Showing titles in World War I

World War I, also known in its time as the "Great War" or the "War to End all Wars", was an unprecedented bloodbath in terms of its sheer scale.

During American participation in World War I, many events caught the public’s attention, but none so much as the plight of the Lost Battalion. Comprising some 500 men of the 77th Division, the so-called battalion was entrapped on the side of a ravine in the Argonne Forest by German forces from October 2 to 7, 1918. Now, in Five Days in October, historian Robert H. Ferrell presents new material - previously unavailable - about what really happened during those days in the forest.

How the US Army developed historical programs since World War I―sending combat historians into the fray to interview soldiers and collect documents for the benefit of history.

Conflit sans précédent dans l'histoire par son échelle, le nombre de ses morts et l'ampleur des destructions matérielles, la Première Guerre mondiale (1914-1918) est déclenchée par l'assassinat de l'archiduc François-Ferdinand à Sarajevo le 28 juin 1914. En France, la mobilisation générale est décrétée le 2 août 1914. S'ensuivent quatre années d'une guerre de position, dite "guerre des tranchées", dont le front s'étend en Europe sur près de 700 kilomètres. Conflit d'un genre nouveau puisqu'il marque également les débuts de la guerre aérienne, l'emploi des chars et des gaz, il se solde par plus de 9 millions de morts et des pays dévastés.

Forever England explores Rupert Brooke’s life, from schooldays to the Great War, and in so doing builds a remarkable picture of a long-lost England and a generation’s descent into war. Brooke’s poems emerge dramatically from a tangled web of love, friendship, mental illness and politics. He reveals also the existence of a previously unrecorded love child from a South Seas romance. The WW1 legend was largely brought about by the words of one of his sonnets: "If I should die, think only this of me/That there’s some corner of a foreign field that is forever England".

The enduring image of World War I is of men stuck in muddy trenches, and of vast armies deadlocked in a fight neither could win. It was a war of barbed wire, poison gas, and horrific losses as officers led their troops on mass charges across No Man's Land and into a hail of bullets. While these impressions are all too true, they hide the fact that trench warfare was dynamic and constantly evolving throughout the war as all armies struggled to find a way to break through the opposing lines.

Famously referred to by US president Woodrow Wilson as "the war to end all wars", the First World War eclipsed all previous wars with its scale of destruction. With over 27 nations involved, the battle-field horrors and political outcomes of the first truly global military conflict had repercussions that are still felt today. NPR presents a vivid portrait of what most experts consider the first modern war, including profiles of America’s flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker, unlikely savior of war-torn Belgium Herbert Hoover, and the last surviving doughboy Frank Buckles.

The First World War was fought over a century ago, its pursuit by the European powers utterly reckless and ending with great consequential misfortune for humanity. Four generations later, the "Great War" has been forgotten by most Americans. The European and Commonwealth nations staged elaborate and moving commemorations during the centennial years of 2014 to 2018 to remember the shared sacrifices and enormity of the war. The general lack of such events in the United States marked the stark difference between how Americans and their allies looked back on that calamity.

El Imperio Otomano se alió con Alemania y Austria-Hungría en la Primera Guerra Mundial. Esto resultó, entre otras consecuencias catastróficas, en la guerra que duró dos años más de lo que debería, las dos revoluciones rusas de 1917 y la dictadura bolchevique, el genocidio del pueblo armenio, quince millones de muertos y el desmembramiento del Imperio Otomano, con el nacimiento de una miríada de nuevos Estados en Oriente Medio cuya inestabilidad social, económica y política sigue sin resolverse un siglo después.

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Jeremy Paxman's Great Britain's Great War. Read by the actor Roy McMillan, this magnificent history of the First World War tells the story of the war in one gripping narrative from the point of view of the British people. We may think we know about it, but what was life really like for the British people during the First World War?

A brief record of the fighting on the Eastern front in the great war, by an Austrian Officer in that great and terrible conflict.

The year 1917 was a year of decisive events. Germany raised the stakes at sea; America eventually declared war; the Nivelle offensive almost destroyed the French army; and, following two revolutions in February and October, Russian forces collapsed. For the Allies, despite their successes at Messines and Cambrai, the year was overshadowed by the losses at Passchendaele. Survivors recall their despair as men and horses drowned in mud: 'a viscous, tenacious mud which smelt of death'.

This story has been written in response to a demand for some account of the very generally misunderstood submarine campaign and, particularly, of the means by which it was defeated. While opinions may differ to a certain extent as to the influence exerted upon the campaign by the various forms of tactics, the means and weapons employed, and the general strategy adopted, I have given what I believe to be a consensus of the best-informed opinion upon these matters; I have taken advantage of all of the information now available to ensure accuracy in the account.

Sound interesting? The author thinks so too! Listen to Las Guerras Mundiales and learn about the two World Wars.

War has always led to prisoners. In ancient times, many were turned into slaves by the victorious armies, while in medieval Europe, they were often returned to their families in return for a ransom, leading to fortune or poverty depending upon which side one was on. By the Napoleonic era, as armies grew in size and professionalism, many were kept in camps for the duration of the fighting, their captors not wanting to restore their enemies' manpower while the fate of nations hung in the balance.

FNH Audio presents an unabridged reading of Green Balls: The Adventures of a Night Bomber. Paul Bewsher was one of the founding members of an experimental unit of Night Bombers during World War One. Never before had an attempt been made to create a unit of specialist bombing aircraft that would operate at night over enemy territory. It was a new experience and new techniques had to be developed to carry out the missions.

However, there is much more to World War I than Franz Ferdinand’s assassination and the clash of the Entente and Central Powers. It was a conflict deeply rooted in hateful rivalries of the world’s most powerful states, and came as a somewhat logical conclusion to the endless balancing and political maneuvering of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And it would change the course of history forever.

They Called Them Soldier Boys offers an in-depth study of soldiers of the Texas National Guard's Seventh Texas Infantry Regiment in World War I, through their recruitment, training, journey to France, combat, and their return home. Gregory W. Ball focuses on the 14 counties in North, Northwest, and West Texas where officers recruited the regiment's soldiers in the summer of 1917, and how those counties compared with the rest of the state in terms of political, social, and economic attitudes.

In Blood on the Snow, Robert Service returns to the subject that has formed the backbone of his long and distinguished career: the Russian Revolution. For Service, the great unanswered question is how to reconcile the two vital narratives that underpin the extraordinary but troubled events of 1917. One puts the blame squarely on Tsar Nicholas II and on Alexander Kerensky’s provisional government that deposed him. The other is the view from the bottom, that of the workers and peasants who wanted democratic socialism, not the Bolshevik dictatorship imposed by Lenin and his successors.

The Gallipoli letter is an 8000-word private report written by journalist Keith Arthur Murdoch, with the help of British war correspondent Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, after visiting the Gallipoli peninsula in September 1915. It describes the organization and conditions of the Gallipoli campaign. It was sent to Andrew Fisher (then-Prime Minister of Australia) and Henry Herbert Asquith (then-Prime Minister of the UK). Murdoch’s twenty-eight-page letter helped to establish the idea of Gallipoli as a military disaster.