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Author: Tim Cook Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 0735235279 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 452
Book Description
There have been thousands of books on the Great War, but most have focused on commanders, battles, strategy, and tactics. Less attention has been paid to the daily lives of the combatants, how they endured the unimaginable conditions of industrial warfare: the rain of shells, bullets, and chemical agents. In The Secret History of Soldiers, Tim Cook, Canada's foremost military historian, examines how those who survived trench warfare on the Western Front found entertainment, solace, relief, and distraction from the relentless slaughter. These tales come from the soldiers themselves, mined from the letters, diaries, memoirs, and oral accounts of more than five hundred combatants. Rare examples of trench art, postcards, and even song sheets offer insight into a hidden society that was often irreverent, raunchy, and anti-authoritarian. Believing in supernatural stories was another way soldiers shielded themselves from the horror. While novels and poetry often depict the soldiers of the Great War as mere victims, this new history shows how the soldiers pushed back against the grim war, refusing to be broken in the mincing machine of the Western Front. The violence of war is always present, but Cook reveals the gallows humour the soldiers employed to get through it. Over the years, both writers and historians have overlooked this aspect of the men's lives. The fighting at the front was devastating, but behind the battle lines, another layer of life existed, one that included songs, skits, art, and soldier-produced newspapers. With his trademark narrative abilities and an unerring eye for the telling human detail, Cook has created another landmark history of Canadian military life as he reveals the secrets of how soldiers survived the carnage of the Western Front.
Author: Tim Cook Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 0735235279 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 452
Book Description
There have been thousands of books on the Great War, but most have focused on commanders, battles, strategy, and tactics. Less attention has been paid to the daily lives of the combatants, how they endured the unimaginable conditions of industrial warfare: the rain of shells, bullets, and chemical agents. In The Secret History of Soldiers, Tim Cook, Canada's foremost military historian, examines how those who survived trench warfare on the Western Front found entertainment, solace, relief, and distraction from the relentless slaughter. These tales come from the soldiers themselves, mined from the letters, diaries, memoirs, and oral accounts of more than five hundred combatants. Rare examples of trench art, postcards, and even song sheets offer insight into a hidden society that was often irreverent, raunchy, and anti-authoritarian. Believing in supernatural stories was another way soldiers shielded themselves from the horror. While novels and poetry often depict the soldiers of the Great War as mere victims, this new history shows how the soldiers pushed back against the grim war, refusing to be broken in the mincing machine of the Western Front. The violence of war is always present, but Cook reveals the gallows humour the soldiers employed to get through it. Over the years, both writers and historians have overlooked this aspect of the men's lives. The fighting at the front was devastating, but behind the battle lines, another layer of life existed, one that included songs, skits, art, and soldier-produced newspapers. With his trademark narrative abilities and an unerring eye for the telling human detail, Cook has created another landmark history of Canadian military life as he reveals the secrets of how soldiers survived the carnage of the Western Front.
Author: Derek Tait Publisher: Pen and Sword Military ISBN: 1473873142 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 38
Book Description
When news of the war broke out in 1914, nothing could prepare the citizens of Gloucester for the changes that would envelop their city over the next four years. The story of Gloucester in the First World War is both an interesting and intriguing one. The city played a key role in the deployment of troops to Northern Europe as well as supplying vital munitions. Local men responded keenly to recruitment drives and thousands of soldiers were billeted in the city before being sent off to fight the enemy overseas. The city also played a vital role caring for the many wounded soldiers who returned home from the front. The effect of the war on Gloucester was great. By the end of the conflict, there wasn't a family in Gloucester who hadn't lost a son, father, nephew, uncle or brother. There were tremendous celebrations in the streets as the end of the war was announced but the effects of the war lasted for years to come. This powerful account of a city that showed great courage and determination in a time of adversity ensures that Gloucester's people, who lived through the four intense years of conflict, are remembered for their immense contribution the war effort.
Author: John Sheen Publisher: Pen and Sword Military ISBN: 1036100006 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 498
Book Description
In answer to Lord Kitcheners appeal, in late August and September 1914 many men joined Alexandras Princess of Waless Own Yorkshire Regiment, better known as The Green Howards. Recruits came from around the Middlesbrough area and the ironstone mines on the North Yorkshire moors, while others came from the East Durham coalfield and the Durham City area. The 8th and 9th Battalions left the Regimental Depot in Richmond in late September and moved to Frensham on the Hampshire/Surrey border, where they trained hard until bad weather forced a move to barracks in Aldershot. They arrived on the Somme front at the end of June 1916, but were not involved in the fighting until 5 July, when the 9th Battalion captured Horseshoe trench and Lieutenant Donald Simpson Bell won the VC when he destroyed a German machine gun position. On 10 July both battalions took part in the capture of Contalmaison, a village that had been a first day objective. A second VC was awarded posthumously to Private William Short of the 8th Battalion during the fighting in Munster Alley in August 1916. The next year found the 23rd Division in the Ypres Salient, where they were in and out of the line until June 1917 when they took part in the Battle of Messines and the 8th Battalion had the honor of taking Hill 60. In November 1917 the division was sent to Italy to bolster the hard-pressed Italian Army, but the 9th Battalion returned to France in 1918 where they fought until the Armistice. The 8th Battalion stayed on in Italy and fought at the crossing of the Piave and Vittorio Veneto, which brought the war to an end in Italy.
