France And Belgium 1915 Vol 1 Winter 1914 15

"This volume completes the unhappy (for the BEF) year of 1915, one described with good reason as a year of disappointment. Its special interest is that it records the first employment of the Territorial and New Army divisions as complete formations in a major offensive and the first British employment of gas. It describes the Battles of Aubers Ridge, a disaster that cost 11,500 casualties in a day; Festubert in which initial success could not be exploited; and Loos (including the Hohenzollern Redoubt) in which we first used gas, with mixed results, and in which we failed to make progress. Our casualties in the battle (25 September-16 October) amounted to nearly 50,400. Total battle losses for 1915 were 285,000 compared with 90,000 for the five months of 1914"--Cover p.4.

The Great War confronted Australia’s fledgling field and garrison artillery forces with a seemingly insurmountable challenge: to rapidly raise, prepare, deploy and engage in history’s most lethal war to date. By 1915, the Australian artillery entered into a bloody contest of learning and adaptation against resourceful and resolute opponents, where the stakes would be measured in thousands of soldiers’ lives. Far from popularly-held views of the Great War as one of stalemate and stagnation, Clash of the Gods of War: Australian Artillery and the Firepower Lessons of the Great War reveals a dynamic and rapidly evolving battle-scape, as artillery planners on each side sought to combine innovative concepts, technology and tactics into victory. The book draws on an unparalleled array of perspectives on artillery and firepower, presented by Australian and international experts and practitioners over four years during the Firepower: Lessons from the Great War seminar series, commemorating the Centenary of Anzac. From Anzac Cove to the Hindenburg Line, Clash of the Gods of War tells a gripping Australian story of the Great War through the lens of artillery – the most lethal and influential arm of the war – and considers the legacy that its evolutionary journey holds for warfare today.

The battle of Loos was one of the most hard-fought battles that the British Expeditionary Force waged during the First World War. This work presents an interpretation of Loos, placing it not only within its political and strategic context, but also discussing command and control and the tactical realities of war on the Western Front during 1915.

Colonel G.W.L. Nicholson's Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914-1919 was first published by the Department of National Defence in 1962 as the official history of the Canadian Army’s involvement in the First World War. Immediately after the war ended Colonel A. Fortescue Duguid made a first attempt to write an official history of the war, but the ill-fated project produced only the first of an anticipated eight volumes. Decades later, G.W.L. Nicholson - already the author of an official history of the Second World War - was commissioned to write a new official history of the First. Illustrated with numerous photographs and full-colour maps, Nicholson’s text offers an authoritative account of the war effort, while also discussing politics on the home front, including debates around conscription in 1917. With a new critical introduction by Mark Osborne Humphries that traces the development of Nicholson’s text and analyzes its legacy, Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914-1919 is an essential resource for both professional historians and military history enthusiasts.

Regarded as one of the most outstanding commanding officers on the Western Front, Wilfrid Abel Smith commanded an elite unit of 1,000 of the finest soldiers in the British Army. Educated at Eton and Sandhurst, Smith was a career soldier who led his battalion of Grenadiers with distinction through the First Battle of Ypres and the winter trench warfare of 1914–15. He died of wounds received at the Battle of Festubert in May 1915.The letters and diaries provide a vivid, first-hand account of the fighting and suffering on the front line, written by a compassionate commander and affectionate family man. Most of his brother officers were Old Etonians, including his brigade commander, Lord Cavan, and his second-in-command, George ‘Ma’ Jeffreys. Smith’s account offers a poignant insight into the way in which the privileged world of a Guards officer responded, with the highest sense of duty and courage, to the unprecedented demands of industrial warfare.From Eton to Ypres is edited by his great-grandson, Charles Abel Smith.

Gallipoli: the mere name summons the story of this well-known campaign of the First World War. And the story of Gallipoli, where in August 1915 the Allied forces made their last valiant effort against the Turks, is one of infamous might-have-beens. If only the Allies had held out a little longer, pushed a little harder, had better luck—Gallipoli might have been the decisive triumph that knocked the Ottoman Empire out of the First World War. But the story is just that, author Rhys Crawley tells us: a story. Not only was the outcome at Gallipoli not close, but the operation was flawed from the start, and an inevitable failure. A painstaking effort to set the historical record straight, Climax at Gallipoli examines the performance of the Allies’ Mediterranean Expeditionary Force from the beginning of the Gallipoli Campaign to the bitter end. Crawley reminds us that in 1915, the second year of the war, the Allies were still trying to adapt to a new form of warfare, with static defense replacing the maneuver and offensive strategies of earlier British doctrine. In the attempt both the MEF at Gallipoli and the British Expeditionary Force on the Western Front aimed for too much—and both failed. To explain why, Crawley focuses on the operational level of war in the campaign, scrutinizing planning, command, mobility, fire support, interservice cooperation, and logistics. His work draws on unprecedented research into the files of military organizations across the United Kingdom and Australia. The result is a view of the Gallipoli Campaign unique in its detail and scope, as well as in its conclusions—a book that looks past myth and distortion to the facts, and the truth, of what happened at this critical juncture in twentieth-century history.

View any image of a Tommy and his uniform becomes an assumed item, few would consider where and how that uniform was made. Over 5 million men served on the Western Front, they all required clothing. From August 1914 to March 1919, across all theaters of operations, over 28 million pairs of trousers and c.360 million yards of various cloth was manufactured.Worn by men of all ranks the uniform created an identity for the fighting forces, distinguished friend from foe, gave the enlisted man respect, a sense of unity whilst at the same time stripping away his identity, turning a civilian into a soldier. Men lived, worked, slept, fought and died in their uniform.Using the authors great-grandfather's war service as a backdrop, this book will uncover the textile industries and home front call to arms, the supply chain, salvage and repair workshops in France, and how soldiers maintained their uniform on the front line.Items of a soldiers uniform can become a way to remember and are often cherished by families, creating a tangible physical link with the past, but the durability of cloth to withstand time can create an important legacy. The fallen are still discovered today and remnants of uniform can help to identify them, at the very least the color of cloth or type of hob nail can give the individual his nationality allowing them to be given a final resting place.