Showing titles in World War I

In 1916, Arthur Eddington, a war-weary British astronomer, opened a letter written by an obscure German professor named Einstein. The neatly printed equations on the scrap of paper outlined his world-changing theory of general relativity. Until then Einstein's masterpiece of time and space had been trapped behind the physical and ideological lines of battle, unknown. Eddington realised the importance of the letter - perhaps Einstein's esoteric theory could not only change the future of science but also restore the world of cooperative international science in a time of brutal war.

In the spring of 1918, German forces broke through Allied lines in a last-ditch attempt to overcome their enemies. To hold back this tide, inexperienced young men from France, Britain, the United States, Australia, and Canada were sent into war. What was it like to be an eighteen-year-old and sent to the frontlines in the First World War? Frederick James Hodges was one of these young men and his book, Men of 18 in 1918, provides insight into the ordeals of an ordinary soldier who left Britain as a teenager but returned as a man having witnessed the full horrors of war.

T. E. Lawrence was a man of all seasons. Known for his great thirst for adventure, he earned the name Lawrence of Arabia due to his hands-on expertise in the Middle East during World War I and the Arab Revolt. Yet his achievements extended well beyond exploration—he was an innovative soldier, a dedicated archaeologist, and a passionate curator of history.

The Gallipoli letter is an 8000-word private report written by journalist Keith Arthur Murdoch, with the help of British war correspondent Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, after visiting the Gallipoli peninsula in September 1915. It describes the organization and conditions of the Gallipoli campaign. It was sent to Andrew Fisher (then-Prime Minister of Australia) and Henry Herbert Asquith (then-Prime Minister of the UK). Murdoch’s twenty-eight-page letter helped to establish the idea of Gallipoli as a military disaster.

From the New York Times bestselling author of War Letters and Behind the Lines, Andrew Carroll’s My Fellow Soldiers draws on a rich trove of both little-known and newly uncovered letters and diaries to create a marvelously vivid and moving account of the American experience in World War I...

Captain Eddie V. Rickenbacker, originally from Ohio, was best known as one of the commanders of the 94th "Hat-in-the-Ring" Squadron, a crack unit of World War I pilots that included many former members of the famed Lafayette Escadrille. The 94th ended the war in France with the highest number of air victories of any American squadron.

Few participants in World War I are more famous than Manfred Albrecht Freiherr von Richthofen, better known as the Red Baron. A German known for victories in a war that his country lost, a cavalry officer made famous as mounted combat disappeared, and an aristocratic hero in a century dominated by democracy; Richthofen's celebrity stands in stark contrast to the era.

Neal Bascomb, a New York Times best-selling author, delivers the spellbinding story of the downed Allied airmen who masterminded the remarkably courageous - and ingenious - breakout from Germany's most devilish POW camp.

Wounded traces the journey made by a casualty from the battlefield to a hospital in Britain. It is a story told through the testimony of those who cared for him - stretcher bearers and medical officers, surgeons and chaplains, orderlies and nurses - from the aid post in the trenches to the casualty clearing station and the ambulance train back to Blighty. We feel the calloused hands of the stretcher-bearers; we see the bloody dressings and bandages; we smell the nauseating gangrene and, at London’s stations, the gas clinging to the uniforms of the men arriving home.

Told for the first time, here is the story of a stray dog who eventually became affectionately known as Sergeant Stubby, the most famous war dog of World War I. Beloved award-winning children's author Ann Bausum brings her friendly writing style and in-depth research to her first book for adults. Stubby's story begins in 1917 when America is about to enter the war. A stray dog befriends Private J. Robert "Bob" Conroy at the Connecticut National Guard camp at Yale University, and the two become inseparable, eventually crossing an ocean and going to war together.

In the autumn of 1915 Will Bird was working on a farm in Saskatchewan when the ghost of his brother Stephen, killed by German mines in France, appeared before him in uniform. Rattled, Bird rushed home to Nova Scotia and enlisted in the army to take his dead brother's place. And We Go On is a remarkable and harrowing memoir of his two years in the trenches of the Western Front, from October 1916 until the Armistice.

In Balloon Ace: The Life of an Early Airpower Visionary, historian Charles Dusch reconstructs Louis Bennett Jr.'s lost legacy. Advocating for a national aviation reserve years before the writings of "Billy" Mitchell, Bennett created a state aerial militia in 1917, complete with supporting airbases and an airplane factory. When the US Army refused to accept his unit, a frustrated Bennett joined the Royal Air Force to fight on the Western Front, destroying nine German balloons and three aircraft in a matter of days before he himself was shot down.

Ralph was a self-made man who took the good examples set by his parents and grandparents, started with very little, cut his losses when necessary, endured the Great Depression without folding and turned a half section of Iowa farm land into a prosperous operation. In so doing he passed on his work ethic and sound judgement to his family and provided a good life for himself and his family. Serving his country when asked to do so may have saved him from getting mired in the Montana homesteading disaster.

William Arthur Human was 22 years old and serving as a British soldier in India when war broke out in 1914. This is his story, in his own words, covering his first eight months on the Western Front and featuring the Battle of Neuve Chapelle. An extraordinarily vivid account that is heartfelt, captivating, and challenging in equal measure.

Vera Brittain and the First World War tells the remarkable story of the author behind Testament of Youth while charting the book's ascent to become one of the most loved memoirs of the First World War period. Such interest is set to expand even more in this centenary year of the war's outbreak.

My Boy Jack is the extraordinary story of Kipling's search for his son. John Kipling was reported missing in the Battle of Loos on the Western Front in 1915. His father, Rudyard, had pulled strings to get his myopic son into the firing line. Devastated at the loss of his only son, Rudyard undertook the sad mission to find John's grave but tragically never succeeded in his quest.

On the centenary of the Great War, there are now no longer any veterans alive of the six million men who served on the Western Front. Although this means that the Great War as a living history is to all intents and purposes over, the twenty years Richard van Emden spent interviewing and carefully recording the memories of over 270 veterans, makes this extraordinary collection of stories even more poignant.

In this persuasive biography, Jim Lacey sheds light on General Pershing's legacy as the nation's first modern combat commander, setting the standard for today's four-star officers. When the U.S. entered into World War I in 1917, they did so with inadequate forces. In just over a year, Pershing built and hurled a one-million-man army against 40 battle-hardened German divisions.

More than three million American men, many of them volunteers, joined the AEF in the first twenty months of US involvement in the First World War. Of these, over 50,000 were killed on European soil. These were the Doughboys, the young men recruited from the cities and farms of the United States, who travelled across the Atlantic to aid the allies in the trenches and on the battlefields. Without their courage and determination, the outcome of the war would have been very different.

Forever England explores Rupert Brooke’s life, from schooldays to the Great War, and in so doing builds a remarkable picture of a long-lost England and a generation’s descent into war. Brooke’s poems emerge dramatically from a tangled web of love, friendship, mental illness and politics. He reveals also the existence of a previously unrecorded love child from a South Seas romance. The WW1 legend was largely brought about by the words of one of his sonnets: "If I should die, think only this of me/That there’s some corner of a foreign field that is forever England".