The O.T.C. and the Great War
Author : Alan Roderick Haig-Brown
Publisher :
Page : 306 pages
File Size : 19,94 MB
Release : 1915
Category : Military education
ISBN :
The British Army and the First World War
Author : Ian Beckett
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 485 pages
File Size : 19,36 MB
Release : 2017-05-15
Category : History
ISBN : 1316824543
Book Description
This is a major new history of the British army during the Great War written by three leading military historians. Ian Beckett, Timothy Bowman and Mark Connelly survey operations on the Western Front and throughout the rest of the world as well as the army's social history, pre-war and wartime planning and strategy, the maintenance of discipline and morale and the lasting legacy of the First World War on the army's development. They assess the strengths and weaknesses of the army between 1914 and 1918, engaging with key debates around the adequacy of British generalship and whether or not there was a significant 'learning curve' in terms of the development of operational art during the course of the war. Their findings show how, despite limitations of initiative and innovation amongst the high command, the British army did succeed in developing the effective combined arms warfare necessary for victory in 1918.
Public Schools and The Great War
Author : Anthony Seldon
Publisher : Pen and Sword
Page : 353 pages
File Size : 37,16 MB
Release : 2013-10-30
Category : History
ISBN : 1781593086
Book Description
In this pioneering and original book, Anthony Seldon and David Walsh study the impact that the public schools had on the conduct of the Great War, and vice versa. Drawing on fresh evidence from 200 leading public schools and other archives, they challenge the conventional wisdom that it was the public school ethos that caused needless suffering on the Western Front and elsewhere. They distinguish between the younger front-line officers with recent school experience and the older 'top brass' whose mental outlook was shaped more by military background than by memories of school.??The Authors argue that, in general, the young officers' public school education imbued them with idealism, stoicism and a sense of service. While this helped them care selflessly for the men under their command in conditions of extreme danger, it resulted in their death rate being nearly twice the national average.??This poignant and thought-provoking work covers not just those who made the final sacrifice, but also those who returned, and?whose lives were shattered as a result of their physical and psychological wounds. It contains a wealth of unpublished detail about public school life before and during the War, and how these establishments and the country at large coped with the devastating loss of so many of the brightest and best. Seldon and Walsh conclude that, 100 years on, public school values and character training, far from being concepts to be mocked, remain relevant and that the present generation would benefit from studying them and the example of their predecessors.??Those who read Public Schools and the Great War will have their prevailing assumptions about the role and image of public schools, as popularised in Blackadder, challenged and perhaps changed.
British Infantry Battalion Commanders in the First World War
Author : Peter E. Hodgkinson
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 265 pages
File Size : 23,87 MB
Release : 2016-04-15
Category : History
ISBN : 1317171918
Book Description
Recent studies of the British Army during the First World War have fundamentally overturned historical understandings of its strategy and tactics, yet the chain of command that linked the upper echelons of GHQ to the soldiers in the trenches remains poorly understood. In order to reconnect the lines of communication between the General Staff and the front line, this book examines the British army’s commanders at battalion level, via four key questions: (i) How and where resources were found from the small officer corps of 1914 to cope with the requirement for commanding officers (COs) in the expanding army; (ii) What was the quality of the men who rose to command; (iii) Beyond simple overall quality, exactly what qualities were perceived as making an effective CO; and (iv) To what extent a meritocracy developed in the British army by the Armistice. Based upon a prosopographical analysis of a database over 4,000 officers who commanded infantry battalions during the war, the book tackles one of the central historiographical issues pertaining to the war: the qualities of the senior British officer. In so doing it challenges lingering popular conceptions of callous incompetence, as well more scholarly criticism that has derided the senior British officer, but has done so without a data-driven perspective. Through his thorough statistical analysis Dr Peter Hodgkinson adds a valuable new perspective to the historical debate underway regarding the nature of British officers during the extraordinary expansion of the Army between 1914 and 1918, and the remarkable, yet often forgotten, British victories of The Hundred Days.
Books on the Great War
Author : Frederick William Theodor Lange
Publisher :
Page : 218 pages
File Size : 31,34 MB
Release : 1916
Category : European war, 1914-
ISBN :
Book Description
Wisden on the Great War
Author : Andrew Renshaw
Publisher : A&C Black
Page : 541 pages
File Size : 36,10 MB
Release : 2014-08-12
Category : Sports & Recreation
ISBN : 1408832356
Book Description
A lasting memorial to those from the cricketing world who fought and those who fell.
