Combat Over the Trenches

Combat Over the Trenches

Author: Chris Clarke

Publisher: Casemate Publishers

Published: 2017-10-30

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 1526715031

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'Father of the Flying Corps' and 'Father of Australian Aviation' were two of the unofficial titles conferred on Oswald ("Toby") Watt when he died in tragic circumstances shortly after the end of the First World War. He had become the Australian Army's first qualified pilot in 1911, but spent the first 18 months of the war with the French Air Service, the Aronautique Militaire, before arranging a transfer to the Australian Imperial Force. Already an experienced combat pilot, he rose quickly through the ranks of the Australian Flying Corps, becoming a squadron leader and leading his unit at the battle of Cambrai, then commander of No 1 Training Wing with the senior AFC rank of lieutenant colonel.These were elements in a colorful and at times a romantic career long existing interest and attention - not just during Watt's lifetime but in the interval since his death nearly a century ago. His name had been rarely out of Australian newspapers for more than a decade before the war, reflecting his wealthy lifestyle and extensive and influential social and political connections. But this focus has enveloped Watt's story with an array of false and misleading elements verging on mythology. For the first time, this book attempts to establish the true story of Watt's life and achievements, and provide a proper basis for evaluating his place in Australian history.


In the Trenches

In the Trenches

Author: Tatiana L. Dubinskaya

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2020-03-01

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 164012196X

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Tatiana L. Dubinskaya’s autobiographical novel of life in the Russian army marked the first major work published by a female World War I soldier in the Soviet Union. Often compared to All Quiet on the Western Front, Dubinskaya’s stark and unsparing story presents a rare look at women in combat and one of the few works of fiction set on the eastern front. Zinaida, a Russian schoolgirl, runs away from home to join the army. Sent to the front, she endures the horrors of trench warfare and the hardships of military life. Undercurrents of revolutionary thinking filter into the ranks as morale begins to crumble. Zinaida must come to grips with the havoc unleashed by the czar’s overthrow and the new socialist government’s attempts to impose revolutionary reforms on the army. Destabilization and desertion follow, and her regiment joins the chaotic mass retreat of the Russian army in the summer of 1917. In addition to Dubinskaya’s original novel, this edition includes selections from her 1936 autobiographical work, Machine Gunner, which she rewrote to satisfy Stalinist censors.


Eye-Deep in Hell

Eye-Deep in Hell

Author: John Ellis

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 1989-09

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 9780801839474

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A detailed reconstruction of life and death in the trenches of World War I, describing the construction and physical and spiritual environment of the trenches and the soldiers' daily routine.


The Russian Origins of the First World War

The Russian Origins of the First World War

Author: Sean McMeekin

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2013-05-06

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 0674072332

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The catastrophe of the First World War, and the destruction, revolution, and enduring hostilities it wrought, make the issue of its origins a perennial puzzle. Since World War II, Germany has been viewed as the primary culprit. Now, in a major reinterpretation of the conflict, Sean McMeekin rejects the standard notions of the war’s beginning as either a Germano-Austrian preemptive strike or a “tragedy of miscalculation.” Instead, he proposes that the key to the outbreak of violence lies in St. Petersburg. It was Russian statesmen who unleashed the war through conscious policy decisions based on imperial ambitions in the Near East. Unlike their civilian counterparts in Berlin, who would have preferred to localize the Austro-Serbian conflict, Russian leaders desired a more general war so long as British participation was assured. The war of 1914 was launched at a propitious moment for harnessing the might of Britain and France to neutralize the German threat to Russia’s goal: partitioning the Ottoman Empire to ensure control of the Straits between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Nearly a century has passed since the guns fell silent on the western front. But in the lands of the former Ottoman Empire, World War I smolders still. Sunnis and Shiites, Arabs and Jews, and other regional antagonists continue fighting over the last scraps of the Ottoman inheritance. As we seek to make sense of these conflicts, McMeekin’s powerful exposé of Russia’s aims in the First World War will illuminate our understanding of the twentieth century.


