a tours section, taking a visitor to accessible remaining structures in the Salient area; and a glossary of terms and their English equivalent. The book will be in full color throughout.
Download or read book The Western Front 1914 1916 The History of World War I written by Michael S Neiberg and published by Amber Books Ltd. This book was released on 2012-03-15 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the first few months of World War I, the Western Front consisted of a relatively static line of trench systems which stretched from the coast of the North Sea southwards to the Swiss border. To try to break through the opposing lines of trenches and barbed wire entanglements, both sides employed huge artillery bombardments followed by attacks by tens of thousands of soldiers. Battles could last for months and led to casualties measured in hundreds of thousands for attacker and defender alike. After most of these attacks, only a short section of the front would have moved and only by a kilometer or two. After Gallipoli, Australians were moved to fight in France on the western Front, in battles including the Battle of the Somme. On the first day of the 1916 Battle of the Somme, 60,000 Allies were casualties, including 20,000 deaths. The principal adversaries on the Western Front, who fielded armies of millions of men, were Germany to the East against a western alliance to the West consisting of France and the United Kingdom with sizable contingents from the British Empire, especially the Dominions. The United States entered the war in 1917 and by the summer of 1918 had an army of around half a million men which rose to a million by the time the Armistice was signed on November 11, 1918. For most of World War I, Allied Forces, predominantly those of France and the British Empire, were stalled at trenches on the Western Front. With the last few men who served in World War I now dying out, and the 90th anniversary of the Armistice coming in November 2008, there is no better time to reevaluate this controversial war and shed fresh light on the conflict. With the aid of numerous black and white and color photographs, many previously unpublished, the World War I series recreates the battles and campaigns that raged across the surface of the globe, on land, at sea and in the air. The text is complemented by full-color maps that guide the reader through specific actions and campaigns.
Download or read book The Western Front 1914 1916 written by Professor Michael S Neiberg and published by Amber Books Ltd. This book was released on 2014-02-16 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The History of World War I series recounts the battles and campaigns of the 'Great War'. From the Falkland Islands to the lakes of Africa, across the Eastern and Western Fronts, to the former German colonies in the Pacific, the World War I series provides a six-volume history of the battles and campaigns that raged on land, at sea and in the air.
Download or read book Great War Total War written by Roger Chickering and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-09-11 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: World War I was the first large-scale industrialized military conflict, and it led to the concept of total war. The essays in this volume analyze the experience of the war in light of this concept's implications, in particular the erosion of distinctions between the military and civilian spheres.
Download or read book The Western Front 1917 1918 written by Andrew Wiest and published by Amber Books Ltd. This book was released on 2014-02-23 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the aid of over 300 photographs, complemented by full-colour maps, The Western Front 1917–1918 provides a detailed guide to the background and conduct of the conflict on the Western Front in the final years of World War I.
Download or read book The Western Front A History of the Great War 1914 1918 written by Nick Lloyd and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2021-03-30 with total page 652 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A tour de force of scholarship, analysis and narration.… Lloyd is well on the way to writing a definitive history of the First World War.” —Lawrence James, Times The Telegraph • Best Books of the Year The Times of London • Best Books of the Year A panoramic history of the savage combat on the Western Front between 1914 and 1918 that came to define modern warfare. The Western Front evokes images of mud-spattered men in waterlogged trenches, shielded from artillery blasts and machine-gun fire by a few feet of dirt. This iconic setting was the most critical arena of the Great War, a 400-mile combat zone stretching from Belgium to Switzerland where more than three million Allied and German soldiers struggled during four years of almost continuous combat. It has persisted in our collective memory as a tragic waste of human life and a symbol of the horrors of industrialized warfare. In this epic narrative history, the first volume in a groundbreaking trilogy on the Great War, acclaimed military historian Nick Lloyd captures the horrific fighting on the Western Front beginning with the surprise German invasion of Belgium in August 1914 and taking us to the Armistice of November 1918. Drawing on French, British, German, and American sources, Lloyd weaves a kaleidoscopic chronicle of the Marne, Passchendaele, the Meuse-Argonne, and other critical battles, which reverberated across Europe and the wider war. From the trenches where men as young as 17 suffered and died, to the headquarters behind the lines where Generals Haig, Joffre, Hindenburg, and Pershing developed their plans for battle, Lloyd gives us a view of the war both intimate and strategic, putting us amid the mud and smoke while at the same time depicting the larger stakes of every encounter. He shows us a dejected Kaiser Wilhelm II—soon to be eclipsed in power by his own generals—lamenting the botched Schlieffen Plan; French soldiers piling atop one another in the trenches of Verdun; British infantryman wandering through the frozen wilderness in the days after the Battle of the Somme; and General Erich Ludendorff pursuing a ruthless policy of total war, leading