Sunday WW1 Remembered

Over the last four years of adding WW1 information onto my blog I have found lots of books really interesting so I thought it was time to share them.

BBC Books
1999

I've had my copy since 1999.
The book that it was republished in 2008 with a new cover.

BBC Books
2008

From the book:

For most British people, the First World War was the Western Front, the trench line stretching from the Swiss Frontier to the North Sea. It was there that the majority of nearly nine million British and Dominion soldiers who enlisted during the war served, and where most of the 947,000 who were killed met their deaths.

This detailed but accessible account covers everything from how the front was created and the experiences of the British Army in France, to the battle of Verdun and the last hundred days of the war. Holmes' concise and heartfelt narrative is illustrated with photographs, diagrams, maps and quotations that bring this inhuman four years of history to life.

In one of the best single-volume histories of the First World War available, Holmes skillfully clarifies the complexities of the Western Front, and highlights the political, military and human dilemmas of this, the most bitter and bloody of conflicts.

My thoughts:

The battles and events that shaped the war on the Western Front is complex and bloody. Many lives were lost on the battlefields of northern France and dreams of a better future disappeared amidst the  carnage and guns which echoed relentlessly, maiming, butchering and killing young men in the thousands.

The Western Front reminds us of their sacrifice.

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Sunday WW1 Remembered..

Over the last four years of adding WW1 information onto my blog I have found lots of books really interesting so I thought it was time to share them.

Michael Joseph 1988
Penguin 1991

Lyn MacDonald writes with authority on the events of WW1 and this book in one that I use when I want to check up on facts or to look for inspiration for a blog post. It's a very readable account of what happened during 1914-1918 and what I find most useful is the poignant mix of the serious and the ordinary, which all add up to a fascinating account of the lives of those soldiers who fought, and died, on the Western Front.

It contains lots of illustrations, poignant photographs and letters, amateur poetry from 'ordinary' soldiers and the events they describe in letters home are both enlightening and desperately sad. There's even information in a letter which was been sent to The Times newspaper, in 1914, accusing them of reporting false news..so we know that phrase isn't new then !

Of the many books in my WW1 bibliography, 1914-1918 : Voices and Images of the Great war is one of my particular favourites especially as it gives a voice to those ordinary soldiers who found themselves, often unwillingly, living out their, sometimes very short, lives in extraordinary and difficult circumstances.

First written 30 years ago, the book is perhaps a little harder to come by now, however, it's well worth a read if you spot it in a library or second hand book store.

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Sunday WW1 Remembered...

Whenever I visit the Imperial War Museum North I take time to visit the shop, carefully browsing the shelves for books and memorabilia that highlight WW1. On my most recent visit I came across this quirky little book which is packed full of interesting snippets about the war.

World War One

A Very Peculiar History

by

Jim Pipe

Book House
2017
192 pages

I've enjoyed flipping through this book, discovering little bits and pieces about the war that I didn't already know. I especially enjoyed reading a section towards the end of the book which mentions famous ex-soldiers, and considers what the twentieth century would have been like if these men hadn't survived their experience of WW1:

Humphrey Bogart 

Bela Lugosi 

Walt Disney 

George Braque

Henry Moore 

Ernest Hemingway 

F Scott Fitzgerald 

A A Milne 

C S Lewis 

J R R Tolkien 

Walter Gropius 

Winston Churchill 

Charles De Gaulle 

Harry S Trueman 

Benito Mussolini

Adolf Hitler

and Angelo Roncalli, later Pope John XXIII

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