WWI Overview
Image: A British government poster used during the First World War to promote the war effort - from Wikimedia Commons
War between the Central European Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and allies) on one side and the Triple Entente (Britain and the British Empire, France, and Russia) and their allies, including the USA (which entered in 1917), on the other side. World War I (1914-1918) has often been described as "the war to end all wars." Instead, it was the harbinger of a completely new type of warfare in which technological advances enabled belligerents to kill or injure vast numbers of soldiers and civilians and to destroy cities with greater efficiency By the end of the war in November 1918, tens of millions of people were dead for no clear purpose. Rather than ending all future warfare, the dissatisfaction that grew out of peace treaty negotiations led in great part to the outbreak of World War II in 1939.
Gale World History in Context
Selected Books
World War I by
The First World War has shaped the history of the twentieth century. It was the first conflict in which aeroplanes, submarines, and tanks played a significant role, the first in which casualties on the battlefield outnumbered those from disease. It precipitated the collapse of the empires ofAustria-Hungary and Turkey, and it promoted revolution in that of Russia. The USA's entry into the war and the part it played in the peace settlement signalled the arrival on the world stage of a new great power. The victors at Versailles took nationalism as one of their guiding principles; theyalso aimed at instituting their vision of liberalism and even democracy; the political consequences are still being played out. In this extensively illustrated book, an international team of experts explores the war in all its different aspects. From its causes to its consequences, from the Western Front to the Eastern, from the strategy of the politicians to the tactics of the generals, the course of the war is charted andits political and human consequences assessed. Chapters on economic mobilization, the impact on women, the role of propaganda, and the rise of socialism establish the wider social context of fighting which took place at sea and in the air and which ranged on land from the Flanders trenches to theBalkan mountains and the deserts of the Middle East. While the war was fought on many fronts and in many different ways, the unifying experience of participants was that of the trenches. The legacy of `the war to end wars' -- in poetry and prose, in collective memory and political culture -- is with us still, eighty years after that first ArmisticeDay.
Call Number: D521.W64 1998ISBN: 0198206143
World War I : the African front by
The definitive history of World War I's forgotten front: Britain versus Germany in East Africa to secure the belly of a continent. On August 7, 1914, Britain fired its first shots of World War I not in Europe but in the German colony of Togo. The campaign to eliminate the threat at sea posed by German naval bases in Africa would soon be won, but in the land war, especially in East Africa, British troops would meet far fiercer resistance from German colonial forces that had fully mastered the tactics of bush warfare. It was expected to be a "small war," over by Christmas, yet it would continue bloodily for more than four years, even beyond the signing of the Armistice in Europe. Its costs were immense, its butchery staggering (in excess of100,000 British troops and 45,000 native recruits dead). Utmost among the tragic consequences, though, was the waste laid to the land and its indigenous peoples in what one official historian described as "a war of extermination and attrition without parallel in modern times." Imperialism had gone calamitously amok. This eye-opening account of the Great War in East Africa does not flinch at the daily horrors of an ill-fated campaignnot just the combat but also a hostile climate, disease, the terrible lonelinessnor does it fail to recount tales of extraordinary courage and the kind of adventure that inspired fiction like C. S. Forester'sThe African Queen, William Boyd'sAn Ice-Cream War, and Wilbur Smith'sShout at the Devil. In all, it demonstrates dramatically why even the most hardened of Great War soldiers preferred the trenches of France to the trauma of East Africa.
Call Number: D576.G3 P35 2008ISBN: 1933648902
Dividing Ireland : World War I and the partition by
This book provides an original assessment of the First World War in Ireland and its consequences, the key to understanding the complexities of the Irish nation today. Thomas Hennessey explores how the War transformed the nature of the Irish and Ulster questions from devolved self-government within the UK to a free Irish republic outside the British Empire, considering such influential figures as de Valera and Michael Collins, and issues such as conscription. He examines both this process of re-evaluation, and the vital question of the consequences for Northern Ireland today.
Call Number: DA962 .H46 1998ISBN: 0415174201
The Myth of the Great War by
This challenging and controversial analysis of the war on the Western Front from 1914 to 1918 reveals how and why the Germans consistently defeated the French and the British with one-half to one-third fewer casualties than the Allies, and how American troops in 1918 saved the Allies from defeat and a negotiated peace with the Germans. Based on a decade of research into previously unused French and German sources, The Myth of the Great War shows what actually happened at the front as the participants perceived it at the time, as opposed to what French and British commanders and governments claimed. John Mosier, who visited all the major battlefields, describes and analyzes campaigns that are routinely neglected or ignored and shows why conventional accounts of such major battles as Verdun are incorrect. He explains how German tactics, weapons, training, and leadership were consistently superior, and why the endless, ineffective attacks of the French and British with inferior weapons and battle tactics of the previous century resulted in mindless slaughter and defeat. Mosier also discusses the major military leaders on both sides ' including Joffre, Petain, Foch, Gallieni, French, Haig, Wilson, Moltke, Ludendorff, Falkenhayn, Mudra, and Pershing. The French and British military controlled, suppressed, and manipulated all battlefield reports. German losses were magnified; failures became successes, defeats victories. Allied intelligence was grossly inaccurate and inadequate, and the result was a distorted picture of what was really happening. Absorbing and persuasive, The Myth of the Great War is a striking new assessment of the military realities of World War I.
Call Number: D521.M86 2001ISBN: 0060196769
The Sleepwalkers : how Europe went to war in 1914 by
Drawing on new scholarship, Clark offers a fresh look at World War I, focusing not on the battles and atrocities of the war itself, but on the complex events and relationships that led a group of well-meaning leaders into brutal conflict. Clark traces the paths to war in a minute-by-minute, action-packed narrative that cuts between the key decision centers in Vienna, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Paris, London, and Belgrade, and examines the decades of history that informed the events of 1914 and details the mutual misunderstandings and unintended signals that drove the crisis forward in a few short weeks. Meticulously researched and masterfully written, Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers is a dramatic and authoritative chronicle of Europe's descent into a war that tore the world apart.
Call Number: D511.C54 2013ISBN: 9780061146657
