Armies of the Great War: The American Army and the First World War
The Journal of Military History review declared this “a well-researched and nicely written volume for the ‘Armies of the Great War’ series.” It went on to say “One of the major strengths of this work is the careful integration of the context in which the American Army is roughly jerked out of its wary complacency….” […]
Germany’s Western Front: Translations from the German Official History of the Great War
This multi-volume series in six (perhaps seven) parts is the first English-language translation of Der Weltkrieg, the German official history of the First World War. It was originally produced between 1925 and 1944 using classified archival records that were destroyed by aerial bombing in April 1945 at the end of the Second World […]
Letters From the Boys: Wisconsin World War I Soldiers Write Home
A collection of letters published in newspapers starting in 1917. Despite opposition to the war in Wisconsin, only 2 percent of eligible young men failed to register for the draft. Men from Wisconsin and Michigan formed the 32nd Division, a National Guard unit that was the sixth division to arrive in France. Seven thousand of […]
The Great War Comes to Wisconsin: Sacrifice, Patriotism, and Free Speech in a Time of Crisis
Political support for the war was weak in the Midwest in general and nowhere more so than in Wisconsin. Dubbed “The Traitor State,” its Senator Robert LaFollette became the voice and face of opposition to the war. But many Wisconsin residents served in the 32nd Division, “Les Terribles,” that fought from 30 July to 20 […]
Unheard Voices, Untold Stories
An interesting collection of documents and interviews with family members of deceased WW1 veterans. The author’s volunteer work at the National World War I Museum in Kansas City both inspired her and provided access to archives and artifacts to help assemble these two books. Stories cover 35 categories including New Immigrants, American […]
Admiral Frank H. Schofield: A Portrait in Letters of An American Navy Family (1886-1942)
The Naval Historical Foundation declared MacAlpine’s book “amazing….” using 12,000 letters plus other documents to tell Schofield’s story. Graduating first in the Naval Academy Class of 1890, by 1915 Schofield commanded the Navy’s first scout cruiser Chester in the Mediterranean, dealing with the Turks during the Armenian troubles. In 1917 he was on Admiral William […]
Hunters and Killers, Volume 1: Anti-Submarine Warfare from 1776 to 1943
Part of a two volume history of Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW), this covers the innovative but rudimentary sensors and weapons the Allies used to counter German U-boats in the Atlantic and Mediterranean, although the U-boats were never completely defeated in the Great War. In August 1914 Germany had only 30 operational submarines compared to Britain’s 75, […]
America’s Sailors in the Great War: Seas, Skies, and Submarines
Rose presents both the big picture of the U.S. Navy’s role in the war as well as anecdotes of the individual sailors. It’s expansion after the Spanish-American War left the Navy as America’s best-prepared force in 1917… building destroyers, sub chasers, and mine layers to counter the submarine threat… only three troop ships were lost […]
The Yanks Are Starving: A Novel of the Bonus Army
Glen Craney is an award-winning novelist, screenwriter, and journalist. He is a Chaucer Awards First-Place Winner, a two-time indie BRAG Medallion Honoree, and a three-time Foreword Reviews Book-of-the-Year-Award Finalist. Craney’s research for this book included the Daughters of the Texas Republic Library, the UCLA Special Collections Library, and the Raymond H. Fogler Library. Fans of […]
The Wilson Deception
Constitutional lawyer David Stewart writes history books about America’s early republic, but his novels touch on other eras. This is a mystery/spy thriller that takes place in Paris during the 1919 Versailles Treaty negotiations. Dr. Jamie Fraser, middle-aged American Expeditionary Force medical officer, is assessing his troubled family life back in the States as he […]
National Flowers: The Battle of Verdun 1916
WW1HA member Kermit Mercer has found a unique way to understand the war with his novel about Verdun based on conversations with World War One poilu (French soldiers). Mercer lived in the Verdun area while serving with the USAF. He got to know many of the veterans when they were in their early 60s and […]
The Kaiser’s American
This is the story of a Brooklyn man of German descent and his adventures in Belgium in the opening campaign of World War One. It presents an entertaining, almost unbelievable, series of events in compelling detail. Klekowski has written other non-fiction books, including Americans in Occupied Belgium, 1914-1918, and created several TV documentaries, including one […]
The Wide World Trilogy
Kirkus Reviews enthused that the Edgar Award-winning best-selling author Robert Goddard’s James Maxted Thrillers are “A sophisticated spy story with serious historical […]
Treacherous Passage: Germany’s Secret Plot Against the United States in Mexico During World War I
