Download or read book The White War written by Mark Thompson and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2009-03-17 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In May 1915, Italy declared war on the Habsburg Empire. Nearly 750,000 Italian troops were killed in savage, hopeless fighting on the stony hills north of Trieste and in the snows of the Dolomites. To maintain discipline, General Luigi Cadorna restored the Roman practice of decimation, executing random members of units that retreated or rebelled. With elegance and pathos, historian Mark Thompson relates the saga of the Italian front, the nationalist frenzy and political intrigues that preceded the conflict, and the towering personalities of the statesmen, generals, and writers drawn into the heart of the chaos. A work of epic scale, The White War does full justice to the brutal and heart-wrenching war that inspired Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms.
Download or read book Life on the Western Front written by Nick Hunter and published by Raintree. This book was released on 2013-10-10 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The trenches of Western Europe saw some of the heaviest fighting in World War I. Find out what life was like in the trenches as well as above ground for the soldiers who served there.
Download or read book Cannon Fodder written by A. Stuart Dolden and published by Blandford. This book was released on 1980 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes the day-to-day life of a British soldier during World War I. Based upon diaries kept by the author from 1914-1919.
Download or read book All Quiet on the Western Front written by Erich Maria Remarque and published by Crw Publishing. This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This First World War classic novel is written in the first person by a young German soldier, Paul Bauer. Only eighteen when he is pressured by his family, friends and society in general, to enlist and fight at the front, he enters the army with six school friends, each filled with optimistic and patriotic thoughts. Within a few months they are all old men, in mind if not completely in body. They witness such horrors and endure such severe hardship and suffering, that they are unable to even speak about it to anyone but each other. The 1930 film adaptation won two Academy Award.
Download or read book Digging the Trenches written by Andrew Robertshaw and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2014-08-19 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive, illustrated survey of the latest in battlefield archaeology reveals “intimate insight into the realities of life” during WWI (Current Archaeology). Modern methods of archaeological, historical, and forensic research have transformed our understanding of the Great War. In Digging the Trenches, battlefield archaeologists Andrew Robertshaw and David Kenyon introduce the reader to this exciting new field and explore many of the remarkable projects that have been undertaken. Robertshaw and Kenyon show how archaeology can be used to reveal the positions of trenches, dugouts and other battlefield features, as well as what life on the Western Front was really like. They also show how individual soldiers are coming into focus as forensic investigation is so highly developed that individuals can be identified and their fates discovered. “An excellent introduction to the subject…Digging the Trenches is essential reading.”—Gary Sheffield, Military Illustrated “What a splendid book this is.”—Neil Faulkner, Current Archaeology
Download or read book Life Death and Growing Up on the Western Front written by Anthony Fletcher and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-28 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book was inspired by the author’s discovery of an extraordinary cache of letters from a soldier who was killed on the Western Front during the First World War. The soldier was his grandfather, and the letters had been tucked away, unread and unmentioned for many decades. Intrigued by the heartbreak and history of these family letters, Fletcher sought out the correspondence of other British soldiers who had volunteered for the fight against Germany. This resulting volume offers a vivid account of the physical and emotional experiences of seventeen British soldiers whose letters survive. Drawn from different regiments, social backgrounds, and areas of England and Scotland, they include twelve officers and five ordinary “Tommies.” The book explores the training, journey to France, fear, shellshock, and life in the trenches as well as the leisure, love, and home leave the soldiers dreamed of. Fletcher discusses the psychological responses of 17- and 18-year-old men facing appalling realities and considers the particular pressures on those who survived their fallen comrades. While acknowledging the horror and futility the soldiers of the Great War experienced, the author shows another side to the story, focusing new attention on the loyal comradeship, robust humor, and strong morale that uplifted the men at the Front and created a powerful bond among them.
Download or read book Voices from the Trenches written by Andy Simpson and published by Pitkin. This book was released on 2006 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A treasure-trove of previously unpublished letters and first hand accounts from British 'tommies' of life and death in the trenches during the First World War. This is the story of the men who held the front line in France and Flanders. It is a graphic account of a strange and seemingly unending style of life and death in all their facets. It is a unique approach, an anthology interwoven with a continuous commentary so that the reader is always kept aware of the context of the writing. The balanced and un-emotive approach cannot, however, fail to leave the reader deeply moved. Domestic life in the line: accommodation, food and drink, wiring and carrying, the whole day and night routine are investigated, as are the operational aspects of trench life – raiding and patrolling in no-man’s-land and the German lines. Actual battle experience is also featured, but one of the most interesting parts of the book is devoted to the attitudes of front line soldiers, officers and their men, to each other; to the staff; to their Allies; to wounds; to fear; to God; to the sheer horror of it all. There is also a strong sense of humor about some of the material included – often a necessary antidote to the appalling conditions, but it should not be thought that everyone involved hated it. Some young soldiers found in it experience and responsibility beyond their years, while the professionals went to war with cool enthusiasm. The aim of this all encompassing portrayal of the front line is to grip the reader such that it cannot be put down, and that by the time it is finished he or she will have a genuine understanding of what it was like to fight in the trenches of the Western Front.
Download or read book All Quiet on the Western Front written by Erich Maria Remarque and published by Everyman's Library. This book was released on 2018-09-18 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A hardcover edition of the classic tale of a young soldier's harrowing experiences in the trenches, widely acclaimed as the greatest war novel of all time—featuring an Introduction by historian Norman Stone. Now a Netflix Film. When twenty-year-old Paul Bäumer and his classmates enlist in the German army during World War I, they are full of youthful enthusiam. But the world of duty, culture, and progress they had been taught to believe in shatters under the first brutal bombardment in the trenches. Through the ensuing years of horror, Paul holds fast to a single vow: to fight against the principle of hate that meaninglessly pits young men of the same generation but different uniforms against one another. Erich Maria Remarque's classic novel not only portrays in vivid detail the combatants' physical and mental trauma, but dramatizes as well the tragic detachment from civilian life felt by many upon returning home. Remarque's stated intention—“to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war"—remains as powerful and relevant as ever, a century after that conflict's end." Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.
