Three Armies in Britain
Three Armies in Britain

Author: Douglas Biggs

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2024-01-22

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 9047410033

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This work reexamines the political and military aspects of the Revolution of 1399 that removed Richard II and placed Henry of Lancaster on the English throne. It argues that Henry of Lancaster was not the "all conquering" hero of 1399 but was rather the leader of a coalition of disaffected noblemen who had old scores to settle with Richard II. It also proposes that Richard II was not an incompetent king whose personality disorder(s) and/or tyrannical behavior brought about his fall. Rather, it argues that the king was in no worse a political position in 1399 than in 1387 or even 1381. As on the previous two great crises of the reign, the king forwent a military option of dealing with his opponents and decided to let the issues of 1399 play themselves out on the field of politics. Both in 1381 and 1387 this tactic had proven effective and there was nothing to suggest in 1399 that it would not be so again.

Three Armies on the Somme
Three Armies on the Somme

Author: William Philpott

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2010-10-05

Total Pages: 657

ISBN-13: 030759372X

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For decades, the Battle of the Somme has exemplified the horrors and futility of trench warfare. Yet in Three Armies on the Somme, William Philpott makes a convincing argument that the battle ultimately gave the British and French forces on the Western Front the knowledge and experience to bring World War I to a victorious end. It was the most brutal fight in a war that scarred generations. Infantrymen lined up opposite massed artillery and machine guns. Chlorine gas filled the air. The dead and dying littered the shattered earth of no man’s land. Survivors were rattled with shell-shock. We remember the shedding of so much young blood and condemn the generals who sent their men to their deaths. Ever since, the Somme has been seen as a waste: even as the war continued, respected leaders—Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George among them—judged the battle a pointless one. While previous histories have documented the missteps of British command, no account has fully recognized the fact that allied generals were witnessing the spontaneous evolution of warfare even as they sent their troops “over the top.” With his keen insight and vast knowledge of military strategy, Philpott shows that twentieth-century war as we know it simply didn’t exist before the Battle of the Somme: new technologies like the armored tank made their battlefield debut, while developments in communications lagged behind commanders’ needs. Attrition emerged as the only means of defeating industrialized belligerents that were mobilizing all their resources for war. At the Somme, the allied armies acquired the necessary lessons of modern warfare, without which they could never have prevailed. An exciting, indispensable work of military history that challenges our received ideas about the Battle of the Somme, and about the very nature of war.

Borrowed Soldiers
Borrowed Soldiers

Author: Mitchell A. Yockelson

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2016-01-18

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 0806155604

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The combined British Expeditionary Force and American II Corps successfully pierced the Hindenburg Line during the Hundred Days Campaign of World War I, an offensive that hastened the war’s end. Yet despite the importance of this effort, the training and operation of II Corps has received scant attention from historians. Mitchell A. Yockelson delivers a comprehensive study of the first time American and British soldiers fought together as a coalition force—more than twenty years before D-Day. He follows the two divisions that constituted II Corps, the 27th and 30th, from the training camps of South Carolina to the bloody battlefields of Europe. Despite cultural differences, General Pershing’s misgivings, and the contrast between American eagerness and British exhaustion, the untested Yanks benefited from the experience of battle-toughened Tommies. Their combined forces contributed much to the Allied victory. Yockelson plumbs new archival sources, including letters and diaries of American, Australian, and British soldiers to examine how two forces of differing organization and attitude merged command relationships and operations. Emphasizing tactical cooperation and training, he details II Corps’ performance in Flanders during the Ypres-Lys offensive, the assault on the Hindenburg Line, and the decisive battle of the Selle. Featuring thirty-nine evocative photographs and nine maps, this account shows how the British and American military relationship evolved both strategically and politically. A case study of coalition warfare, Borrowed Soldiers adds significantly to our understanding of the Great War.

The British Army and the First World War
The British Army and the First World War

Author: Ian Beckett

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-05-25

Total Pages: 485

ISBN-13: 1107005779

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A comprehensive new history of the shaping and performance of the British army during the First World War.

Battle Tactics of the Western Front
Battle Tactics of the Western Front

Author: Paddy Griffith

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 1994-05-25

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0300160615

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Historians have portrayed British participation in World War I as a series of tragic debacles, with lines of men mown down by machine guns, with untried new military technology, and incompetent generals who threw their troops into improvised and unsuccessful attacks. In this book a renowned military historian studies the evolution of British infantry tactics during the war and challenges this interpretation, showing that while the British army's plans and technologies failed persistently during the improvised first half of the war, the army gradually improved its technique, technology, and, eventually, its' self-assurance. By the time of its successful sustained offensive in the fall of 1918, says Paddy Griffith, the British army was demonstrating a battlefield skill and mobility that would rarely be surpassed even during World War II. Evaluating the great gap that exists between theory and practice, between textbook and bullet-swept mudfield, Griffith argues that many battles were carefully planned to exploit advanced tactics and to avoid casualties, but that breakthrough was simply impossible under the conditions of the time. According to Griffith, the British were already masters of "storm troop tactics" by the end of 1916, and in several important respects were further ahead than the Germans would be even in 1918. In fields such as the timing and orchestration of all-arms assaults, predicted artillery fire, "Commando-style" trench raiding, the use of light machine guns, or the barrage fire of heavy machine guns, the British led the world. Although British generals were not military geniuses, says Griffith, they should at least be credited for effectively inventing much of the twentieth-century's art of war.