World War I: The Great War

"With over a million already dead, heroic American soldiers and nurses served in the closing battles of World War I. New mechanized weapons led to the bloodiest war of the 20th century."
PBS

The existence of the Schlieffen plan has been one of the basic assumptions of 20th-century military history. It was the perfect example of the evils of German militarism: aggressive, mechanical, and disdainful of both politics and of public morality. World War I began in August 1914 allegedly because the Schlieffen plan forced the German government to transform a Balkan quarrel into a World War by attacking France. In the end, the Schlieffen plan failed at the battle of the Marne. The Schlieffen plan has become ‘common knowledge’. Yet it has always been recognised that the Schlieffen plan included inconsistencies, which have never been satisfactorily explained. On the basis of newly discovered documents from German archives, this book presents a radically different picture of German war planning between 1871 and 1914, and concludes that, in fact, there never really was a ‘Schlieffen plan’.
Oxford Scholarship Online

In this Pulitzer Prize-winning history, Tuchman writes about the turning point of the year 1914--the month leading up to the war and the first month of the war. This was the last gasp of the Gilded Age, of Kings and Kaisers and Czars, of pointed or plumed hats, colored uniforms, and all the pomp and romance that went along with war. How quickly it all changed, and how horrible it became. Tuchman is masterful at portraying this abrupt change from 19th to 20th Century. And how she manages to make the story utterly suspenseful, when we already know the outcome, is the mark of a great writer, and a classic volume of history."
Doug Grad, editor, Ballantine Books

"Historian Herwig... draws primarily on German and Austro-Hungarian archival sources (many of which have become accessible only in the last decade) to analyze the surprising weaknesses and blundering of those two powers. Following an informative preface by series editor and historian Hew Strachan and an introduction by the author, Herwig presents a terse narrative of the war's course. Chapter notes and an extensive bibliography contain a large number of German and Austrian official sources, while black-and-white maps illustrate major battles and campaigns."
Library Journal

"he Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Nicholas and Alexandra returns with a sequel to Dreadnought that is imposing in both size and quality, taking the British and German battle fleets through WWI. The fluent narrative begins amid the diplomatic crisis of July 1914 and ends with the scuttling of the German High Seas Fleet at Scapa Flow in 1919. Massie makes a coherent if long narrative out of a sequence of events familiar to students of naval history but probably not to many other potential readers. The focus is on the two fleets that confronted each other across the North Sea, their weapons and tactics and their complex and controversial leaders, both military and political. As in his other books, the author describes his cast of characters with the vividness of a novelist, British Admiral Beatty's disastrous marriage being a painful case in point. What emerges from that focus is not only a number of outstanding battle narratives (Jutland is only the most famous), but a closely argued case for the German fleet having been a disaster for its country's war effort. Once built, the High Seas Fleet made war with England and the blockade of Germany inevitable. Unable to break the blockade with that expensive fleet, Germany felt compelled to choose between a negotiated peace and unrestricted submarine warfare. Once the Germans chose the latter course, American intervention and disaster become nearly unavoidable. It may seem odd to describe a book of this size as an "introduction," but readers will soon understand that the size of the topic requires a long narrative. "Castles of steel" was Winston Churchill's grand phrase for the Grand Fleet and its German counterpart, and this unusually fine military narrative lives up to it as well. "
Publisher's Weekly

"Hart is the current master of an approach to military history developed by Martin Middlebrook and Lyn Macdonald. Direct quotations from participants establish the face of battle, then combined with a narrative/analytical backdrop contextualizing the personal experiences. As oral historian of Britain's Imperial War Museum, Hart has unrivaled access to relevant sources. This book, published in Britain in 2005, is a masterful synthesis of the human and the operational aspects of a campaign that increasingly defines the British experience in the Great War. Hart vividly presents the runup to the Big Push expected to end the war; the disaster of July 1, 1916, when the British army suffered nearly 60,000 casualties; and the numbing months of attrition as British troops bled against the German defenses. Hart describes the horror as reflecting not the stupidity of individual generals and politicians but the determination of nations to resolve their differences by a war fought to the finish. The British army learned how to fight battles like the Somme, built around fire power. But its learning curve was slippery with blood. Hart honors the men who paid the price"
Publisher's Weekly