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Author: Elizabeth Greenhalgh
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2014-11-13
Total Pages: 487
ISBN-13: 110701235X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA major new account of the role and performance of the French army in the First World War.
Author: Bruno Cabanes
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2016-08-23
Total Pages: 210
ISBN-13: 030022494X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA renowned military historian closely examines the first month of World War I in France. On August 1, 1914, war erupted into the lives of millions of families across France. Most people thought the conflict would last just a few weeks . . . Yet before the month was out, twenty-seven thousand French soldiers died on the single day of August 22 alone—the worst catastrophe in French military history. Refugees streamed into France as the German army advanced, spreading rumors that amplified still more the ordeal of war. Citizens of enemy countries who were living in France were viciously scapegoated. Drawing from diaries, personal correspondence, police reports, and government archives, Bruno Cabanes renders an intimate, narrative-driven study of the first weeks of World War I in France. Told from the perspective of ordinary women and men caught in the flood of mobilization, this revealing book deepens our understanding of the traumatic impact of war on soldiers and civilians alike. “An exceptional book, a brilliant, moving, and insightful analysis of national mobilization.” —Martha Hanna, author of Your Death Would Be Mine: Paul and Marie Pireaud in the Great War “This book deserves a wide readership from historians, critics and anyone interested in the catastrophe of war.” —Mary Louise Roberts, Distinguished Lucie Aubrac and Plaenert-Bascom Professor of History, University of Wisconsin, Madison “The sounds, sights and emotions of August, 1914 are all evoked with exceptional skill.” —David A. Bell, author of The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It
Author: Laurent Mirouze
Publisher:
Published: 2007
Total Pages:
ISBN-13: 9783902526090
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe first volume represents a snapshot of the army on 2 August 1914, before all the developments forced on it by the war. The second volume deal with the great changes precipitated by the flying corps and the special artillery with its first tanks.
Author: Michael Goya
Publisher: Casemate Publishers
Published: 2018-10-30
Total Pages: 369
ISBN-13: 1473886988
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe noted military historian presents an illuminating study of trench warfare during WWI—and how it influenced the French Army’s evolution. Michel Goya’s Flesh and Steel during the Great War is a major contribution to our understanding of the French Army’s experience on the Western Front, and how that experience impacted the future of its military theory and practice. Goya explores the way in which the senior commanders and ordinary soldiers responded to the extraordinary challenges posed by the mass industrial warfare of the early twentieth century. In 1914 the French army went to war with a flawed doctrine, brightly-colored uniforms and a dire shortage of modern, heavy artillery. How then, over four years of relentless, attritional warfare, did it become the great, industrialized army that emerged victorious in 1918? To show how this change occurred, the author examines the pre-war ethos and organization of the army. He describes in telling detail how, through a process of analysis and innovation, the French army underwent the deepest and fastest transformation in its history.
Author: Holger Afflerbach
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Published: 2015-07-01
Total Pages: 244
ISBN-13: 3110435993
DOWNLOAD EBOOKNearly fourteen million people died during the First World War. But why, and for what reason? Already many contemporaries saw the Great War as a "pointless carnage" (Pope Benedict XV, 1917). Was there a point, at least in the eyes of the political and military decision makers? How did they justify the losses, and why did they not try to end the war earlier? In this volume twelve international specialists analyses and compares the hopes and expectations of the political and military leaders of the main belligerent countries and of their respective societies. It shows that the war aims adopted during the First World War were not, for the most part, the cause of the conflict, but a reaction to it, an attempt to give the tragedy a purpose - even if the consequence was to oblige the belligerents to go on fighting until victory. The volume tries to explain why - and for what - the contemporaries thought that they had to fight the Great War.
Author: Jean Jacques Becker
Publisher: Berg Publishers
Published: 1985
Total Pages: 360
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA well-known authority in the field provides a wide-ranging exploration of the repercussions of the First World War upon the French people.
Author: Louis Barthas
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2014-03-28
Total Pages: 729
ISBN-13: 030020695X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK“An exceptionally vivid memoir of a French soldier’s experience of the First World War.”—Max Hastings, New York Times bestselling author Along with millions of other Frenchmen, Louis Barthas, a thirty-five-year-old barrelmaker from a small wine-growing town, was conscripted to fight the Germans in the opening days of World War I. Corporal Barthas spent the next four years in near-ceaseless combat, wherever the French army fought its fiercest battles: Artois, Flanders, Champagne, Verdun, the Somme, the Argonne. First published in France in 1978, this excellent new translation brings Barthas’ wartime writings to English-language readers for the first time. His notebooks and letters represent the quintessential memoir of a “poilu,” or “hairy one,” as the untidy, unshaven French infantryman of the fighting trenches was familiarly known. Upon Barthas’ return home in 1919, he painstakingly transcribed his day-to-day writings into nineteen notebooks, preserving not only his own story but also the larger story of the unnumbered soldiers who never returned. Recounting bloody battles and endless exhaustion, the deaths of comrades, the infuriating incompetence and tyranny of his own officers, Barthas also describes spontaneous acts of camaraderie between French poilus and their German foes in trenches just a few paces apart. An eloquent witness and keen observer, Barthas takes his readers directly into the heart of the Great War. “This is clearly one of the most readable and indispensable accounts of the death of the glory of war.”—The Daily Beast (“Hot Reads”)
Author: Richard S. Fogarty
Publisher: JHU Press
Published: 2008-08-15
Total Pages: 399
ISBN-13: 0801888247
DOWNLOAD EBOOKReservoirs of men -- Race and the deployment of troupes indigènes -- Hierarchies of rank, hierarchies of race -- Race and language in the army -- Religion and the "problem" of Islam in the French army -- Race, sex, and imperial anxieties -- Between subjects and citizens
Author: David Murphy
Publisher: Casemate Publishers
Published: 2015-10-30
Total Pages: 190
ISBN-13: 1473872928
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis historical analysis of the ill-fated Franco-British operation reveals how it nearly spelled defeat for the Triple Entente in WWI. In December of 1916, General Robert Nivelle was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the French armies fighting the Germans on the Western Front. A national hero, he had enjoyed a meteoric rise to high command and public acclaim since the beginning of the Great War. In return, he proclaimed he 'had the formula' that would ensure victory and end the conflict in 1917. But his offensive was a bloody and humiliating failure for France, one that could have opened the way for French defeat. Historian David Murphy presents a penetrating, in-depth analysis of The Nivelle Offensive, demonstrating why it failed and underscoring its importance in the course of the First World War. Murphy describes how the charismatic officer used his charm and intelligence to win the support of French and British politicians, but also how his vanity and braggadocio displayed no sense of operational security. By the opening of the campaign, his plan was an open secret and he had lost the ability to critically assess the operation as it developed. The result was disaster.
Author: Ian Sumner
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2018-01-30
Total Pages: 254
ISBN-13: 1526701812
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe French air force of the First World War developed as fast as the British and German air forces, yet its history, and the enormous contribution it made to the eventual French victory, is often forgotten. So Ian Sumner's photographic history, which features almost 200 images, most of which have not been published before, is a fascinating and timely introduction to the subject. The fighter pilots, who usually dominate perceptions of the war in the air, play a leading role in the story, in particular the French aces, the small group of outstanding airmen whose exploits captured the publics imagination. Their fame, though, tends to distract attention from the ordinary unremembered airmen who formed the body of the air force throughout the war years. Ian Sumner tells their story too, as well as describing in a sequence of memorable photographs the less well-known branches of the service the bomber and reconnaissance pilots and the variety of primitive warplanes they flew.
