Books about The Great War?

November 14, 2005 6:12 AM

MilitaryHistoryBookFilter. Seeking readable histories of soldier and homefront experience during World War I. I'm not so much interested in tactical aspect of particular battles as I am in the individuals and communities involved.

This is partly inspired by the last book I read, and also because my grandfather served with The Sixth Cavalry in France during WWI. While I'd like to find some layman-friendly history books, I'll take fiction recommendations as well.

posted by grabbingsand to Society & Culture (25 answers total)

Don't You Know There's a War On? is an incredibly readable pop history of the American home front. I credit it for not totally falling prey to rosy nostalgia: it covers unpleasant aspects of daily life during WWII as well, particularly racial strife and bias, antiwar activism and isolationism, and lack of complete acceptance of rationing and government regulations.
posted by Miko at 6:31 AM on November 14, 2005

The two fictional accounts that spring to mind are All Quiet on the Western Front and Birdsong.
posted by jontyjago at 6:46 AM on November 14, 2005

Storm of Steel is an account of life in the German trenches. An extraordinary read.
posted by patricio at 6:59 AM on November 14, 2005

Another vote for "All Quiet on the Western Front".
posted by CKZ at 7:01 AM on November 14, 2005

The poet Robert Graves' Goodbye to All That is an amazing firsthand account of WWI - possibly one of the best books I've ever read. Also, Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth is an engrossing read - after Brittain loses her brother and fiance to the war, she drops out of Oxford and becomes a nurse. Don't let the length scare you off - her story and descriptions of conditions of the war, both in England and abroad, are fascinating.

Two of my favorite histories are Paul Fussell's Great War and Modern Memory and Barbara Tuchman's Guns of August. I usually get bogged down in too many particulars in historical accounts - I'm more of a lazy fiction reader - but I found these two easy to read (and keep reading once I started).

Finally, if you want some good WWI fiction, try A Very Long Engagement and Pat Barker's Regeneration. The latter has two more books in a series, but I thought they got tedious pretty quickly.
posted by bibliowench at 7:04 AM on November 14, 2005

This puppy had me from the get go. It's a bit short on perspective but anecdotally is about as good as it gets. Also this is one my girlfriend recommends. She works at the Imperial War Museum and is incapable of being wrong.
posted by Jofus at 7:07 AM on November 14, 2005

Start with the War Poets (Owen, Sassoon, Rosenberg), dip your toes into Jones' In Parenthesis, and go through the various letters from some of the Voices of War books that Jofus cites above.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 7:28 AM on November 14, 2005

Duh, I'm so sorry. I misread your "I" as a "II". Disregard my recommendation.
posted by Miko at 7:44 AM on November 14, 2005

Another great (and hilarious) fictional account, as told from the Czech perspective, is Jaroslav Hasek's The Good Soldier Svejk.
posted by saladin at 7:55 AM on November 14, 2005

Her Privates We by Frederic Manning is an excellent book.

I can also second the recommendation for Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves.
posted by ciaron at 8:09 AM on November 14, 2005

...and what robocop is bleeding said. Particularly about my original post.
posted by Jofus at 8:13 AM on November 14, 2005

One more fictional account, but with a fair amount of pedigree (based on previous novels about the Civil War and American Revolution) is Jeff Shaara's To The Last Man. I'm reading it right now and am enjoying it. It focuses on four individuals - Manfred von Richthofen (aka the Red Baron), Raoul Lufbery (the first ace of the Lafayette Escadrille, John Pershing (the American General), and a fourth who I have not reached yet. Very readable, engrossing, and (as far as I can tell) factually accurate. That being said, you only get a view of the war as the four main characters saw it. Not a lot of broad strategic views.
posted by gregchttm at 8:15 AM on November 14, 2005

I just finished To The Last Man. An excellent book. History based fiction. It follows several characters (The Red Baron, Raul Luffberry, Gen. Pershing, and an American private) through the war.

Lots of great scenes in the trenches as well as air battles.
posted by bondcliff at 8:15 AM on November 14, 2005

Dalton Trumbo's devastating Johnny Got His Gun.

Quite a few of Ernest Hemingway's early short stories deal with returning home after World War I. In Our Time is his first short story collection, and includes the very good "The Big Two-Hearted River." (The Complete Short Stories is a more complete collection.) A Farewell to Arms is his classic World War I novel, but it deals more with events during the war.

More at Wikipedia's Literature of World War I page.
posted by kirkaracha at 9:29 AM on November 14, 2005

I haven't read these, but America's Great War: World War I and the American Experience and Over Here: The First World War and American Society sound interesting.
posted by kirkaracha at 9:37 AM on November 14, 2005

The Englishman's daughter : a true story of love and betrayal in World War I by Ben Macintyre.

Small band of British soldiers get left behind the lines in 1914. Local villagers protect them from occupying Germans for the next two years. Simply amazing.
posted by IndigoJones at 9:42 AM on November 14, 2005

(UK title for Mr Macintyre's book is A Foreign Field.)
posted by IndigoJones at 9:47 AM on November 14, 2005

Robert Graves, Goodbye To All That. (The classic account of the Western Front -- brilliant and gripping, though not entirely reliable as a work of autobiography; there are semi-fictionalised elements in it too.)

Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. (Sassoon hated Goodbye To All That, and this is his own version of events -- ironic and melancholy where Graves is cynical and bitter. His Diaries 1915-1918 have also been published.)

Edmund Blunden, Undertones of War. (The third of the three great memoirs of the Western Front. May come as a disappointment after Graves and Sassoon -- more pastoral, less blood-and-guts -- but still worth reading.)

Marc Bloch, Memoirs of War 1914-15. (The war as seen by a French soldier -- a useful counterpoint to the English accounts.)

Ernst Junger, Storm of Steel. (The view from the other side.)

For the view from the (English) home front: the story of Rudyard Kipling and his son Jack (killed on the Western Front in 1915) is desperately sad. Kipling passionately believed the war was right, but at the same time couldn't forgive himself for having indirectly caused his son's death by encouraging him to enlist. See T. and V. Holt, My Boy Jack: The Search for Kipling's Only Son.

Regeneration and Birdsong have been highly praised, but I found them a disappointment: when you've read the first-hand accounts of the Western Front, these fictional recreations can't help seeming slightly fake. If you're looking for a novel of the Great War, read The Lord of the Rings.
posted by verstegan at 10:43 AM on November 14, 2005

John Keegan's The Face of Battle recreates and contrasts the battlefield experience of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme.
posted by russilwvong at 11:09 AM on November 14, 2005

Not a book, but worth a look is this photoset from flickr called WWI Eastern Front Foto.
posted by dripdripdrop at 11:29 AM on November 14, 2005

Not available yet on Project Gutenburg, but _My War Experiences in Two Continents_ by Sarah Macnaughtan has been fascinating to proofread. She was a journalist who ran a soup kitchen in Belgium for injured soldiers, then tried to do the same on the Persian front. This is her diary, with letters added. Much shorter than Vera Brittain's book, and much more informative.
posted by QIbHom at 12:06 PM on November 14, 2005

As a primary source, I'd highly recommend With a Machine Gun to Cambrai by George Coppard.

Lots of good suggestions on histories above. For a bit of controversy read chapter 12 of Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War for an examination of why the troops themselves fought. It's available in paperback and very easy to get into even if you know little about the period (although beware, his arguments are beguiling but can be argued with).
posted by greycap at 1:23 PM on November 14, 2005

Here is a great bibliography with notes and links.
posted by tellurian at 4:48 PM on November 14, 2005

I just finished "The Guns of August," and it was one of the best written books I've ever read. It's not a narrative story about a particular person like a novel would be, but Barbara Tuchman goes into great detail about the personalities of the people who made big decisions during the first month of the war. She shows that cultural misunderstanding and human weakness played at least a big a role as tactical miscues in the high casualty rates of the war's beginning. And it's beautiful, the entire book. It blew my mind.
posted by croutonsupafreak at 7:39 AM on November 15, 2005

Not directly answering the question, but since a couple of people have mentioned The Guns of August:

I came across an interesting post on H-DIPLO a few months back which questioned the conventional wisdom on World War II, suggesting that the latest historical research shows Imperial Germany was determined to go to war--it didn't blunder into the war. The author is William Keylor, a historian at Boston University.

Before addressing some of the major issues that he raises, I would like to take up a point that he touches only in passing but which has long intrigued me. That is the yawning gap between the consensus of scholarly specialists about a particular historical subject and the popular perception of the educated public.

Let us take as examples of this phenomenon the two general topics of Professor D’Agostino’s lucid essay. If one were to question the historically knowledgeable person today about the origins of the Great War, one would probably receive a reply something like the following: the great powers of Europe blundered into a war in the summer of 1914 that none of them wanted to fight, because their leaders failed to negotiate a peaceful resolution of an arcane dispute in the Balkans. All of the belligerent states therefore deserve equal blame for permitting, through the blindness, miscalculation, and inaction of their leaders, the outbreak of the most deadly conflict in human history up to that time. That is what President Kennedy gleaned from his reading of Barbara Tuchman’s _The Guns of August_ as he sought to avoid an even more lethal outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

There is an abundant scholarship that has definitively demonstrated that Imperial Germany used the Sarajevo assassination as a pretext to wage a carefully planned preventive war and sabotaged all efforts to reach a peaceful solution of the crisis. But this interpretation has never advanced beyond the professional journals and scholarly monographs to challenge the “blundering into Armageddon, all were guilty” thesis, which continues to hold pride of place in the public imagination.[3]

[3] Fritz Fischer unearthed the evidence of the German plan long ago, but while his path-breaking Graff nach der Weltmacht generated a lively debate in Germany and among academic historians in the English-speaking world, its findings never found their way into popular histories of the war. David Fromkin’s recent work _Europe’s Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914?_ (New York, 2004) brilliantly confirms the Fischer thesis and summarizes the evidence from recent scholarship of the German preventive war scheme.
posted by russilwvong at 9:06 AM on November 15, 2005