an eleventh-hour attack on Reims even as his men succumbed to the Spanish Flu. As Lloyd reveals, far from a site of attrition and stalemate, the Western Front was a simmering, dynamic “cauldron of war” defined by extraordinary scientific and tactical innovation. It was on the Western Front that the modern technologies—machine guns, mortars, grenades, and howitzers—were refined and developed into effective killing machines. It was on the Western Front that chemical warfare, in the form of poison gas, was first unleashed. And it was on the Western Front that tanks and aircraft were introduced, causing a dramatic shift away from nineteenth-century bayonet tactics toward modern combined arms, reinforced by heavy artillery, that forever changed the face of war. Brimming with vivid detail and insight, The Western Front is a work in the tradition of Barbara Tuchman and John Keegan, Rick Atkinson and Antony Beevor: an authoritative portrait of modern warfare and its far-reaching human and historical consequences.
Download or read book With the German Guns written by Herbert Sulzbach and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2012-04-23 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An invaluable eye-witness account of life at the lower levels of the German Army during the First World War.”—HistoryOfWar.org At once harrowing and lighthearted, Herbert Sulzbach’s exceptional diary has been highly praised since its original publication in Germany in 1935. With the reprint of this classic account of trench warfare, it records the pride and exhilaration of what to him was the fight for a just cause. It is one of the very few available records of an ordinary German soldier during the First World War. “One of the most notable books on the Great War. It is a book which finely expressed the true soldierly spirit on its highest level; the combination of a high sense of duty, courage, fairness and chivalry.”—Sir Basil Liddell Hart “Herbert Sulzbach’s first person diary focuses on four years of trench warfare and is a valuable contribution to the overall individual story of the First World War, more so than many other such accounts perhaps, as the author was German.”—OCAD Militaria Collectors Resources “A first-class personal account of Herbert Sulzbach’s war seen through his diaries. There is much insight into both his and the German soldier’s attitude to war and events . . . a very readable narrative and adds to the library of sources that are invaluable to counter the legions of postmodern re-evaluations of the German soldier.”—Battlefield Guide
Download or read book All the Kaiser s Men written by Ian Passingham and published by The History Press. This book was released on 2011-10-21 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Convinced that both God and the Kaiser were on their side, the officers and men of the German Army went to war in 1914, confident that they were destined for a swift and crushing victory in the West. The vaunted Schlieffen Plan on which the anticipated German victory was based expected triumph in the West to be followed by an equally decisive success on the Eastern Front. It was not to be. From the winter of 1914 until the early months of 1918, the struggle on the Western Front was characterised by trench warfare. But our perception of the conflict takes little or no account of the realities of life 'across the wire' in the German trenches. This book redresses that imbalance and reminds us how similar these young German men were to our own Tommies. Drawing from diaries and letters, Ian Passingham charts the hopes and despair of the German soldiers, filling an important gap in the history of the Western Front.
Download or read book They Shall Not Pass written by Ian Sumner and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2012-05-19 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Sumner’s brilliant window onto the French army is a book I cannot recommend highly enough . . . Full of detail and mixed with vivid personal accounts.”—War History Online This graphic collection of first-hand accounts sheds new light on the experiences of the French army during the Great War. It reveals in authentic detail the perceptions and emotions of soldiers and civilians who were caught up in the most destructive conflict the world had ever seen. Their testimony gives a striking insight into the mentality of the troops and their experience of combat, their emotional ties to their relatives at home, their opinions about their commanders and their fellow soldiers, the appalling conditions and dangers they endured, and their attitude to their German enemy. In their own words, in diaries, letters, reports and memoirs—most of which have never been published in English before—they offer a fascinating inside view of the massive life-and-death struggle that took place on the Western Front. The author’s pioneering work will appeal to readers who may know something about the British and German armies on the Western Front, but little about the French army which bore the brunt of the fighting on the allied side. His book represents a milestone in publishing on the Great War. “An interesting, well-written and informative book which goes a long way to explaining why the French army mounted the staunch defense of its homeland that it did.”—Burton Mail “The text is skillfully put together and moves seamlessly from one voice to another while illuminating the flow of events that affected Frenchmen and women during the Great War.”—Stand To! The Western Front Association
Download or read book Christmas Truce written by Malcolm Brown and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 1999 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During Christmas 1914, in a war already famous for its horror and brutality, enemy shook hands with enemy in No Man`s Land, exchanged souvenirs, even played football. The truce between the trenches extended over at least two-thirds of the British line and there were similar cease-fires in the French and Belgian sectors. In some areas the peaceable mood lingered well into 1915. Originally published in 1984, this book is one of the finest accounts ever assembled on one of the most overlooked stories of World War I.
