About this title: In this history of World War I, a professor of military history discusses the causes of the war and provides in-depth analyses of the major battles on two fronts. He reports on the great changes Europe underwent as the result of the conflict, and how it was set up for the second conflict later in the century.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Knopf
Date Published: 1999
ISBN-13:9780375400520ISBN:0375400524
Description: Good. Used item may show library stamps, stickers and marks. Buy with confidence-your satisfaction is guaranteed at B-Logistics! Due to the large scale of our operation, we do not have access to the specific contents/condition of our items. Please note that Expedited shipping is not available at this time. read more
Description: Good. Former Library book. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Fine. 0375700455 Two corners had been folded down to mark place. Otherwise fine overall. PRICED ACCORDINGLY FOR GREAT VALUE! Your satisfaction is of course guaranteed. We ship the same or next day. read more
Edition: Abridged.
Binding: Audiobook cassette
Publisher: Random House Audio Publishing Group
Date Published: 1999
ISBN-13:9780375406669ISBN:0375406662
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. very minor bump on one corner of box. 6 cassettes. Audience: General/trade. John Keegan is one of the most reknown military history authors. Count on this book to be in the best tradition of event and result history. How the destruction of empires of the 19th Century reshaped Europe into what became the tinder box for WWII which in turn led directly to the world of the 21st century. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Date Published: 1999
ISBN-13:9780375400520ISBN:0375400524
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. Price is clipped from dust jacket and gift inscription is written on second endpaper. Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. With dust jacket. 496 p. Contains: Illustrations. Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc, Westminister, Maryland, U.S.A.
Date Published: 1999
ISBN-13:9780375400520ISBN:0375400524
Description: Very Good in Very Good jacket. Ex-Library Hard Cover-VG/VG-Book and dust jacket are bright and clean-Index-475 pages. -Ex-Library. read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Random House, New York
Date Published: 1999
ISBN-13:9780375406669ISBN:0375406662
Description: Very Good. Abridged Audio Book. Presented on 6 cassettes. Approximate running time: 9 Hours. Read by Simon Prebble. Not an ex-library audiobook. Colorfully illustrated cardboard case. Includes a photograph of the Author and Reader. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Pimlico
Date Published: 1999-09-02
ISBN-13:9780712666459ISBN:0712666451
Description: Very Good. As issued no jacket. Trade Paperback. Very Good condition with no markings. No highlights, underlines or notes in text. No creases to spine or cover. Minor wear to cover. Foxing and speckling of edges and some in text. Tight binding and clean crisp text. Very Nice copy. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Vintage
Date Published: 2000-05-16
ISBN-13:9780375700453ISBN:0375700455
Description: Very Good. Unmarked, uncreased, gently used. Cover has slight shelf wear. Pages clean & bright, binding tight. *Ships Next Business day* read more
Edition: Illustrations
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Vintage Books USA
Date Published: 2000
ISBN-13:9780375700453ISBN:0375700455
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. Spine straight w/o creases, binding tight, no reader/remainder/library marks, covers/pgs flat w/sharp corners, very slight shelf wear. 475 numbered pgs., Audience: General/trade. Photos/other info available by e-mail. Daily orders/e-mail responses. E-mail confirmation of shipment. Books stored in smoke-free, climate controlled environment. Check our feedback. read more
Description: Like New. Hardcover no dj. Like new; no internal markings; has lost its "Brand New" shine but no obvious defects. Dj nearly fine. No remainder mark; no ownership markings; never part of an institution's collection. In sealed plastic protection. 1999. Hardcover no dj. read more
"Good...I'm not too fond of Keegan's straight up histories. I much prefer his books like face of battle, the mask of command, and intelligence in war that are mostly analysis. Worth reading but martin gilberts book by the same name was better and shorter."
"This is an encyclopedic description of the First World War's military history and strategy. Reading it almost turns one into a pacifist and certainly into a believer in the idiocy, cruelty, and utter disregard by leaders for the deaths of millions of their citizens by European leaders.
Keegan excels as a writer and provides a top down view of events and strategy as well as description of warfare in the trenches.
As a result of lessons learned during the Franco/Prussian War in the 1870s, military planning and planning staffs greatly advanced by the early 20th Century. These highly detailed and timed plans relied on railroads to get armies into the field. The plans were inflexible.
Diplomacy, unfortunately, did not have a similar development. The art continued to be carried out by somewhat incompetent ministers frequently out of touch with rapidly occurring events and very much out of touch with military leaders. Keegan, looking back from the end of 20th Century, claims that diplomacy may have succeeded in avoiding war if leaders had developed a super national body like the United Nations where they might have communicated before approving the execution of their war plans. Sadly, no such body existed and the war started in August 1914.
A central Keegan point is lack of communication. Diplomacy failed to communicate and once the plans began leaders, even if they cared to, could not stop armies from boarding trains taking them to carefully preplanned battlefields. Lack of communication also was partially responsible for large losses. Generals continued to rely on runners to communicate with the front. Telephones were used but in battle were almost useless as lines were easily cut. Infantry advances were normally preceded by artillery. As soldiers advanced, artillery was supposed to advance with them. Artillery support normally broke down because gunners had no way of knowing how far the infantry had advanced. Because they had no communication they did not know where to aim. Without artillery support, advancing soldiers were left to the murderous fire of entrenched machine guns and riflemen.
