Showing titles in World War I

In 1938, British statesman The Rt. Hon. Winston S. Churchill, a former military officer and member of the House of Commons, penned his Arms and the Covenant, published in the United States as While England Slept; a Survey of World Affairs, 1932–1938. The book is a powerful collection of his speeches warning that England was not at all prepared for the inevitability of war with Germany. While England Slept is published here in its original classic form with the preface and notes by Churchill’s son, Randolph S. Churchill.

A joint operation between Britain and France, the 1916 Battle of the Somme was an attempt to gain territory and dent Germany's military strength. By the end of the action, the Allied Forces had made just twelve kilometres. For this slight gain, more than a million lives were lost. In this classic military memoir, Staff Sergeant Sidney Rogerson vividly captures the last spell of frontline duty performed by the 2nd Battalion of the West Yorkshire Regiment.

A World on Edge is the story of the aftermath of World War I, a transformative time when a new world seemed possible—told from the vantage of people, famous and ordinary, who lived through the turmoil. November 1918. The Great War has left Europe in ruins, but with the end of hostilities, a...

Hans Schiller was a seventeen-year-old student in Bromberg, Prussia, when World War I broke out in August 1914. He enlisted in the German army and was assigned to an artillery unit on the Eastern Front. From 1915 to 1917, Schiller saw action in what is now Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. After the Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917 and Russia's withdrawal from the war, Schiller was transferred to the Western Front. He arrived in time for Germany's last great offensive in the west.

Only a man who had lived all his life in Suffolk could produce such a vivid and accurate portrayal of Akenfield and its inhabitants. Ronald Blythe recounts the personal recollections of, among others, the local school keeper, doctor, blacksmith, saddler, district nurse and magistrate as they discussed farming, education, welfare, class, religion and death. Originally published in 1969, Akenfield forms a unique document of a way of life that has, in many ways, disappeared.

Вильгельм II и российский монарх Николай II дружили семьями (немецкий кайзер приходился двоюродным братом супруге императора Александре Федоровне, их матери были родными сестрами), они ездили в гости и называли друг друга Вилли и Ники. Во время личных встреч любили устраивать костюмированные вечеринки, а еще их объединяло общее увлечение — коллекционирование военных мундиров. Как же случилось так, что недавние друзья стали вдруг заклятыми врагами, что стало истинной причиной начала Первой мировой войны и какие события привели к падению императорского дома Гогенцоллернов?

The Lost Cause and the Great War tells the stories of central Tennessee Progressive-era reformers to illustrate the fascinating broader issue of how Southerners steeped in Lost Cause Civil War mythologies simultaneously developed patriotic American fervor. Focusing on Luke Lea, a prominent politician and American army officer who attempted to capture Kaiser Wilhelm II during World War I, the book reveals the intricate interplay between three competing ideas: attachment to the memory of the Confederacy, intense American nationalism, and advocacy for progressive reforms.

The 95th Rifles - Wellington's sharpshooters - first into battle and last out. Acclaimed military writer Mark Urban explores the extraordinary story of these military pioneers; the toughest and deadliest infantrymen in Wellington's Army. Immortalised in Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe novels, the 95th...

The German Army lost two consecutive wars and the conclusion is often drawn that it simply wasn't able to cope with its opponents. This image is constantly reinforced in literature and in the media, where seemingly brainless operating German units led by fanatical officers predominate. Nothing...

When Tsar Nicholas II fell from power in 1917, Imperial Russia faced a series of overlapping crises, from war to social unrest. Though Nicholas's life is often described as tragic, it was not fate that doomed the Romanovs - it was poor leadership and a blinkered faith in autocracy. Definitive and engrossing, The Last Tsar uncovers how Nicholas II stumbled into revolution, taking his family, the Romanov dynasty, and the whole Russian Empire down with him.

The First World War saw the birth of an extraordinary fighting machine that has held an enduring fascination for over a century: the tank. In TANK MEN, ex-soldier and military historian Robert Kershaw brings to life the grime, the grease and the fury of a tank battle through the voices of ordinary men and women who lived and fought in those fearsome machines. Drawing on vivid personal testimony from the crucial battles of the First and Second World Wars, this is military history at its very best.

The extraordinary story of a headmaster turned cryptographer, and our top-secret war with the Kaiser's Reich. On 11 August 1914, just days after war had been declared, Australian Captain J.T. Richardson boarded a German merchant vessel fleeing Melbourne's Port Phillip and audaciously seized a...

In the spirit of Ben Macintyre’s greatest spy nonfiction, the truly unbelievable and untold story of Frederick Rutland—a debonair British WWI hero, flying ace, fixture of Los Angeles society, and friend of Golden Age Hollywood stars—who flipped to become a spy for Japan in the lead-up to...

A propulsive human drama that chronicles the mass exodus of Jews from Eastern Europe to America in the early years of the twentieth century, and the men who made it possible. Over thirty years, from 1890 to 1921, 2.5 million Jews, fleeing discrimination and violence in their homelands of Eastern...

The fascinating true story of the year 1910 when King Edward VII died, sending shockwaves through Britain. 'I could read Martin Williams all day. This book throws shafts of light on recent history almost repeating itself, giving vivid glimpses into monarchy and the way things were, and are...

Growing up in the Tennessee hills, Alvin York was equally renowned as a marksman and as a hard-drinking brawler. A dramatic New Year's conversion convinced him that killing was against God's will, and yet this shy, big-boned mountaineer single-handedly dispatched two dozen Germans and captured...

Sir Barnes Wallis CBE became a household name after the hit 1954 film The Dam Busters in which Michael Redgrave portrayed a shy, slightly abstracted genius at odds with bureaucracy. Yet this was a simplified picture of a complicated, mercurial man. Wallis' contribution to British aircrafts and weapons is legendary; from the R100 intercontinental airship and innovative aircrafts like the Wellesley and Wellington, to bombs that destroyed hitherto invulnerable targets, and variable-geometry aerodynes.

March, 1914. When talented artist Isobel embarks on a journey to Egypt, it's to reunite her best friend, Alice, with her husband, Wilfred—and to use the stunning sights of Cairo as inspiration for her own paintings. A whirlwind romance was the last thing she expected, but when Isobel meets Wilfred's handsome brother, Edward, neither can deny the strong connection between them—especially when unexpected tragedy strikes, leaving them all reeling. Just as they get to grips with their grief, WW1 erupts, and the lovers are forced to separate. 

Young Gavrilo Princip arrived at the Vlajnic pastry shop in Sarajevo in Bosnia-Herzegovina on the morning of 28th June 1914. He was greeted by his fellow conspirators in the plot to kill Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The archduke, next in line to succeed as emperor of Austria, was beginning a state visit to Sarajevo later that morning. Ferdinand was not a very popular character - widely thought of as bad-tempered and arrogant and perhaps even deranged. To the young students, he embodied everything they loathed about imperial oppression.  

The 1914-18 conflict narrated through the voices of the men whose combat was in the air. The empty chairs belonged, all too briefly, to the doomed young First World War airmen who failed to return from the terrifying daily aerial combats above the trenches of the Western Front. The edict of their commander in chief was the missing aviators were to be immediately replaced. Before the new faces could arrive, the departed men's vacant seats at the dinner table were sometimes poignantly occupied by their caps and boots, placed there in a sad ritual by their surviving colleagues.