Download or read book Germany s Western Front 1914 Translations from the German Official History of the Great War written by and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This multi-volume series in six parts is the first English-language translation of Der Weltkrieg, the German official history of the First World War. Originally produced between 1925 and 1944 using classified archival records that were destroyed in the aftermath of the Second World War, Der Weltkrieg is the inside story of Germany’s experience on the Western front. Recorded in the words of its official historians, this account is vital to the study of the war and official memory in Weimar and Nazi Germany. Although exciting new sources have been uncovered in former Soviet archives, this work remains the basis of future scholarship. It is essential reading for any scholar, graduate student, or enthusiast of the Great War. This volume, the second to be published, covers the outbreak of war in July–August 1914, the German invasion of Belgium, the Battles of the Frontiers, and the pursuit to the Marne in early September 1914. The first month of war was a critical period for the German army and, as the official history makes clear, the German war plan was a gamble that seemed to present the only solution to the riddle of the two-front war. But as the Moltke-Schlieffen Plan was gradually jettisoned through a combination of intentional command decisions and confused communications, Germany’s hopes for a quick and victorious campaign evaporated.
Download or read book Victory at Gallipoli 1915 written by Klaus Wolf and published by Pen and Sword Military. This book was released on 2020-04-30 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The German contribution in a famous Turkish victory at Gallipoli has been overshadowed by the Mustafa Kemal legend. The commanding presence of German General Liman von Sanders in the operations is well known. But relatively little is known about the background of German military intervention in Ottoman affairs. Klaus Wolf fills this gap as a result of extensive research in the German records and the published literature. He examines the military assistance offered by the German Empire in the years preceding 1914 and the German involvement in ensuring that the Ottomans fought on the side of the Central Powers and that they made best use of the German military and naval missions. He highlights the fundamental reforms that were required after the battering the Turks received in various Balkan wars, particularly in the Turkish Army, and the challenges that faced the members of the German missions. When the allied invasion of Gallipoli was launched, German officers became a vital part of a robust Turkish defense – be it at sea or on land, at senior command level or commanding units of infantry and artillery. In due course German aviators were to be, in effect, founding fathers of the Turkish air arm; whilst junior ranks played an important part as, for example, machine gunners. This book is not only their missing memorial but a missing link in understanding the tragedy that was Gallipoli.
Download or read book Haig s Enemy written by Jonathan Boff and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the First World War, the British army's most consistent German opponent was Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria. Commanding more than a million men as a General, and then Field Marshal, in the Imperial German Army, he held off the attacks of the British Expeditionary Force under Sir John French and then Sir Douglas Haig for four long years. But Rupprecht was to lose not only the war, but his son and his throne. In Haig's Enemy, Jonathan Boff explores the tragic tale of Rupprecht's war--the story of a man caught under the wheels of modern industrial warfare. Providing a fresh viewpoint on the history of the Western Front, Boff draws on extensive research in the German archives to offer a history of the First World War from the other side of the barbed wire. He revises conventional explanations of why the Germans lost with an in-depth analysis of the nature of command, and of the institutional development of the British, French, and German armies as modern warfare was born. Using Rupprecht's own diaries and letters, many of them never before published, Haig's Enemy views the Great War through the eyes of one of Germany's leading generals, shedding new light on many of the controversies of the Western Front. The picture which emerges is far removed from the sterile stalemate of myth. Instead, Boff re-draws the Western Front as a highly dynamic battlespace, both physical and intellectual, where three armies struggled not only to out-fight, but also to out-think, their enemy. The consequences of falling behind in the race to adapt would be more terrible than ever imagined.