The infamous Zimmerman telegram proposed a military alliance between Germany and Mexico if the USA entered the Great War. The secret diplomatic communication sent by the German Foreign Office was intercepted, deciphered, and revealed to the American public by British intelligence and caused a furor in 1917. What was not then publicly known was how […]
The Sunken Gold: A Story of World War I Espionage and the Greatest Treasure Salvage in History
The Sunken Gold is the story of how 43 tons of England’s gold was sunk off the coast of Ireland en route to the United States and later was mostly recovered by the British. The salvage, which took a number of years, was conducted by a small group of divers working in harsh conditions without […]
The Baltimore Sabotage Cell: German Agents, American Traitors, and the U-Boat Deutschland During World War I
The book’s focus on U-Boat Deutschland makes it easy to understand the experimental vessel and keep track of the groups connected with it. Deutschland was one of two subs designed as underwater freighters to avoid the British blockade. The other, the Bremen, was lost at sea on its initial voyage. Support of the U-Boat was […]
Spy of the Century Alfred Redl & the Betrayal of Austro-Hungary
A New York Times review provided an irresistible description of this book’s topic: “The Redl Affair had everything: sex, espionage, betrayal, a fall from greatness and a sensational climax in which Redl went to his death like a figure of high tragedy.” Alfred Redl was an Austro-Hungarian army officer and former head of the Empire’s […]
I Was a Spy! The Classic Account of Behind-the-Lines Espionage in the First World War
The author and her family were overrun in Belgium at the outbreak of the war. Instead of completing her medical studies to become a physician, Marthe became a nurse in a hospital run by the Germans. She also fed information to the British who had set up an underground network as they retreated. Marthe proved […]
Verdun: Looking at History
Verdun: Looking at History Directed by Léon Poirier Kino Lorber Home Video, 2016 151 minutes, in B&W with color extras DVD, $21.00 Léon Poirier’s silent classic, Verdun, Visions d’histoire, cast veterans as actors and extras in 1927-28, providing the most realistic view of the battle possible since 1916. Poirier filmed outdoors, unusual for the 1920s, […]
Real Stories of Love and Loss: 14 War Stories
Real Stories of Love and Loss: 14 War Stories Directed by Jan Peter BBC America, 2014 430 minutes, in color and B&W Standard Edition DVD, $29.98 14 War Stories deftly presents a human perspective on the First World War that is simultaneously wide-ranging and personal. The title is a pun in that it dramatizes the […]
The WI: A Centennial History
The Women’s Institute is the story of women helping women. The WI is a hybrid of a Canadian organization conceived by Adelaide Hoodless and an urbane British group founded by suffragist, Mrs. Nora Wynford Phillips. Both groups wanted to help women improve themselves and the lives of their families. Mrs. Hoodless was inspired by the […]
Holding the Home Front: The Women’s Land Army in the First World War
This is a well-researched history of the British Women’s Land Army in WW1 and how it paved the way for the success of the WLA in the Second World War. Unlike the United States that set up agricultural colleges after the American Civil War, Great Britain lacked a unified approach to agriculture until World War […]
Bicycles, Bloomers and Great War Rationing Recipes: The Life and Times of Dorothy Peel OBE
Dorothy Peel was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1918 by the Ministry of Food to recognize her creation of wartime recipes for householders. Peel’s great granddaughter wrote this book after finding Granny Dot’s cookery book on an attic shelf. Straker assembled more than 150 pages of recipes supported by color photographs and […]
All Quiet on the Home Front: An Oral History of Life in Britain During The First World War
This reviewer has read a number of histories of the home fronts of Britain, the U.S., and France, and this oral history is by far the most fascinating. Authors van Emden and Humphries conducted about a hundred interviews from the late 1990s until the early 2000s with people who had grown up in Britain during […]
The First World War on Cigarette and Trade Cards: An Illustrated and Descriptive History
This impressive volume is the product of thirty years of cartophilic collecting by the author, in the category of warfare and the Great War specifically. Some cards with WW1 subjects were published after the war, but the vast majority of the cards in the book were published during the war as inserts in packs of […]
Charles Edward Dilkes, Remembering World War One: An Engineer’s Diary of the War
This memoir of a volunteer engineer covers Dilkes’s enlistment, journey to France, and the battles in which he was involved while serving in the 1st Division from May 1917 to September 1919. It is an invaluable source of information on what life was like for an American soldier on the Western Front. It is well […]
Rags: Hero Dog of WWI, A True Story
Mascots were some of the most beloved members of military units during World War 1. A statue of the German shepherd who served with the Marines in France is on proud display at the Marine Corps University in Quantico, Virginia. This book for children is the story of Rags, a mangy stray rescued from the […]