Neither side, Germany, on the one hand, France allied with England on the other, had the strength to defeat the other. Trench warfare resulted. By 1915 trenches extended some 400 miles from the Channel to Switzerland. Each side tried attacking to gain ground only to sustain extremely heavy losses. So heavy that the attack stopped because there were no more men.
By 1917 men in the French Army mutinied. They would attack no more. War in the French area of the Western Front became one of an armed standoff.
Germany was fighting a two front war, one in the west and another in the east against Russia. Keegan describes the battles on the Eastern Front in detail. Russia, at first victorious, later sustained defeat and heavy losses in its largely peasant army. The result was the Russian Revolution and Russia's leaving the war. Its soldiers simply disappeared on their way back to civilian life.
This was truly a world war. Turkey joined Germany and Austria. One result was Gallipoli where thousands of Australians and New Zealanders were killed The Australian 29th Division lost its strength twice over. Eight thousand five hundred and sixty New Zealanders fought at Gallipoli. They sustained 14,720 casualties, including wounded, as several men went back to fight again. The war was also fought in the German African colonies.
The United States entered the war on April 6, 1917. Keegan notes that earlier that year Wilson repeated his policy to stay out of the war. Two events changed the policy. The first was the Zimmermann telegram. British intelligence exposed a German telegram proposing an alliance with Mexico under which Mexico would recover Texas, Arizona and New Mexico. The other was unrestricted German submarine warfare and the sinking of American merchant ships.
By the summer of 1917 the German high command realized it could avoid defeat only upon the success of one last offensive. The result was the 3rd battle of Ypres or Passchendaele. At first the Germans were successful but the combined forces of Britain and France turned them back. Seventy thousand British and Commonwealth soldiers were killed and 170,000 wounded.
The war went on but by the summer of 1918 the Germans realized that they were out of manpower and the allies, now with U. S. intervention, had millions more to put into battle. The British navy throughout the war conducted a successful blockade and the German population was starving. Many Germans aided by Russians were in revolt. The Germans sued for peace, the Kaiser abdicated, and the Armistice was signed on November 11, 1918.
Keegan concludes,
"War cemeteries were organized from the outset, graves registration officers marked the plots and, when time permitted, chaplains and the dead men's comrades observed the solemnities. Even so, at the war's end, the remains of nearly half of those lost remained lost in actuality. Of the British Empire's million dead, most killed in France and Belgium, the bodies of over 500,000 were never to be found or, if found, not identified. A similar proportion of the 1,700,000 French war dead also disappeared.
To the million dead of the British Empire and the 1,700,00 French dead, we must add 1,500,000 soldiers of the Habsburg Empire who did not return, two million Germans, 460,000 Italians, 1,700,000 Russians and many hundreds of thousands of Turks; their numbers were never counted."
He adds,
"But then the First World War is a mystery. Its origins are mysterious. So is its course. Why did a prosperous continent, at the height of its success as a source and agent of global wealth and power and at one of the peaks of intellectual and cultural achievement, choose to risk all it had won for itself and all it offered to the world in the lottery of a vicious and local internecine conflict? Why, when the hope of bringing the conflict to a quick and decisive conclusion was everywhere dashed to the ground within months of its outbreak, did the combatants decide nevertheless to persist in their military effort, to mobilize for total war and eventually to commit the totality of their young manhood to mutual and existentially pointless slaughter. Principle was perhaps at stake; but the principle of the sanctity of international treaty, which brought Britain into the war, scarcely merited the price eventually paid for its protection. Defense of the national territory was at stake also, the principle for which France fought at almost unbearable damage to its national well-being. Defense of the principle of mutual security agreement, underlying the declarations of Germany and Russia, was pursued to the point where security lost all meaning in the dissolution of state structure. Simple state interest, Austria's impulse and the oldest of all reasons for war making, proved, as the pillars of imperialism collapsed about the Habsburgs, no interest at all.""
"I read this as a follow-up to Paris 1919. I read the two books out of chronological order, but I actually found that made The First World War a much more interesting read. Keegan does spend a good amount of time at the beginning of the book covering the motivations of the various belligerents, but having read Paris 1919, I felt I had a much stronger understanding and of the causes and effects of the course of the war.
On its own I was shocked at the level of detail of the book. My one minor complaint is that I could not tell at times whether Keegan was giving a shorter synopsis of certain battles, or whether the battles were just very short in and of themselves. My sense is his level of detail from first person accounts available varied, so his narrative had to vary as well. Even still, I think he could have tried harder, in some cases, to relay the scope of events in relation to each other.
I would absolutely recommend this book to anyone interested in the causes of World War I, the course the war took, and the long reaching consequences of the decisions made by the leaders of the time. After reading this, Paris 1919, and the Dark Valley (Panorama of the 1930s), I cannot wait to dive into The Second World War (also by Keegan)."
"Another masterwork from Keegan, how can anyone ever hope to write as well as this man in a general historical sense but still include so much detail and substance that it almost reads like enjoyable fiction? Keegan has done it again, folks, and this book should be on every historian's bookshelves."
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