Veteran MPs and Conservative Politics in the Aftermath of the Great War
Author : Richard Carr
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 245 pages
File Size : 28,43 MB
Release : 2016-03-03
Category : History
ISBN : 1317002415
Book Description
Between 1918 and 1939, 448 men who performed uniformed service in the First World War became Conservative MPs. This relatively high-profile cohort have been under-explored as a distinct body, yet a study of their experiences of the war and the ways in which they - and the Conservative Party - represented those experiences to the voting public reveals much about the political culture of Interwar Britain and the use of the Great War as political capital. Radicalised ex-servicemen have, thus far, been considered a rather continental phenomenon historiographically. And whilst attitudes to Hitler and Mussolini form part of this analysis, the study also explores why there were fewer such types in Britain. The Conservative Party, it will be shown, played a crucial part in such a process - with British politics serving as a contested space for survivors' interpretations of what the war should mean.
Sport, Militarism and the Great War
Author : Thierry Terret
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 467 pages
File Size : 24,81 MB
Release : 2013-09-13
Category : Sports & Recreation
ISBN : 1135760950
Book Description
The Great War has been largely ignored by historians of sport. However sport was an integral part of cultural conditioning into both physiological and psychological military efficiency in the decades leading up to it. It is time to acknowledge that the Great War also had an influence on sport in post-war European culture. Both are neglected topics. Sport, Militarism and the Great War deals with four significant aspects of the relationship between sport and war before, during and immediately after the 1914-1918 conflict. First, it explores the creation and consolidation of the cult of martial heroism and chivalric self-sacrifice in the pre-war era. Second, it examines the consequences of the mingling of soldiers from various nations on later sport. Third, it considers the role of the Great War in the transformation of the leisure of the masses. Finally, it examines the links between war, sport and male socialisation. The Great War contributed to a redefinition of European masculinity in the post-war period. The part sport played in this redefinition receives attention. Sport, Militarism and the Great War is in two parts: the Continental (Part I) and the "Anglo-Saxon" (Part II). No study has adopted this bilateral approach to date. Thus, in conception and execution, it is original. With its originality of content and the approaching centenary of the advent of the Great War in 2014, it is anticipated that the book will capture a wide audience. This book was originally published as a special issue of The International Journal of the History of Sport.
Tolkien and the Great War
Author : John Garth
Publisher : HMH
Page : 419 pages
File Size : 46,92 MB
Release : 2013-06-11
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0544263723
Book Description
How the First World War influenced the author of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy: “Very much the best book about J.R.R. Tolkien that has yet been written.” —A. N. Wilson As Europe plunged into World War I, J. R. R. Tolkien was a student at Oxford and part of a cohort of literary-minded friends who had wide-ranging conversations in their Tea Club and Barrovian Society. After finishing his degree, Tolkien experienced the horrors of the Great War as a signal officer in the Battle of the Somme, where two of those school friends died. All the while, he was hard at work on an original mythology that would become the basis of his literary masterpiece, the Lord of the Rings trilogy. In this biographical study, drawn in part from Tolkien’s personal wartime papers, John Garth traces the development of the author’s work during this critical period. He shows how the deaths of two comrades compelled Tolkien to pursue the dream they had shared, and argues that the young man used his imagination not to escape from reality—but to transform the cataclysm of his generation. While Tolkien’s contemporaries surrendered to disillusionment, he kept enchantment alive, reshaping an entire literary tradition into a form that resonates to this day. “Garth’s fine study should have a major audience among serious students of Tolkien.” —Publishers Weekly “A highly intelligent book . . . Garth displays impressive skills both as researcher and writer.” —Max Hastings, author of The Secret War “Somewhere, I think, Tolkien is nodding in appreciation.” —San Jose Mercury News “A labour of love in which journalist Garth combines a newsman’s nose for a good story with a scholar’s scrupulous attention to detail . . . Brilliantly argued.” —Daily Mail (UK) “Gripping from start to finish and offers important new insights.” —Library Journal “Insight into how a writer turned academia into art, how deeply friendship supports and wounds us, and how the death and disillusionment that characterized World War I inspired Tolkien’s lush saga.” —Detroit Free Press
Mr. Punch's History of the Great War
Author : Charles Larcom Graves
Publisher : London : Cassell
Page : 354 pages
File Size : 17,67 MB
Release : 1920
Category : English wit and humor, Pictorial
ISBN :
Book Description
A series of exerpts from Punch Magazine articles about World War I. Reprinted in the United States by Frederick Stokes.