Download or read book The Strategy on the Western Front written by Herbert Howland Sargent and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2014-06-02 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An excerpt from a review in the Naval Institute Proceedings, Volume 47, Issues 1: THE THREE ERRORS THERE were three great German offensives on the Western Front, we are told, in each of which Germany made a great strategical blunder: the first Marne, the Verdun campaign of 1916, and the offensive begun in March, 1918. The first alleged error was in attempting the strategical offensive on two fronts at the same time. The Western Front, only one hundred and fifty miles long, was protected by the Moselle and Metz, backed by the Rhine and Strassburg; it could not have been turned by France without violating the neutrality of Belgium or Switzerland. Had Germany held this line defensively with a small part of her combatant forces while she defeated her other enemies in detail, the war would not have lasted more than two years. Thus the Germans would have avoided violating the neutrality of Belgium and the consequential British and American hostility. The failure of the western offensive is attributed particularly to the strength of Belfort, which commands the narrow pass into France between the Vosges and Jura ranges. "Had the Germans been able to capture this fortress," Sargent says, "the way would have been opened for turning the Vosges and the fortresses of Épinal, Toul and Verdun and for the envelopment of the French right wing, which, with the left wing and the little British and Belgian armies already enveloped, would no doubt have resulted in the final surrender of the French army and the capture of Paris." The Second Error: After the battle of the Marne Germany remained on the defensive on the Western Front for about eighteen months, during which she was considerably outnumbered by the Allies. She assumed the offensive in other parts of the theatre of war with successful campaigns against the Russians and Serbians. But before she had entirely disposed of Russia, Serbia and Italy, she again assumed the offensive in the West by way of the Crown Prince's tremendous campaign for Verdun—one of the most formidable in history—which failed. This is charged as a mistake because with the same effort and less loss Germany could "have completed her victories in the Eastern Front, destroyed the army at Salonica, and captured that important seaport; then with greatly superior forces have struck and crushed the Italian army; and then, with all her enemies disposed of outside of France and Belgium, have returned to the Western Front with an enormous preponderance of forces." The Third Error: After the failure at Verdun the Germans again consigned the West to the defensive role, and resumed the offensive against Russia, Romania, and Italy. But here again the Germans were not persistent, for if they had massed their available forces in turn against Salonica and Italy, probably both would have been disposed of, the Germans would have occupied Greece and the valley of the Po, and would have advanced to the French and Maritime Alps for an invasion of France via Nice. Instead of following up her advantages in the Near East and in Italy, Germany precipitated her offense of 1918 in the West, beginning on March 21, with her powerful thrust at Amiens, followed by the attack against the British around Ypres and two attacks against the French between Reimes and Montdidier towards Chateau-Thierry, in none of which attacks was she able to make a sufficiently broad rupture in the line to allow resumption of a war of movement.
Download or read book Ypres 1914 Langemarck written by Jack Sheldon and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2014-04-30 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These three Battleground Europe books on Ypres 1914 mark the centenary of the final major battle of the 1914 campaign on the Western Front. Although fought over a relatively small area and short time span, the fighting was even more than usually chaotic and the stakes were extremely high. Authors Nigel Cave and Jack Sheldon combine their respective expertise to tell the story of the men British, French, Indian and German - who fought over the unremarkable undulating ground that was to become firmly placed in British national conscience ever afterwards.When, in October 1914, the newly created German Fourth Army attacked west to seize crossings over the Yser, prior to sweeping south in an attempt to surround the BEF, two things prevented it. To the north, it was the efforts of the Belgian army, reinforced by French troops, coupled with controlled flooding of the polders but, further south, the truly heroic defence of Langemarck, for three days by the BEF and then by the French army, was of decisive importance. The village stood as a bulwark against any further advance to the river or the town of Ypres. Here the German regiments bled to death in the face of resolute Allied defence and any remaining hope of forcing a decision in the west turned to dust.
Download or read book The Western Front 1914 1916 written by Michael S. Neiberg and published by Amber Books. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the first few months of World War I, the Western Front consisted of a relatively static line of trench systems which stretched from the coast of the North Sea southwards to the Swiss border. This book recreates the battles and campaigns that raged across the surface of the globe, on land, at sea and in the air.