The Life and Times of a World War I Soldier: The Julius Holthaus Story
An affectionate work about an ancestor by a U.S. Army veteran who found the spot in the Argonne forest where Julius Holthaus’ body was recovered and then wrote a story about him using Holthaus’ diary and extensive research. The amount of detail is impressive, including notes about the German 76th Reserve Division that fought against […]
A Bigger Field Awaits Us: The Scottish Football Team That Fought the Great War
Tells the story of eleven Scottish football players and their fans who volunteered for the 16th Royal Scots Battalion in November 1914. Seven months later the battalion lost 80 percent of its 800-plus men during the nearly-five-month-long Battle of the Somme. In May 1918 the battalion was disbanded to provide its 400 soldiers as replacements […]
Written in Blood: The Battles for Fortress Przemysl in WWI
Winner of the 2016 Tomlinson Prize Award A series of battles to capture and relieve the besieged Habsburg Fortress of Przemyl during the fall of 1914 and early 1915 was bloodier than Verdun. By the time the fortress finally fell to the Russians on 22 March 1915, the Austro-Hungarian Army had sustained 800,000 casualties; the […]
With Their Bare Hands: General Pershing, the 79th Division, and the Battle for Montfaucon
Gene Fax earned well-deserved praise for this very detailed presentation of the U.S. 79th Division’s famous assault on the heavily fortified German position on Montfaucon at the start of the 1918 Meuse-Argonne offensive. Although concentrating on this one engagement, Fax uses half the book to explain the background of this seemingly impregnable location, America’s entry […]
Verdun: The Lost History of the Most Important Battle of World War I, 1914-1918
John Mosier is controversial, even reviled by some historians. His other works include The Myth of the Great War and The Blitzkrieg Myth, which exemplify his approach. The review in The Journal of Military History by Robert A. Doughty noted that Mosier “charges military leaders such as Joseph Joffre and Ferdinand Foch with incompetence, ignorance, […]
Verdun: The Left Bank
This is the author’s fourth book in Pen and Sword’s Battleground Europe series covering the Battle of Verdun in 1916. Although there is a short 2-page section at the beginning called “Advice to Tourers,” it is not meant to be a battlefield guide. The book includes a plethora of historical and modern black & white […]
Verdun: The Longest Battle of the Great War
Winner of the 2014 Tomlinson Prize Award This new look at arguably the most famous battle on the Western Front earned well-deserved praise. It mixes traditional military history with social and cultural history that considers the soldiers’ experiences, the institutional structures of the military, and the impact of war on national identity. The review in […]
The Somme: The Epic Battle in the Soldiers’ own Words and Photographs
This is a wonderful book, filled with new or rarely-before-seen sepia-tinted photographs, many from the soldiers’ own private collections. These images are linked to appropriate text such as these observations on the first day by Rifleman Giles Eyre of the 2nd Kings Rifle Corps: “We are now scrambling over what must have been the British […]
The 1916 Battle of the Somme: Reconsidered
Twenty-four years prior to the release of this book, historian Peter Liddle’s “classic” The Soldier’s War, 1914-1918 introduced readers to the four-and-a-half month Battle of the Somme. Here “Liddle reconsiders the battle in the light of recent scholarship” although without using even one German source or citing even one German unit in the index. His […]
A Companion to the Meuse-Argonne Campaign
This impressive work contains essays by 29 historians on a variety of aspects pertaining to the largest and bloodiest battle in U.S. Army history until the Battle of the Bulge in World War Two. As B. H. Allen wrote in the Academia.edu Literature Review of the book, the battle “is barely even mentioned in most […]
Images of War: Rare Photographs From Wartime Archives
The photo albums in the Images of War series each contain up to 250 black and white archival photographs. The Somme photographs are accompanied by text written by Official War Correspondent Sir Philip Gibbs, who was an eyewitness to the events. Some of his captions are questionable. For example, on page 42 there is […]
Forty-Seven Days: How Pershing’s Warriors Came of Age to Defeat the German Army in World War I
This is a skillful re-telling of the Meuse-Argonne battle, focusing on the key American leaders and heroes and select events during the 47 days of the offensive. This is followed with an “Aftermath” chapter that contains concise post-WW1 biographies of many of the main characters, including their WW2 experiences. The book is largely told from […]
Blood on the Snow: The Carpathian Winter War of 1915
Winner of the 2010 Tomlinson Prize Award This is the first book-length account of the Carpathian campaign of 1915, described by some as the “Stalingrad of the First World War.” It was also the first English-language account of WW1 Eastern Front military operations in more than 30 years. Tunstall did research in Vienna’s and Budapest’s […]