Author: George Wilson Publisher: Ballantine Books ISBN: 0307775259 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 294
Book Description
"If you survive your first day, I'll promote you." So promised George Wilson's World War II commanding officer in the hedgerows of Normandy -- and it was to be a promise dramatically fulfilled. From July, 1944, to the closing days of the war, from the first penetration of the Siegfried Line to the Nazis' last desperate charge in the Battle of the Bulge, Wilson fought in the thickest of the action, helping take the small towns of northern France and Belgium building by building. Of all the men and officers who started out in Company F of the 4th Infantry Division with him, Wilson was the only one who finished. In the end, he felt not like a conqueror or a victor, but an exhausted survivor, left with nothing but his life -- and his emotions. If You Survive One of the great first-person accounts of the making of a combat veteran, in the last, most violent months of World War II.
Author: Adrian Gregory Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1107650860 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 355
Book Description
What was it that the British people believed they were fighting for in 1914–18? This compelling history of the British home front during the First World War offers an entirely new account of how British society understood and endured the war. Drawing on official archives, memoirs, diaries and letters, Adrian Gregory sheds new light on the public reaction to the war, examining the role of propaganda and rumour in fostering patriotism and hatred of the enemy. He shows the importance of the ethic of volunteerism and the rhetoric of sacrifice in debates over where the burdens of war should fall as well as the influence of religious ideas on wartime culture. As the war drew to a climax and tensions about the distribution of sacrifices threatened to tear society apart, he shows how victory and the processes of commemoration helped create a fiction of a society united in grief.
Author: Andrew Swift Publisher: Akeman Press ISBN: 9780954613839 Category : Bath (England) Languages : en Pages : 512
Book Description
Interweaving letters from men at the front with stories of life at home, this book describes the Great War's impact on the city of Bath. It is a story of grief, suffering and anger - but also features laughter. With minor variations, it could be the story of almost any town or city in the country at that time.
Author: Paul Fussell Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0199971978 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 433
Book Description
Winner of both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and named by the Modern Library one of the twentieth century's 100 Best Non-Fiction Books, Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory was universally acclaimed on publication in 1970. Today, Fussell's landmark study remains as original and gripping as ever: a literate, literary, and unapologetic account of the Great War, the war that changed a generation, ushered in the modern era, and revolutionized how we see the world. This brilliant work illuminates the trauma and tragedy of modern warfare in fresh, revelatory ways. Exploring the work of Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Edmund Blunden, David Jones, Isaac Rosenberg, and Wilfred Owen, Fussell supplies contexts, both actual and literary, for those writers who--with conspicuous imaginative and artistic meaning--most effectively memorialized World War I as an historical experience. Dispensing with literary theory and elevated rhetoric, Fussell grounds literary texts in the mud and trenches of World War I and shows how these poems, diaries, novels, and letters reflected the massive changes--in every area, including language itself--brought about by the cataclysm of the Great War. For generations of readers, this work has represented and embodied a model of accessible scholarship, huge ambition, hard-minded research, and haunting detail. Restored and updated, this new edition includes an introduction by historian Jay Winter that takes into account the legacy and literary career of Paul Fussell, who died in May 2012.
Author: J. Stuart Richards Publisher: McFarland ISBN: 1476635455 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 256
Book Description
"I guess you all are wondering where I am May. Well many miles away and settled at last and ready for some hard work. The sooner we get into it the quicker it is going to be over and all admit that it is up to America to finish the job and what I have been able to hear, they think it will be over in two or three months. Well the sooner the better now that we have come this far. Have sure traveled some and will have loads to tell you when I come home."--Lt. W. Ellsworth Gregory. Letters from soldiers to local newspapers during wartime had been popular since the Civil War, but World War I marked the end of this practice, as most letters were highly censored to keep the names of cities and landmarks from the public in an effort to keep any military intelligence from the enemy in World War I. This work is a collection of letters, stories, and oral histories of Pennsylvanians in World War I. The letters and stories compiled here were published in local newspapers, and now give readers a rare look at what their writers experienced in the trenches, in the air, on the sea, in the hospitals, and on the home front during the war.
Author: Ed Klekowski Publisher: McFarland ISBN: 0786492007 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 263
Book Description
Beginning with the novelist Edith Wharton, who toured the front in her Mercedes in 1915, this book describes the wartime experiences of American idealists (and a few rogues) on the Western Front and concludes with the doughboys' experiences under General Pershing. Americans were "over there" from the war's beginning in August 1914, and because America was neutral until April 1917, they saw the war from both the French and German lines. Since most of the Americans who served, regardless of which side they were on, were in Champagne and Lorraine, this sector is the focus. Excerpts from memoirs are supplemented by descriptions of personalities, places, battles and even equipment and weapons, thus placing these generally forgotten American adventurers into the context of their times. A special set of maps based upon German Army battle maps was drawn and rare photographs supplement the text.
Author: Tim Cook
Author: Tim Cook
Author: Derek Tait
Author: John Sheen
Author: George Wilson
Author: James Charles Risk
Author: Adrian Gregory
Author: Andrew Swift
Author: Paul Fussell
Author: J. Stuart Richards
Author: Ed Klekowski