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The First World War: A New History

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Told from the perspective of Captain Baldry’s cousin Jenny, The Return of the Soldier explores how relationships were frayed by the huge emotional wounds rent by conflict. It remains one of the best WW1 books. WW1 books written by soldiers By 5 September the Sixth Army consisted, besides Sordet's Cavalry Corps and the 45th (Algerian) Division, of the VII Corps, brought from Alsace, and the 55th and 56th Reserve Divisions from Lorraine; the IV Corps was en route from Fourth Army. The Ninth Army, originally constituted as the Foch Detachment, comprised the IX and XI Corps transferred from Fourth Army, together with the 52nd and 60th Reserve Divisions and 9th Cavalry Division, the 42nd from Third Army and the 18th Division from Third Army.

It was first published in 1962 and its reputation has increased since then. Tuchman threw herself into research, covering the events leading up to the war and its first month, weaving a compelling narrative on how the war began. It’s an essential read for all Great War and military history enthusiasts. Best books on the causes of WW1 Although, in theory, the book is only about 1914, in practice he spends a lot of time talking about themes that run through the whole war, like the financing of it. He also tells the whole story of the war in Africa, all the way up to 1918, in this first volume. So it’s much bigger than it pretends to be. The most depth and insight comes right at the beginning, in Keegan’s retelling of how the war began. This also happens to be the best part of the book. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with World War I knows that its origins are as complicated as Inception and as mysterious as Justin Bieber’s fame. John Keegan truly wrote a masterpiece here, and it is no doubt a great work today. I think in todays world, we are so focused on the Second World War, and not many people realize how much of an impact the First World War had on our society. It is astonishing and sad how millions of young men died in such a short amount of time, and how many communities perished. Behind each and every soldier was a mother who was praying for his safe return, but many would find out he had died on the battlefield. John Keegan is vastly overrated as a writer and scholar. I think the latter was accidental. People projected authority, with his sober demeanor, who can blame them? Keegan routinely employs clumsy metaphors and speaks of terrifying events in terms of inefficiency. He also resorts to unflattering stereotypes which detract. Keegan uses little primary sources, instead he mines Alistair Horne's book on Verdun and similar secondary texts.I read an interesting interview with Sebastian Faulks where he said he is impatient with characters in books where the author clearly loves the character and wants you to as well. And so just everyone in the fictional world loves the character. He said, he’s always very careful to make sure that quite a few people in the book don’t like the character he likes. So the protagonist is a character—who I find very likeable, because he’s a little bit of a modern sub-in, he sees the world a little as we would—who everyone within the book thinks is a bit of an odd fish. They just don’t connect with him, you know, and that makes him feel very three-dimensional. I only dipped into a few chapters, one was about the atmosphere in Berlin on the eve of the war. It was very evocative. Later, there’s a chapter about All Quiet on the Western Front, and how Adolf Hitler spent a lot more time in the trenches than the author of that book. I found it very readable, but I wasn’t sure how it all held together, necessarily. Keegan covers campaigns like the Battle of the Marne in the war’s opening stages to its final moments in November 1918. He goes into more detail than Sir Michael Howard, making it an essential single-volume read. I’ve recommended it because I think you have to. It’s considered one of the great classics. Personally, I have a love-hate relationship with Hemingway. I really admire him, he’s a very playful writer, I always enjoy him more than I expect to. But there is something so dudely bro-ish about him. I have to be in the right place for him.

America’s entry into the war. Superb analyses the arrival of 100,000 fresh troops a month in the summer of 1918 along the Western front. The German high command knew by the end of summer that they had lost the war. They were losing nearly every single battle/skirmish on the Western front and lost all their gains made in the Spring ofAll Quiet on the Western Front has been adapted for the screen three times. The 1930s version won the Academy Award for Best Picture, but the 2022 Netflix production is the only one to be shot in German. Regeneration, Pat Barker In the end, Keegan maintains a very balanced approach that never tries to apportion blame for causing the war. One of the points that he makes is that the traditional distinction that most historians make—whereby, broadly, you have international historians talking about the causes of war and then military historians talking about what happens during the war—is a false one. You can’t actually explain the causes of the war without also looking at its conduct and how it is fought out. Nor can you understand the conduct without understanding the causes. And so he tries, if you like, to bridge the divide between peace and war. We can well understand why Hitler found it so hard to believe that it was conclusive and resorted to conspiracy theories soon. Sleepwalkers author Christopher Clark is a renowned researcher of German history. His biography of Kaiser Wilhelm II, Kaiser Wilhelm II: A Life in Power, helps us understand and explore the motivations of one of the Great War’s most controversial figures.

The political scene in Europe and the wider world was volatile in the 1900s and early 1910s. Ramifications from the 19 th century’s conflicts were still reverberating around Europe, creating a tense atmosphere. There had been a hundred years of freedom from destructive European land war. I mean, in 1870 the Prussians invaded France, but though that was interesting politically, it wasn’t so violent and destructive. So, fundamentally, having this absolutely catastrophically violent war crash onto the shores of a very peaceful society… I think that makes it resonate with us. It follows many famous real-life characters, including war poets Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and Robert Graves, exploring the Great War’s emotional impact on those who fought it.A good biography can really help you understand the personalities involved in prosecuting the Great War. As such, some of the best books on WW1 are biographies of its main actors. With a hundred years of perspective and lots of historical research done, can we now say what World War I was about?

Change is easier to effect if you go with the cultural grain of the organisation rather than cutting across it” War is a bit like other people’s marriages; it’s hard enough to understand even when you know all the facts. When you only know one side of the story, you have no chance.”Widely considered one of the finest analyses on WW1. You won’t find many quotes or first hand accounts of the soldiers here. But what you will find are excellent summaries and insights on the panoply of events that unfolded over the five years of the Great War. There is even a section – proportionately long, too – in which Keegan vigorously defends these men. He takes umbrage at the brilliant German tactician Max Hoffman’s conception of the British army as “lions led by donkeys.” Not true, Keegan insists. And in support of this argument, he lists the difficulties inherent in command, and makes increasingly facile and strident comparisons to the Napoleonic Wars and the American Civil War. After the Second World War, German historians fully accepted the charge of an aggressive war waged by Germany from 1939. Germans accepted the grotesque character of Hitler and his regime, but this acceptance stressed that Hitler was exceptional, an aberration, who in no way represented the general course of German history. This all changed in the 1960s with the historiographical shift caused by the work of Fritz Fischer. Fischer produced two ground-breaking books on German war aims and German planning for war that completely changed the debate on the origins of the 1914-1918 war. Fischer’s argument that Germany planned the war and desired control over continental Europe caused a huge uproar in Germany. If one accepted the aggressive intent in German foreign policy in 1914, it was but a small step to make the connection with the war launched in 1939. Maybe the Kaiser and Hitler were not that dissimilar. The contentious nature of Fischer’s views meant that his arguments soon spilled over into the TV and the media. Having dealt comprehensively and effectively with the Fischer debate, and shown just how immense was the impact of Fischer’s work, Mombauer then outlines the post-Fischer perspectives on the origins of the war. As Mombauer argues, this more recent work, informed by Fischer, provides a more nuanced examination of the origins of the war that moves away from simplistic notions of German guilt.

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