Showing titles in World War I

The Somme offensive was intended to achieve a decisive victory for the British and French Allies over the Germans, yet the Allies failed to achieve all of their objectives and the war was to continue for another two years. More than a million men from both sides became casualties in the long and bitter struggle on the Somme in 1916. This audiobook tells this story through the unique collections of IWM.

IWM was founded on 5th March 1917 when the War Cabinet approved a proposal by Sir Alfred Mond MP for the creation of a national war museum to record the events still taking place during the First World War. The intention was to collect and display material as a record of everyone's experiences during the war - civilian and military - and to commemorate the sacrifices of all sections of society.The First World War Retold tells the story of that war from a fresh perspective from IWM's unparalleled collections.

The scale and nature of the First World War, and the manner in which the dead were treated, created conditions in which a very particular language of grief and remembrance of the war dead flourished. A Century of Remembrance explores the deeply personal ways in which people mourned their loved ones, and memorialised them, and examines the cornerstones of national-scale remembrance that took hold in Britain throughout the 1920s, from the poppy to the cenotaph.

The First World War was the defining event of the last century. It claimed the lives of more than 16 million people across the globe and had an enormous impact on all who experienced it. No nation in Europe was left untouched and even neutral states felt its devastating impact. Yet it was the ordinary men and women who were affected the most. This gripping, revealing and poignant collection of stories tells the First World War from the perspective of those who were there, using letters, diaries and memoirs from Imperial War Museum's unparalleled archives.

Eine Jugend in Deutschland, voller Hoffnung und voller Enttäuschung: Als Freiwilliger zieht Ernst Toller begeistert in den Ersten Weltkrieg und kehrt, für kriegsuntauglich erklärt, als bekennender Pazifist zurück. In München schlägt er sich im November 1918 auf die Seite der Revolution, wird zum Anführer der Räterepublik und erlebt deren tragisches Scheitern. Er wird geächtet, festgenommen und zu fünf Jahren Festungshaft verurteilt. Als er im Juli 1924 das Gefängnis verlässt, ist Ernst Toller eine internationale Berühmtheit.

This book tells the stories of the Muslims, Christians, Jews and others who made a courageous stand against the mass slaughter of Ottoman Armenians in 1915, the first modern genocide. Foreigners and Ottomans alike ran considerable risks to bear witness and rescue victims, sometimes sacrificing their lives. Diplomats, humanitarians, missionaries, lawyers and other visitors to the Empire stood up, including Tolstoy's daughter, Alexandra; Raphael Lemkin, the jurist who first established genocide as an international crime; and the polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen.

From the twentieth century onward, women took on an extraordinary range of roles in intelligence, defying the conventions of their time. Across both world wars, far from being a small part of covert operations, women ran spy networks and escape lines, parachuted behind enemy lines, and interrogated prisoners. And, back in Bletchley and Whitehall, women's vital administrative work in MI offices kept the British war engine running. In this major, panoramic history, Helen Fry looks at the rich and varied work women undertook as civilians and in uniform.

Hard Aground brings together three intertwined stories documenting the US Navy's strategic and materiel evolution from the end of Civil War through the First World War. The first story focuses on the reconstruction of the US Navy following the swift and near-total dismantling of the Union Navy infrastructure after the Civil War. Jampoler argues that the federal government discovered that the fleet requested by the navy, and paid for by Congress, was the wrong fleet.

Livre de circonstance, rédigé par le Maréchal Pétain pour son entrée à l’Académie Française. Philippe Pétain fut nommé au commandement des troupes de Verdun le 26 février 1916 à la suite de l’importante attaque allemande sur ce front. Cette dernière voulait "saigner " l’armée française. Il dut, en peu de temps, réorganiser entièrement le dispositif de défense et d’approvisionnement des troupes, bien moins nombreuses et équipées de leurs adversaires.

Weihnachten an der Westfront 1914: Inmitten eines erbarmungslosen Stellungskrieges schließen deutsche, französische und britische Soldaten spontan Waffenstillstand auf Ehrenwort. Im Niemandsland feiern sie zusammen Weihnachten.

