by John Keegan
ARMED FORCES
There is a rich literature on the armed forces of the First World War, particularly on the British army. Among the best are: P. Simkins, Kitchener’s Army, Manchester, 1986, a scholarly labour of love on the war’s largest volunteer army; and I. Beckett and K. Simpson, A Nation in Arms, Manchester, 1985. Good books on the French army include D. Porch, The March to the Marne, Cambridge, 1981; L. Smith, Between Mutiny and Obedience, Princeton, N.J., 1994; and R. Challener, The French Theory of the Nation in Arms, New York, 1955. E. Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen, London, 1977, has illuminating passages on the acceptance of conscription by rural France before the war. G. Pedroncini, Les mutineries de 1917, Paris, 1967, is still definitive. B. Menning, Bayonets Before Bullets: The Imperial Russian Army, 1861-1914, Bloomington, 1994, is outstanding and is complemented by A. Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, Princeton, N.J., 1980. G. Rothenburg, The Army of Franz Joseph, West Lafayette, Ind., 1976, is the best book in English on the Austro-Hungarians but J. Lucas, Fighting Troops of the Austro-Hungarian Army, Speldhurst, Eng., 1987, is packed with useful detail. There is still no good book in English on the German army. A Millett and W. Williamson’s Military Effectiveness, I, Boston, 1988, has excellent chapters on national armies. J. Gooch, Army, State and Society in Italy, 1870–1915, New York, 1989, is excellent, and D. Omissi, The Sepoy and the Raj, London, 1994, on the Indian Army, is outstanding. Nothing comprehensive has yet been written in English on the Ottoman army of 1914–18.
There are several excellent studies of the German navy, including J. Steinberg, Yesterday’s Deterrent, London, 1965, and H. Herwig, Luxury Fleet, London, 1980, and The German Naval Officer Corps, Oxford, 1973. On the Royal Navy, A. Marder, From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow, 5 vols, London, 1961–70, remains the classic authority. M. Vego, Austro-Hungarian Naval Policy 1904–14, London, 1996, is interesting on the preliminaries to the Austro-Italian naval war in the Adriatic.
The technical literature of air fighting is considerable but there are few books of worth on air forces. An interesting study is D. Winter, The First of the Few: Fighter Pilots of the First World War, London, 1982.
BATTLES AND CAMPAIGNS
An early and now largely forgotten campaign history remains invaluable on the subject: S. Tyng, The Campaign of the Marne, Oxford, 1935. The best book on the contemporaneous battle in the east is D. Showalter, Tannenberg, Hamden, Conn., 1991. N. Stone, The Eastern Front 1914–17, New York, 1975, is indispensable. Important books on battles on the Western Front are: E. Spears, Liaison 1914: A Narrative of the Great Retreat and Prelude to Victory, London, 1939, on the Nivelle offensive; M. Middlebrook, The First Day on the Somme, London, 1971, and The Kaiser’s Battle, London, 1978, on the opening of the German offensives of 1918; A. Horne, The Price of Victory, London, 1962, a classic account of Verdun; A. McKee, Vimy Ridge, London, 1962; and L. Wolff, In Flanders Fields, London, 1958, an impassioned account of Passchendaele. C. Falls, Caporetto, London, 1966, and A. Palmer, The Gardeners of Salonika, London, 1965, are the best studies of the Italian and Macedonian fronts in English. Gallipoli has produced an enormous literature, often of high quality. Good general books are: R. Rhodes James, Gallipoli, London, 1965; G. Cassar, The French and the Dardanelles, London, 1971; and A. Moorehead, Gallipoli, London, 1956, dated but highly readable. Useful books on the outer theatres of war are C. Falls, Armageddon 1918, London, 1964 (Palestine); A. Barker, The Neglected War: Mesopotamia 1914–18, London, 1967; and B. Farwell, The Great War in Africa, London, 1987. A compendium, History of the First World War, London, 1969–71, issued by Purnell in parts and edited by B. Pitt and P. Young, forming eight volumes, contains accounts of all the war’s episodes, some by leading scholars. It is a valuable source, particularly for the more obscure campaigns (e.g., Tsingtao, the Caucasus). C. Ellis, The Transcaspian Episode, London, 1963, is a brilliant monograph on British intervention in South Russia in 1918. Allied intervention in Russia and on the military aspects of the Russian revolution and civil war are covered in J. Wheeler-Bennett, Brest-Litovsk: The Forgotten Peace, London, 1966; E. Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War, New York, 1989; R. Luckett, The White Generals, New York, 1971; J. Bradley, Allied Intervention in Russia, London, 1968; P. Kencz, Civil War in South Russia, New York, 1977; and M. Carley, Revolution and Intervention, New York, 1983.
