The First World War

Rating:
Summary: This is a military and political history of the Great War
Review: This is a one-volume military history of the First World War that includes political and social background sufficient to give the prosecution of the war context. Keegan does an admirable job of setting up the competing viewpoints about the start of the war. He calls the beginning mysterious and I suppose that is true. I have always found that whole of the Great War a vague cultural memory until I read this quite valuable book.

It is almost impossible to capture the mindset that unleashed this horrible convulsive nightmare as if it were going to be some sort of quick and simple vindication of the home team. Yet it appears that all sides had little concern for the war at its beginning. Yet, it soon descended into a fiery pit that consumed the youth and treasure of Europe and the western world.

While Keegan is obviously and proudly British, his objectivity is admirable. He praises and criticizes the deserving on all sides of the conflict. He wants to help us understand what happened so we can begin to fathom they whys (which always have to come after understanding the what, where, how, and when).

I particularly enjoyed Keegan's description of the breaking of armies in 1917-18 and his description of the way the war ground to its end. Its end seems almost as strange as its beginning. The war was a convulsive madness that kept the combatants struggling beyond all reason and sense and then, it seems one day they just decide to stop.

Keegan's statement that the Second World War was a continuation of the First is becoming a more common view and will, I believe, become the standard view and the way the wars will be discussed. Given the strange beginning of the war and the viciousness with which it was fought, it seems natural that the victors would take an out their rage on the vanquished. We know now that this lopsided peace sowed the seeds of the whirlwind we still call World War II.

If I have one criticism of the book, it is that I think it really does give America's participation in the war short shrift. This seems like over compensation to me. If America has a fixation on its role in winning the World Wars at the expense of blinding itself to the great sacrifices of other peoples in bringing about victory, it seems to me that the sacrifices of American lives seem barely mentioned beyond their being a lot of them and their being more enthusiastic than efficient. There is simply so much to tell in such a small space that everything is told more briefly than its partisans would like and I am an American partisan.

At the very end of the book, Keegan says, "If we could understand [the war's] loves as well as its hates, we would nearer understanding the mystery of human life." I think this is can be a spur to other analyses of the war. Once we have the prosecution of the war in our minds the deeper whys can be asked. I think once such book is Glenn Watkins' wonderful "Proof Through The Night: Music and the Great War", which adds a great deal to the cultural impact of the war and the culture's impact during the war. If you want to read something beyond the arguments about the battles and politics, Watkins is a great book to read.

You cannot read just one book and hope to have more than a superficial understanding of this awful conflict. However, this is a great volume to get a handle on the outlines and battles of the conflagration. There is a topical bibliography and many footnotes that will aid further reading and study. I think this is an essential book.

Rating:
Summary: Erudite but boring at times
Review: I love history and history books. I had great hopes for this one since I have read others by the author but the prose seems almost disconnected at time. There is LOTS of background and LOTS of evidence to support various conjectures, but somehow these seem disjointed from the tale. The book was packed full of information but that data seemed almost unrelated to the story. And he committed the worst sin of a writer - he bored. Better luck next time, John.

Rating:
Summary: Review of First World War
Review: This is probably on a par with anything written by Barbara Tuchman. I learned new things about the war and its aftermath (1918 to 1921) that I had never known, especially because of the author's attention to detail on more than just the Western or Eastern fronts. Although it's detailed (nearing Kevin Philips quality), it's very readable. It would have benefited from the judicious use of more battlefield maps, especially for the typical American ignorant of the local geography of Flanders.

Nevertheless, this is a very pertinent book today for the world in which we live. Incidentally, if the description of the English losses at the Somme doesn't bring a tear to your eye, the only generous interpretation is that you missed that section. A small criticism is that the author spends more time than needed foreshadowing the calamity of WWII and not enough exploring the circumstances leading to WWI.

Rating:
Summary: A solid overview
Review: This was the first book I read about the entire First World War, although I had read a few on the prelude to that terrible conflict. I highly recommend Barbara Tuchmann's "The guns of August" for an overview of the events that led to the stalemate in Northern France, and Robert Massey's "Dreadnought" on the political build-up to the storm.
The book is well-written, though I must confess that putting it down was not as hard as I had hoped it would be. Certainly the amount of information is staggering, and the writer appears to have a very solid grasp of the subject. This being my first read of a number of the events described here, I could not comment on the author's accuracy other than to say that it looks convincing! Keegan has his favourites (the Germans are not among them, nor is General Haig) but that makes for a more lively read than strictly observed neutrality.
The only problem with the book is that it needs a great deal more maps, and the maps need better definition in terms of places and geographic barriers. I found myself leafing back to maps that gave a bit of an impression of an area - often to find that the detail I was looking for was not there.
Other than that, I found this a good book to introduce a reader to the battles of the First World War.

Rating:
Summary: Enjoyable for military history buffs
Review: This is a great introduction to the "Great War". The Western Front is understandably the focus of much of the text, but the reader gets a good picture of the "world" aspect to WWI, with time spent on battles in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and the High Seas. Overall, the book does not go too indepth on any particular factor of the war, but provides a good overview. If there is to be a complaint, it is that too much focus is placed on military unit movements and not enough on the "culture" of the war (trench-life, technology, propaganda, the homefront, politics, causes). Also, the Treaty of Versailles is COMPLETELY ignored!