Brought up in rural North Wales, David Lloyd George attended neither a grand school nor ancient university. He was very much an outsider. And yet he rose through the ranks with charisma, fierce intelligence and fighting spirit to become, as Churchill put it in his tribute, a man who ‘stood, when at his zenith, without a rival’. But his rise was not without its hardships.

Im Ersten Weltkrieg waren von Herbst 1914 bis Sommer 1918 die Kämpfe an der Westfront von Materialschlachten und Grabenkämpfen bisher nicht gekannten Ausmaßes geprägt. Kein Angriff erfolgte, ohne vorher das gegnerische Stellungssystem mit größtem Artillerieeinsatz zu bearbeiten. Auf der Seite der Verteidiger genügten meist wenige Maschinengewehre, um auch stärkste Angriffe zum Stehen zu bringen. Über Jahre hinaus konnte keine der Kriegsparteien entscheidende Vorteile erringen. Ende Juni 1916 begannen die Briten an der Somme eine Offensive, nachdem auf den deutschen Stellungen ein siebentägiges Trommelfeuer gelegen hatte.

The Gas and Flame Men explores how these famous baseball men, along with an eclectic mix of polo players, collegiate baseball and football stars, professors, architects, and prominent social figures all came together in the Chemical Warfare Service. Jim Leeke examines their service and its long-term effects on their physical and mental health-and on Major League Baseball and the world of sports.

On the evening of June 27, 1918, the Llandovery Castle—an unarmed, clearly marked hospital ship used by the Canadian military—was torpedoed off the Irish Coast by U-Boat 86, a German submarine. Sinking hospital ships violated international law. To conceal his actions, the U-86 commander had the submarine deck guns fire on survivors. One lifeboat escaped with witnesses to the atrocity. Global outrage over the attack ensued.

Sent to France with the Royal Flying Corps at just 17, and later a member of the famous 56 Squadron, Cecil Lewis was an illustrious and passionate fighter pilot of the First World War, described by Bernard Shaw in 1935 as 'a thinker, a master of words, and a bit of a poet'. In this vivid and spirited account the author evocatively sets his love of the skies and flying against his bitter experience of the horrors of war. We then follow his progress from France and the battlefields of the Somme to his pioneering defence of London against deadly nighttime raids.

Philippe Pétain est un sujet historique qui dépasse le personnage. Jean-Yves Le Naour, historien en spécialiste de la Première Guerre mondiale et du XXe siècle, nous présente ici la biographie du maréchal Pétain mais aussi une histoire du pétainisme. L’historien se penche sur le mythe Pétain forgé durant la Première Guerre mondiale, en tant que vainqueur de Verdun, l’enracinement du mythe durant l’Entre-deux guerres, pour aboutir au chef de l’État vénéré sous Vichy, de 1940 à 1944, quand le maréchal se pose en protecteur des Français tout en collaborant activement avec l’occupant.

In WWI the terror of German submarines was completely justified. This invisible menace was a constant threat to allied shipping able to strike anywhere day or night. Thus was conceived the grand mine barrage, an outsized idea for a growing problem. The fence in the menace by laying a barrage of anti-submarine mines right across the North Sea, requiring the manufacturing of mines in unprecedented numbers to be laid by ships that didn’t even exist.

Friedrich Reck might seem an unlikely rebel against Nazism. Not just a conservative but a rock-ribbed reactionary, he played the part of a landed gentleman, deplored democracy, and rejected the modern world outright. To Reck, the Nazis were ruthless revolutionaries in Gothic drag, and helpless as he was to counter the spell they had cast on the German people, he felt compelled to record the corruptions of their rule.

Terence Loveridge offers a unique look at the land and air operations around the strategic village of Monchy-le-Preux at the center of the western front during World War I. The story of the Great War is usually one of condemnation or rehabilitation of strategists and consecration of the common soldier, while the story of those who planned, directed, and led operations on the ground has generally been overlooked.

"Good-Bye to All That: An Autobiography" by Robert Graves is a seminal work that vividly captures the harrowing experiences of a young British officer during World War I.