Read more about local history Chapel Street: A tangible symbol of remembrance. Remembering Hull during The Great War.
The little book that gave American GIs their first taste of England during WW II
The Great War was also fought in rural Home Front towns where food was produced and preserved. How did WW1 change children's lives in the rural West Midlands? A different war to the standard accounts of the Western Front. The wider picture years on. Sign up for our newsletter Enter your email address below to get the latest news and exclusive content from The History Press delivered straight to your inbox.
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Five Million Tides Buy. Stories of a Manchester Street Buy. Of course, to some people all war is futile and this is just a particularly extreme example. The people who fought it certainly thought they were fighting for something and about something important at the time.
And they were prepared, if necessary, to sacrifice their lives for it. So I think there are multiple different areas historians and other people can still argue about. Did you get a sense, while writing that, of why the Germans were fighting World War I? It was fear and paranoia. They saw an alliance of Britain, France and Russia, these strong powers on their borders and getting stronger all the time, as they saw it.
They were very frightened about the possibility of Germany being crushed by some combination of those powers at some indeterminate point in the future. What were your criteria for choosing them? Are they academic books reflecting the latest research, or more general? What did you have in mind? I tried to recommend a mixture, some more academic, some more accessible. Excellence was the main criterion.
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I tried to find five books, each of which, in some way, the best at what it was trying to achieve. I also wanted to try and reflect the fact that the way we write the history of the First World War has changed immensely, certainly from when I was at school. It gives you a good sense of the whole war, including the peace settlement at Versailles. Tell me what you like about it. First of all, as a standalone book, this is the best, single, short introduction to the whole First World War. Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount.
Sir Michael Howard is a very fine historian by any measure, but certainly the greatest living military historian or historian of warfare. The First World War is a trees-and-forests war.
This is quite a big book. You need pretty strong wrists if you want to read it in bed. The bibliography alone is 50 pages. When you only know one side of the story, you have no chance. So his attitude throughout is comparative.
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He looks at it from the British point of view, the German point of view, the Austrian point of view and so on and so forth. The second point is that he understands something that, particularly in Britain, we tend to forget. The centenary commemorations were a good example: There was very little discussion of their allies and almost none of their enemies. Although, in theory, the book is only about , in practice he spends a lot of time talking about themes that run through the whole war, like the financing of it.
He also tells the whole story of the war in Africa, all the way up to , in this first volume. You get a very real sense of how the war moved from being just a bunch of Europeans fighting each other into a World War, both in terms of the European war sucking in the resources of the world to add fuel to the fire but also in terms of the war being exported to Africa, to Asia, to the Americas.
Are there any take-homes or generalizations we can make after reading it? Although, as I say, the two points that come out of the book are the need to treat the war internationally and the need to see it globally. Those were the new departures that he made when the book came out in Although some people had talked about looking at it in those terms, not enough people had.
On the causes of the war, he does two interesting things. This slithering-by-accident-into-war is not the case. If you want to find the causes of the war, we have to look deeper. We have to look into mentalities: And even cultural trends. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter. One of the points that he makes is that the traditional distinction that most historians make—whereby, broadly, you have international historians talking about the causes of war and then military historians talking about what happens during the war—is a false one.
Nor can you understand the conduct without understanding the causes.
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And so he tries, if you like, to bridge the divide between peace and war. You have to keep expanding, or else you will die as a country or as a nation. That idea goes deep into the German psyche. The book is about , and he writes about a key battle that year, the Battle of the Marne. The first two books we discussed were both trying to tell the global history of the war.
This book is doing something different. Adrian Gregory is one of the best historians of the British Home Front that we have. The way that the book pulls together social history and cultural history, in particular, is the most distinctive thing about it. It was an extreme view, but there were people who thought that.
There were others, for instance, who when the churchmen stood up on a Sunday and gave their sermons and said we should fight the Hun because he represents everything that is ungodly believed that too. A lot of the tropes that were used were suggesting—maybe sometimes very subtly—that this was a sacrifice not only for Britain but also to God.
A lot of modern historians, because of who we are and the relatively secular society that most of us have been brought up in, tend to underestimate how much religion was part of the warp and weft of everyday life years ago. It must, therefore, have played a much greater role in explaining how people acted. Are there any other reasons that people were prepared to go to war? What debate is this touching on? People did cheer in the streets, that definitely happened. But most people went off to war because they felt they had to, rather than because they actively wanted to. There are some people who are.
They make sure all that is done and then they join up. It happens after about a month. He seems to feel quite strongly about it. World War II looks like a straightforward crusade against the Nazis. World War I can look futile and hard to explain in comparison. The nature of the Second World War changed a lot as it went on. But, with hindsight, it looks very black and white.