Churchill in the Trenches

Churchill in the Trenches

Author: Peter Apps

Publisher:

Published: 2015-10-12

Total Pages: 138

ISBN-13: 9781517752439

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November 1915: disgraced and stripped of high office, Winston Churchill heads to the trenches to fight.A quarter of a century before his "finest hour" in 1940, Britain's future Prime Minister faced a very different kind of crisis. As First Lord of the Admiralty at the start of the First World War, he found himself blamed for the catastrophic military fiasco of the Dardanelles. Thrown for the first time into the political wilderness, he decided to rejoin the British Army and take his place on the Western Front.The first standalone account of this period of his life published since the 1920s, CHURCHILL IN THE TRENCHES reconstructs his six months near the Belgian town of Ypres. It reveals he how he gradually won over the troops he commanded -- the tough but traumatised 6th Battalion, Royal Scots Fusiliers. And it tells the largely unknown story of how amid mud and squalor, one of the 20th century's most memorable characters became one of its greatest leaders.


First Over There

First Over There

Author: Matthew J. Davenport

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2015-05-12

Total Pages: 381

ISBN-13: 1250056446

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The riveting true story of America's first modern military battle, its first military victory during World War One, and its first steps onto the world stage At first light on Tuesday, May 28th, 1918, waves of American riflemen from the U.S. Army's 1st Division climbed from their trenches, charged across the shell-scarred French dirt of no-man's-land, and captured the hilltop village of Cantigny from the grip of the German Army. Those who survived the enemy machine-gun fire and hand-to-hand fighting held on for the next two days and nights in shallow foxholes under the sting of mustard gas and crushing steel of artillery fire. Thirteen months after the United States entered World War I, these 3,500 soldiers became the first "doughboys" to enter the fight. The operation, the first American attack ever supported by tanks, airplanes, and modern artillery, was ordered by the leader of America's forces in Europe, General John "Black Jack" Pershing, and planned by a young staff officer, Lieutenant Colonel George C. Marshall, who would fill the lead role in World War II twenty-six years later. Drawing on the letters, diaries, and reports by the men themselves, Matthew J. Davenport's First Over There tells the inspiring, untold story of these soldiers and their journey to victory on the Western Front in the Battle of Cantigny. The first American battle of the "war to end all wars" would mark not only its first victory abroad, but the birth of its modern Army.


Trench Warfare

Trench Warfare

Author: Bob Carruthers

Publisher: Casemate Publishers

Published: 2015-07-30

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 1526714140

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This powerful collection, depicting the grim events of trench warfare, showcases the work of the contemporary combat artists and illustrators from the Great War era. Included here are the works of serious artists, propagandists, illustrators and humorists. The result is a stunning and vivid graphic record of life and death in the trenches during the Great War, as reported to contemporary audiences at a time when the events of the Great War were still unfolding. During the Great War artists and illustrators produced a highly accurate visual record of the fleeting moments the bulky cameras couldnt reproduce. These works form a body ofwar reportage that are as valid as the written word. Today, the work of the combat illustrators and the official war artists from the Great War era is overlooked by historians in favor of photographs, but these illustrations are nonetheless important, as they provide a contemporary record of hand-to-hand fighting, trench raids, aerial dogfights, sea battles, desperate last stands, night actions and cavalry charges.


Enduring the Great War

Enduring the Great War

Author: Alexander Watson

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2008-04-17

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 1139867253

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This book is an innovative comparative history of how German and British soldiers endured the horror of the First World War. Unlike existing literature, which emphasises the strength of societies or military institutions, this study argues that at the heart of armies' robustness lay natural human resilience. Drawing widely on contemporary letters and diaries of British and German soldiers, psychiatric reports and official documentation, and interpreting these sources with modern psychological research, this unique account provides fresh insights into the soldiers' fears, motivations and coping mechanisms. It explains why the British outlasted their opponents by examining and comparing the motives for fighting, the effectiveness with which armies and societies supported men and the combatants' morale throughout the conflict on both sides. Finally it challenges the consensus on the war's end, arguing that not a 'covert strike' but rather an 'ordered surrender' led by junior officers brought about Germany's defeat in 1918.


The Trenches

The Trenches

Author: Dorothy Hoobler

Publisher: Putnam Publishing Group

Published: 1978-01-01

Total Pages: 191

ISBN-13: 9780399206405

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Describes the combat experiences of English, French and German soldiers on the Western Front during the Great War.


It was the War of the Trenches

It was the War of the Trenches

Author: Jacques Tardi

Publisher:

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 118

ISBN-13: 9781606993538

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The experiences of World War I from the perspectives of soldiers on the battle field and their families at home.