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November Top 10 Titles

WWI Military History

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Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World by Margaret Macmillan

For six months in 1919, after the end of "the war to end all wars," the Big Three - President Woodrow Wilson, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George and French premier Georges Clemenceau - met in Paris to shape a lasting peace. In this landmark work of narrative history, Margaret MacMillan gives a dramatic and intimate view of those fateful days, which saw new political entities-Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Palestine, among them-born out of the ruins of bankrupt empires, and the borders of the modern world redrawn.

Passchendaele: Canada’s Triumph and Tragedy on the Fields of Flanders by Norman Leach

This fully-illustrated, easily-accessible, account of the battle of Passchendaele presents the background and details of Canada's coming of age in The Great War.

During WWI, the battle for the tiny Belgium town Passchendaele was one of the most significant tests of Canadian courage and expertise. British Commander-in-Chief General Douglas Haig had devised one of the most controversial stratagems of the entire war: Allied forces would attack headlong into the heavily fortified German entrenchments, capture the town of Passchendaele and its highlands, and drive toward the coast to destroy German submarine bases.

General Arthur Currie's Canadian Corps was called to the front for this attack. After their victories at Vimy Ridge and Hill 70, the Canadians had earned the nickname "storm troopers" for, like a storm, they could not be stopped. Even for the battle-hardened Canadians, Passchendaele was a living hell. Many drowned in the mud before ever seeing the enemy. Others died from deadly chlorine gas and others from artillery shells that rained down in numbers over 175 per square meter.

The Canadians seized Passchendaele, succeeding where all others had failed, and displaying high standards of leadership, staff work and training. The Corps had suffered 16,000 casualties; nine Victoria Crosses were awarded to acknowledge the extraordinary heroism. Though the actual value of the campaign is debated to this day, one thing is certain: Canadians had been tested against the worst horrors of the Great War, and they had proven their valour.

Vimy Ridge: A Canadian Reassessment edited by Geoffrey Hayes, Andrew Iarocci and Mike Bechthold

On the morning of April 9, 1917, troops of the Canadian Corps under General Julian Byng attacked the formidable German defences of Vimy Ridge. Since then, generations of Canadians have shared a deep emotional attachment to the battle, inspired partly by the spectacular memorial on the battlefield. Although the event is considered central in Canadian military history, most people know very little about what happened during that memorable Easter in northern France.

Vimy Ridge: A Canadian Reassessment draws on the work of a new generation of scholars who explore the battle from three perspectives. The first assesses the Canadian Corps within the wider context of the Western Front in 1917. The second explores Canadian leadership, training, and preparations and details the story of each of the four Canadian divisions. The final section concentrates on the commemoration of Vimy Ridge, both for contemporaries and later generations of Canadians.

This long-overdue collection, based on original research, replaces mythology with new perspectives, new details, and a new understanding of the men who fought and died for the remarkable achievement that was the Battle of Vimy Ridge.

Austerity Britain; 1945-1951 by David Kynaston

Austerity Britain is the first book in the four-volume series Tales of a New Jerusalem, which tells the story of the people of Britain from 1945 to Margaret Thatcher's election in May 1979--the consequences of which continue to this day.

Austerity Britain takes the reader on an utterly absorbing journey from 1945 to the general election of 1951, which returned Churchill and the Conservatives to power after six years of a Labour government that transformed the country. Through excerpts from diaries, letters, articles, and through his own analysis David Kynaston shows the lives of ordinary citizens as well as ministers, consumers as well as producers, the country and the city, the regions as well as London, the every day as well as the seismic, and Lords as well as Wembley, as everyone lived through six extremely hard years of unremitting postwar austerity while the building blocks of a new Britain were put in place.

The Marne, 1914: The Opening of World War I and the Battle That Changed the World by Holger H. Herwig

It is one of the essential events of military history, a cataclysmic encounter that prevented a quick German victory in World War I and changed the course of two wars and the world. Now, for the first time in a generation, here is a bold new account of the Battle of the Marne. A landmark work by a distinguished scholar, The Marne, 1914 gives, for the first time, all sides of the story. In remarkable detail, and with exclusive information based on newly unearthed documents, Holger H. Herwig superbly re-creates the dramatic battle, revealing how the German force was foiled and years of brutal trench warfare were made inevitable.

Herwig brilliantly reinterprets Germany's aggressive "Schlieffen Plan"-commonly considered militarism run amok-as a carefully crafted, years-in-the-making design to avoid a protracted war against superior coalitions. He also paints a new portrait of the run-up to the Marne: the Battle of the Frontiers, long thought a coherent assault but really a series of haphazard engagements that left "heaps of corpses," France demoralized, Belgium in ruins, and Germany emboldened to take Paris.

Finally, Herwig puts in dazzling relief the Battle of the Marne itself: the French resolve to win, which included the exodus of 100,000 people from Paris (where even pigeons were placed under state control in case radio communications broke down), the crucial lack of coordination between Germany's First and Second Armies, and the fateful "day of rest" taken by the Third Army. He provides revelatory new facts about the all-important order of retreat by Germany's Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hentsch, previously an event hardly documented and here freshly reconstructed from diary excerpts.

Herwig also provides stunning cameos of all the important players: Germany's Chief of General Staff Helmuth von Moltke, progressively despairing and self-pitying as his plans go awry; his rival, France's Joseph Joffre, seemingly weak but secretly unflappable and steely; and Commander of the British Expeditionary Force John French, arrogant, combative, and mercurial.

The Marne, 1914 puts into context the battle's rich historical significance: how it turned the war into a four-year-long fiasco that taught Europe to accept a new form of barbarism and stoked the furnace for the fires of World War II. Revelatory and riveting, this will be the new source on this seminal event.