Particular aspects of the naval war are well described in: J. Goldrick, The King’s Ships Were at Sea: The War in the North Sea, August, 1914—February 1915, Annapolis, Md., 1984; P. Halpern, The Naval War in the Mediterranean, 1914–18, London, 1987; G. Bennet, Coronel and the Falklands, New York, 1962, and Cowan’s War: The Story of British Naval Operations in the Baltic, 1918–20, London, 1964; and J. Terraine, Business in Great Waters, London, 1989, the best general account of the U-boat campaign. Among the enormous number of books on Jutland the following should be noted: N. Campbell, Jutland: An Analysis of the Fighting, London, 1986; and A. Gordon, The Rules of the Game, London, 1996.
POLITICS AND ECONOMICS
Among notable books on the politics and economics of the war by academic writers are: V. Berghahn, Germany and the Approach of War in 1914, New York, 1973; G. Feldman, Arms, Industry and Labor in Germany, 1914–18, Princeton, N.J., 1966; D. French, British Strategy and War Aims, London, 1986; J. Galantai, Hungary in the First World War, Budapest, 1989; M. Geyer, Deutsche Rüstungspolitik, Frankfurt, 1984; P. Guinn, British Strategy and Politics, 1914–18, Oxford, 1965; and Z. Zeman, The Break-up of the Habsburg Empire, London, 1961.
CULTURE AND SOCIETY
French scholars have recently made notable contributions to the social and cultural history of the war. They include J.-J. Becker and S. Audouin-Rouzeau, Les sociétés européennes et la guerre de 1914–18, Paris, 1990; J.-J. Becker et al., Guerres et Cultures 1914–18, Paris, 1994; J.-J. Becker, La France en guerre, 1914–18, Paris, 1988; and J.-J. Becker, The Great War and the French People, Leamington Spa, Eng., 1985. Becker’s English collaborator, J. Winter, has edited, with W. Wall, The Upheaval of War: Family, Work and Welfare in Europe, 1914–18, Cambridge, 1988. His Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History, Cambridge, 1995, is a moving essay on the efforts made by soldiers and civilian communities to bear, rationalise and commemorate the griefs the war caused. More literary, and now one of the most famous of all Great War books, is Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, Oxford, 1975, a study of the English literature, particularly novels and memoirs. An older but still valuable French equivalent is J. Norton Cru, Témoins, new edition, Nancy, France, 1993. Two important books on the German experience are L. Moyer, Victory Must Be Ours, London, 1995; and R. Whalen, Bitter Wounds: German Victims of the Great War, Ithaca, N.Y., 1984. In The Myriad Faces of War, Cambridge, 1986, Trevor Wilson has constructed a multi-faceted portrait of the British war experience. An interesting American perspective is E. Leed, No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I, Cambridge, 1979.
BIOGRAPHY
The military leaders of the First World War have found few retrospective admirers. This increasingly seems unfair. They were men presented with an almost insuperable problem—how to break a strong fortified front with weak, indeed inadequate means—and none was any much worse a general than another. An interesting collective portrait is presented by Correlli Barnett in The Swordbearers, London, 1963; his subjects are Moltke the Younger, Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, Commander of the Grand Fleet, Pétain and Ludendorff. Basil Liddell Hart’s sympathetic biography Foch: Man of Orleans, 1931, stands the test of time. So does J. Wheeler-Bennett’s Hindenburg: The Wooden Titan, London, 1936. D. Goodspeed is excellent in Ludendorff, London, 1966. Haig remains an enigma, an efficient military technician deficient in human feeling. John Terraine supplies a partisan defence of his achievements in Haig: The Educated Soldier, London, 1963; a more sceptical biography, emphasising the less rational side of his character, is by G. De Groot, Douglas Haig, London, 1988; also to be noted is Haig’s Command by D. Winter, London, 1991. The P
rivate Papers of Douglas Haig, edited by R. Blake, 1952, is indispensable. So, too, is Philip Magnus’s Kitchener, New York, 1959. D. Smythe, Pershing, Bloomington, Ind., 1986, provides the best biography of the General of the (American) Armies. R. Holmes has written an excellent biography of Sir John French in The Little Field Marshal, London, 1981. Good biographies of British admirals are provided by R. Mackay, Fisher of Kilverstone, Oxford, 1973; A. Temple Patterson, Jellicoe, London, 1969; and S. Roskill, Earl Beatty, London, 1980.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Keegan was for many years senior lecturer in military history at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. He has been a fellow at Princeton University and a professor of history at Vassar College.
