Showing titles in World War I

Hans Schiller was a seventeen-year-old student in Bromberg, Prussia, when World War I broke out in August 1914. He enlisted in the German army and was assigned to an artillery unit on the Eastern Front. From 1915 to 1917, Schiller saw action in what is now Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. After the Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917 and Russia's withdrawal from the war, Schiller was transferred to the Western Front. He arrived in time for Germany's last great offensive in the west.

This is the story of a young man who trained as a pilot, and then flew with the Royal Flying Corps in France during the First World War, eventually becoming an ace. Hugh White flew F.E.2D Scout aircraft as a reconnaissance patrol pilot and later in the war was promoted to squadron leader of squadrons flying the S.E.5a, which was Britain's best fighter aircraft at the time. During the two years of flying, he experienced and survived a series of escapades including a dramatic mid-air collision with the enemy.

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.

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".

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.

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...

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.

As a young soldier in the battlefields of Gallipolia, Sydney Loch witnessed the horror of war first-hand. On his return to Australia he detailed what he saw in his book The Straits Impregnable. Hoping to avoid military censorship his publishers dubbed Sydney's book a novel. But as the war ground on and the numbers of casualties grew the publisher inserted a note saying the story was factual.

In this one-hour history book, discover the main events that led to World War I and how this first global conflict unfold from the Western front, to Africa, the Middle East, and Asia as it became one of the bloodiest war of all time. It was dubbed “the war to end all wars,” but as anyone alive today can clearly attest, this was most certainly not the case. World War I was indeed an ending point in world history, but rather than ending wars, it could be said to be the war that ended the “fraternity of wars.”

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.

La Grande Guerra non ha eroi. I protagonisti non sono re, imperatori, generali. Sono fanti contadini, i nostri nonni. La guerra dei nostri nonni racconta il conflitto '15-'18 sul fronte italiano, alternando storie di uomini e di donne: le storie delle nostre famiglie. Attraverso lettere, diari di guerra, testimonianze, conduce nell'abisso del dolore. Eppure, sia il racconto di una sofferenza che oggi non riusciamo a immaginare, sia le tante storie a lieto fine restituiscono la stessa idea: la Grande Guerra fu la prima sfida dell'Italia unita; e fu vinta.

The First World War Diaries of Manchester Pals Captain Charlie May – written and kept in secret and published now for the first time. A born storyteller, Charlie May’s vivid eye for detail and warm good humour brings his experience in the trenches (and the experience of millions of ordinary...

In 1914 a war began that destroyed nearly everything in its path: lives, countries, empires, and the world as it was known until that moment. And while destruction could be found almost everywhere around the world in its aftermath, nowhere was more marred than that of the Western Front; the scars of which still haunt us to this day.

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.

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.

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.

Using original archives from the Western Front, this historic account uncovers the stories of seven men whose remarkable bravery in 1916 won them the Victoria Cross, Britain’s most prized military medal. Interviews with modern-day family members reveal the personal stories of each man, exploring the differing fortunes they experienced and the variety of reasons for which they fought.

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.