Download or read book Trench written by Stephen Bull and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-05-20 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A complete guide to trench warfare on the Western Front from an authority on the subject. Even now, 100 years on from the conflict, the image of trenches stretching across Western Europe – packed with young men clinging to life in horrendous conditions – remains a powerful reminder of one of the darkest moments in human history. In this excellent study of trench warfare on the Western Front, expert Dr Stephen Bull reveals the experience of life in the trenches, from length of service and coping with death and disease, to the uniforms and equipment given to soldiers on both sides of the conflict. He reveals how the trenches were constructed, the weaponry which was developed specifically for this new form of warfare, the tactics employed in mass attacks and the increasingly adept defensive methods designed to hold ground at all cost. Packed with photographs, illustrations, annotated trench maps, documents and first-hand accounts, this compelling narrative provides a richly detailed account of World War I, providing a soldier's-eye-view of life in the ominous trenches that scarred the land.
Download or read book The Imperial War Museum Book of the Western Front written by Malcolm Brown and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2013-11-21 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An unrivalled and readable introduction to the years of Trench Warfare' TESThe First World War was won and lost on the Western Front. Covering the whole war, from the guns of August 1914 to the sudden silence of the November 1918 Armistice, the IWM Book of the Western Front reveals what life was really like for the men and women involved. With first-hand accounts of off-duty entertainments, trench fatalism, and going over the top, this is an extremely important contribution to the continuing debate on the First World War. Malcolm Brown has updated this edition, introducing new evidence on sex and homosexuality, executions, the treatment or mistreatment of prisoners and shell shock.'A blockbuster . . . as near as anyone is likely to get to the authentic life of the trenches' Yorkshire Post
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 Tweets from the Trenches written by Jacqueline Larson Carmichael and published by Cathedral Grove Books. This book was released on 2018-09-22 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than 150 tiny true stories from World War I soldiers, female combatants and nurses and the home front. 'Tweets from the Trenches: Little True Stories of Life & Death on the Western Front' brings real voices from diverse backgrounds to life in journal excerpts, poetry and social media. Presented chronologically, with historical images and contemporary photos from the author's journey in her grandfathers' steps. An odyssey into the dugouts of WWI history, 'Tweets from the Trenches' is written in flash documentary creative non-fiction, it encompasses excerpts of journals, letters and memoirs of Allied participants from Prince Edward Island to Yorkshire to South Carolina. With a picture on almost every page, the war unfolds chronologically in stories of valour and heartbreak, on everything from rationed rum and brave homing pigeons to post-traumatic stress disorder. Author Jacqueline Larson Carmichael had two grandfathers on the ground with the Canadian Expeditionary Force throughout the fiery battle on the Western Front. Her curiosity about their experience led to walking on the Western Front herself as part of a research project. As a social media experiment, the seasoned journalist gave Black Jack a Twitter account of his own, posting in his name on Twitter and Facebook - as if he were posting from the trenches of Flanders, Belgium and France. In 2016, on a travel writing research trip, Carmichael traveled to Belgium, France and Germany, and walked portions of the Western Front where both her grandfathers were soldiers for most of the duration of World War I. The long-time journalist, whose work has been seen in The Dallas Morning News, the Toronto Sun, Entrepreneur Magazine, found footnoted flash documentary creative non-fiction a great way to quickly tell little stories pulled from history. Life after battle - including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) - is addressed in a series of pieces that include the dramatic example of Canadian Member of Parliament Samuel Simpson Sharpe, whose death induced by the trauma of war was barely acknowledged in Ottawa circles for almost a century.
Download or read book Eight Stories written by Erich Maria Remarque and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2018-05-29 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seven of the eight short stories in this collection were originally published in Collier's magazine. The eighth story, Dreamt Last Night, was published in Redbook magazine.
Download or read book Somewhere in France A Tommy s Guide to Life on the Western Front written by William Whittaker and published by Amberley Publishing Limited. This book was released on 2014-06-15 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique combination of first-hand account and narrative history, which together provide a brilliant, eloquent and moving guide to a soldier's life in the Great War.
Download or read book The Western Front written by Richard Holmes and published by Random House. This book was released on 2008 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard Holmes brings the Western Front to life in this detailed and authoritative text, in a way that goes deep beneath scholarly debate, ripping off the veneer of cliche which now covers the war as it really was."
Download or read book Battle Tactics of the Western Front written by Paddy Griffith and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1996-01-01 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Beneath the Killing Fields written by Matthew Leonard and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2017-02-19 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beneath the Killing Fields of the Western Front still lies a hidden landscape of industrialised conflict virtually untouched since 1918. This subterranean world is an ambiguous environment filled with material culture that that objectifies the scope and depth of human interaction with the diverse conflict landscapes of modern war. Covering the military reasoning for taking the war underground, as well as exploring the way that human beings interacted with these extraordinary alien environments, this book provides a more all-encompassing overview of the Western Front. The underground war was intrinsic to trench warfare and involved far more than simply trying to destroy the enemys trenches from below. It also served as a home to thousands of men, protecting them from the metallic landscapes of the surface. With the aid of cutting edge fieldwork conducted by the author in these subterranean locales, this book combines military history, archaeology and anthropology together with primary data and unique imagery of British, French, German and American underground defences in order to explore the realities of subterranean warfare on the Western Front, and the effects on the human body and mind that living and fighting underground inevitably entailed.