Fifty Dead Men Walking by Martin McGartland

For more than four years, Martin McGartland lived the astonishing double life of a secret agent. To the IRA, he was a trusted Intelligence Office and an integral member of an active service unit. To the British Government however, he was known only as Agent Carol. Martin McGartland is credited by British Intelligence with saving the lives of at least 50 people. Every time he tipped off the authorities, he risked detection and yet, heroically and fearlessly, he continued to pass on life-saving information. Finally, his cover was blown. Martin was taken from Sinn Fein headquarters in Belfast to an IRA safe house for questioning and almost certain execution. Though guarded by armed men, in a desperate bid for freedom, he dived from a third floor window. This breathtaking story is now a major film starring Sir Ben Kingsley and Jim Sturgess.

Children of Armenia: A Forgotten Genocide and the Century-long Struggle for Justice by Michael Bobelian

From 1915 to 1923, the ruling Ottoman Empire drove 2 million Armenians from their ancestral homeland; 1.5 million of them were viciously slaughtered. While there was an initial global outcry and a movement led by Woodrow Wilson to aid the "starving Armenians," the promise to hold the perpetrators accountable was never fulfilled and a curtain of silence soon descended on one of the worst crimes of modern history. Now, almost a century later, the Armenians are still fighting for justice.

After uncovering his family’s experiences during the Genocide, Michael Bobelian struggled to rationalize how an event as widely reported as the Genocide -- more than a hundred articles ran in The New York Times in 1915, with a typical headline exclaiming "Wholesale Massacres of Armenians by Turks" -- could fade from public consciousness. Why was the Genocide ignored, forgotten, and, worse, relegated to fiction for so long? What role did America’s national self-interest play in helping Turkey evade public accountability? Why did Armenians themselves initially stand silent? Based on years of archival research and personal interviews, Children of Armenia is the first book to trace this post-Genocide history and reveal the events that have conspired to eradicate the "hidden holocaust" from the world’s memory.

At the close of World War I, the upsurge of support for the Genocide’s survivors, considered one of the world’s first international human right movements, inspired the few remaining Armenian leaders -- such as Simon Vratsian, the ravaged nation’s last prime minister, and Vahan Cardashian, Armenia’s chief advocate in the United States -- to seek relief and justice for their people. But despite their tireless efforts, the promises made to them by the war’s victors were systematically cast aside during postwar negotiations. In the end, the Armenians received nothing, not even an apology, and decades of silence would pass before the Genocide’s survivors -- dispersed, stateless, and on the verge of extinction -- would produce a new generation of activists who would renew their fight for justice.

In Children of Armenia, we meet Gourgen Yanikian, a seventy-seven-year-old terrorist bent on revenge, whose act of terrible violence in Southern California galvanized a movement for recognition; Vartkes Yeghiayan, a lawyer who brought a class action suit against New York Life, seeking to win a judgment for thousands of unclaimed policies; and Van Krikorian, who teamed up with Senator Bob Dole to gain public acknowledgment of the Genocide from the U.S. government. From the initial acts of revenge-fueled terrorism to the birth of an organized movement seeking recognition for these unacknowledged crimes -- including political maneuvering to get a resolution passed by the U.S. Congress -- this is a groundbreaking account of the Armenian struggle to seek redress in the face of recalcitrant perpetrators and an indifferent world.

Bobelian delivers a powerful lesson on the price that is paid when injustice goes unacknowledged and a moving story of a people living in the shadow of a century-old genocide.

Day We Won the War Turning Points at Amiens 8 August 1918 by Charles Messenger

History credits Germany with inventing the Blitzkrieg in the early days of World War II. But it was not they, but the British, who had pioneered the techniques of mobile mechanized warfare two decades earlier at Amiens, the battle that turned the tide of the First World War. Charles Messenger, a noted author on military subjects and a former officer in the Royal Tank Regiment, vividly re-creates this decisive battle and explores its historic lessons. His dramatic account shows how the British attack, spearheaded by tanks and supported by planes, was the first totally convincing demonstration of the power of modern technology to win wars.

The Last Century of Sea Power: From Port Arthur to Chanak, 1894—1922 by H. P. Willmott

The transition to modern war at sea began during the period of the Sino-Japanese War (1894--1895) and the Spanish-American War (1898) and was propelled forward rapidly by the advent of the dreadnought and the nearly continuous state of war that culminated in World War I. By 1922, most of the elements that would define sea power in the 20th century were in place. Written by one of our foremost military historians, this volume acknowledges the complex nature of this transformation, focusing on imperialism, the growth of fleets, changes in shipbuilding and armament technology, and doctrines about the deployment and use of force at sea, among other factors. There is careful attention to the many battles fought at sea during this period and their impact on the future of sea power. The narrative is supplemented by a wide range of reference materials, including a detailed census of capital ships built during this period and a remarkable chronology of actions at sea during World War I.

Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman

A definitive Pulitzer Prize-winning recreation of the powder keg that was Europe during the crucial first thirty days of World War I traces the actions of statesmen and patriots alike in Berlin, London, St. Petersburg, and Paris.

"More dramatic than fiction...The Guns of August is a magnificent narrative--beautifully organized, elegantly phrased, skillfully paced and sustained....The product of painstaking and sophisticated research."

Historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Barbara Tuchman has brought to life again the people and events that led up to World War I. With attention to fascinating detail, and an intense knowledge of her subject and its characters, Ms. Tuchman reveals, for the first time, just how the war started, why, and why it could have been stopped but wasn’t. A classic historical survey of a time and a people we all need to know more about, The Guns of August will not be forgotten.