Manual Of Field Works All Arms

A riveting lyrical constellation centered on the Battle of Passchendaele in Flanders Fields and tibetan protective magic In the foreword to her book-length poem, Salient, Elizabeth Gray writes, “This work began by juxtaposing two obsessions of mine that took root in the late 1960s: the Battle of Passchendaele, fought by the British Army in Flanders in late 1917, and the chöd ritual, the core ‘severance’ practice of a lineage founded by Machik Lapdrön, the great twelfth-century female Tibetan Buddhist saint.” Over the course of several decades, Gray tracked the contours and traces of the Ypres Salient, walking the haunted battlefield ground of the contemporary landscape with campaign maps in hand, reading “not only history, poetry, and fiction, but also unit diaries; contemporary reports and individual accounts; survey information and maps of all kinds; treatises on aerial photography and artillery tactics; and manuals on field engineering and tactical planning.” Out of this material, through a process of collage, convergence, and ritual chöd visualization, Gray has composed a spare, fascinating lyrical engagement with The Missing, in shell hole and curved trench, by way of amulets and obstacles. What is salient rises from the secret signs in song, like a blessing, protected from harm.

This is the story of the British Army's endeavours during the Great War to deceive the enemy and trick him into weakening his defences and redeploying his reserves. In this year-by-year account, Martin Davies shows how Sir John French and Sir Douglas Haig actively encouraged their Army commanders to employ trickery so that all attacks should come as a 'complete surprise' to the enemy. The methods of concealment of real military artefacts and the creation of dummy ones were ingenious enough but the real art lay in the development of geographically dispersed deception plans which disguised the real time and place of attack and forced the enemy to defend areas threatened by fake operations. Some of these plans, such as disguising mules as tanks and creating dummy airfields bordered on the farcical but were often amazingly effective. The driving force behind the deception plans was GHQ and the Army commanders, further dispelling the myth of 'Lions led by Donkeys'. Evidence shows that the British Army employed deception to advantage in all their theatres of operation.

This manual summarises the state of the art after the First World War, and includes no fewer than 175 plates with a range of diagrams of the most significant value. It examines the general principles underlying field fortifications, and explains why they are needed. Emphasis is placed on the need for defences in the field against artillery, gas, mines and aircraft: all lessons learned in the First War. There follows a great deal of valuable detail on how and where to site trenches, both for infantry and machine guns. The real meat comes in the long section dealing with the trenches themselves and fire positions, and how to establish a defensive system. Camouflage is included in this section of the book. The detail in the book is quite remarkable, and covers other matters of importance, such as bridging, accommodation in the field, communications and demolition s, and there is a special section on land mines and traps.

The result of over twenty-five years of research, Beneath Flanders Fields reveals how this intense underground battle was fought and won. The authors give the first full account of mine warfare in World War I through the words of the tunnellers themselves as well as plans, drawings, and previously unpublished archive photographs, many in colour. Beneath Flanders Fields also shows how military mining evolved. The tunnellers constructed hundreds of deep dugouts that housed tens of thousands of troops. Often electrically lit and ventilated, these tunnels incorporated headquarters, cookhouses, soup kitchens, hospitals, drying rooms, and workshops. A few dugouts survive today, a final physical legacy of the Great War, and are presented for the first time in photographs in Beneath Flanders Fields.

The trench was the frontline Tommy's home. He lived, ate, slept, and sometimes died in this narrow passage amongst the slime of mud and blood on the Western Front. His washbasin was a mess-tin, his cooker – a small fire built into the wall, his entertainment – his friends, his fear – the man living in the trench on the other side of No Man's Land. Over 6 million men died whilst serving in the trenches – how did they live in them? For the first time, World War I historian Andrew Robertshaw and a group of soldiers, archaeologists and historians use official manuals and diaries to build a real trench system and live in it for 24 hours, recreating the frontline Tommy's daily existence, answering the questions: How do you build a trench quietly? How clean can you really get in a trench? How easy is it to sleep? How do you keep yourself entertained? How to do you stay alive and kill the enemy? And many more... Hour-by-hour, the Tommy's day unfolds through stunning colour photographs in this ground-breaking experiment in Great War history.