But, if you want a what-happened-when account of the war, this is a GREAT book

Rating:
Summary: The First World War
Review: Esteemed military historian Keegan places the disastrous and still puzzling events of 1914-18 into a superb narrative. He is especially good at explaining the most befuddling part--the war's beginning, which he relates not with tired, powder-keg metaphors but with fresh analysis showing that, among other things, the reticence of European diplomats to use the telephone instead of traditional letters and cables allowed events to speed out of control.

Rating:
Summary: Cries Out for a Rewrite
Review: I have finally finished the book. In an earlier review, I choked on the poor writing style--you can see this review a few weeks earlier at Amazon. Keegan needs to revise this book, and this time, he must take control of the map making. There are not enough maps (lots of earlier reviewers have complained about this), and the person who made the maps did not read what is written in the text. First, there needs to be five times as many maps. Secondly, the towns that were involved in the battles must be shown on the maps. Thirdly, the maps must show topology--we need to see the mountains, lakes, and bogs (and how about boundaries between the countries?). Can you believe that there is only one major map showing all the Western battle fields from 1914 to 1918 and that appears on about page 125? I am going to the library and search for a better book on WW1.

Rating:
Summary: Lost without a map in the Belgian woods.
Review: A practicing military historian, with a good grasp of the geography of Europe in 1914, might thoroughly enjoy this book. Apparently many have. It is immensely detailed in its treatments of the battles of the war and doubtless such detail informs a keen grasp of any battle. But that detail is almost completely unsupported by maps, keys or legends allowing the less-expert reader to maintain his bearings.

If you don't know the difference between a corps and a brigade, if you haven't memorized the twists and turns of the rivers of Europe along with the lay of the forests and of the ridges, you will be simply lost. Can you locate Luxembourg in your mental map of Europe? picture the fit of Belgium into Germany? sketch the course of the Meuse? Consider this passage:

"Lanzerac, in a conference held at Chimay on the afternoon of 21 August, told the Chiefs of Staff of his subordinate corps that the plan was for Fifth Army to hold the high ground on the south bank of the Sambre. He feared that if he committed his soldiers to hold the dense belt of little industrial buildings and cottages - le Boringe - that line the bank between Charleroi and Namur, they would become involved in small-scale street fighting and be lost''

After 95 pages of this I quit. Just looking at the number of times my spell-checker choked on the preceding paragraph reminds me of how densely geographic the first quarter of the book was. I honestly considered reading it with an atlas at hand - but that's hardly a relaxing read.

Excepting European and world maps printed on the front and back pastedowns, the book provides only 15 maps over the entire 450 pages and 4 years of war. All but one, I might add, appear after my own defeat on page 95! Few of these support the level of on-the-ground detail of Keegan's text. When they do so, as in the case of his map of the famous Gallipoli battle, which provides both detail and an inset reminding one where the Gallipoli peninsula is, it reminds one of what was glaringly absent in the dozens of prior battle descriptions.

The book has two discrete segments of photographs which seem to be a somewhat random assortment of images, albeit suitable gritty ones. For more illustration a later, putatively separate book provides 'An Illustrated History of the First World War' which I have reviewed separately (hint' still no maps !).

As a final critique, this book would more aptly be titled 'A Military History of the First World War'. Although it devotes a decent handful of pages up front to noting the diplomatic stutterings that failed to prevent the war, it hardly seems to address the world outside the battlefield after 1914.

Two stars for the immense amount of military detail.

Rating:
Summary: Poor Use of English Language for an Important Subject
Review: You should believe the other reviewers when they say the writing is poor. Let me give you an example from page 27: "Though A.J.P. Taylor was flippantly wrong to characterize the outbreak of 1914 as 'war by timetable,' since statesmen might have averted it at any time, given goodwill, by ignoring professional military advice, the characterization is accurate in a deeper sense." Do you get the idea? Every paragraph has sentences like that, making this book difficult to read. On the positive side, his knowledge is deep and wide, but you are going to have to dig.

I just finished Barbara Tuchman's "The Guns of August"--what a difference. I wish I knew of another book on this general subject so I could recommend it. Tuchman's book covers only about the first 30 days of the war.

Rating:
Summary: Dry, but informative...
Review: I went into this book knowing next to nothing about WWI aside from the ten minutes they talk about it in grade school. The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, lots of dead people, and that's about it. What I came away with was an appreciation for how utterly pointless this conflict was, and a real understanding of what went on in the headquarters of both sides, and what precipitated the horrors that earned WWI the name "War to End All Wars."

What this book provides is a bird's-eye view of the conflict. It begins with the political climate surrounding the initial flare-ups, and the plunge into all-out war. The combat is described from the perspective of a General, where strategic movement is a focal point, while the horrors of war and casualty numbers are mentioned only in passing. There is very little discussion of weapons and tactics, Keegan prefers to describe the attempts made by Generals to break the stalemate. There is a final chapter which lends some emotion to the book, but for the most part, Keegan leaves the life of the private for other authors.

This book is not an easy read, and any reader will find him/herself "plowing through" sections that are pretty dry and full of unit names and roman numerals. However, this is essential to to bigger picture, and from the standpoint of learning about the First World War, this was an excellent, informative first read.