Five Books on World War I
What to read on the 106th anniversary of the end of the war to end all wars
Today marks 106 years since the end of the First World War.
An armistice famously went into effect at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, bringing combat to a halt on the Western Front. France and Britain had been fighting Imperial Germany for over four years, with the United States joining the struggle in April 1917 but only really making its military might felt over the course of the following year. Over the course of roughly a year and a half of combat, some 53,000 Americans were killed in action—an indicator of the brutal nature of the war as it finally left the trenches in its final six months.
The world’s first industrial war brought a host of new technologies to the battlefield, from tanks and airplanes to submarines and chemical weapons. It also proved the world’s most destructive conflict to date, leaving millions dead while shattering empires and toppling the existing international order. Though the war in Western Europe came to an end, fighting continued to rage across Eastern Europe and the former Russian empire, fueling the rise of fascism and consolidating Soviet communism.
Meanwhile, America refused to participate in the postwar settlement President Woodrow Wilson helped negotiate, leaving erstwhile American allies in the lurch when it came to their own security. What’s more, a churlish American insistence that its allies pay off their war debts in full led to the creation of a convoluted scheme of reparations and finance that came crashing down just over a decade later. Another, even more cataclysmic war would inevitably result from America’s failure to play its part in global politics.
On this somber anniversary, here are five books that have helped me make sense of the First World War:
The Great War: A Combat History of the First World War: British historian Peter Hart provides an excellent overview of the strategies and tactics used throughout the First World War, from the opening battles in France and Belgium to fighting in Italy, the Balkans, and the Middle East to the final Allied offensives that won the war in 1918. Most importantly, Hart uses oral histories effectively to give readers a sense of what those strategies and tactics actually meant in practice for the soldiers, sailors, and airmen on the front lines. Contrary to repeated claims that Allied generals, profligate with the lives of the men under their command, blundered and butchered their way through four years of war, Hart concludes that many did their best to adapt to the new and rapidly evolving conditions of industrial warfare. Ultimately, though, “the Allies won on the battlefield because of a massive superiority in numbers and resources.”
Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea: Today, World War I at sea is best remembered as the world’s first submarine war—especially in the United States, where Germany’s campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare finally brought America into the war in 1917. But historian Robert Massie’s mammoth tome reminds us that there was much more to the naval war than just submarines; the war saw the largest clash of battleships in history at the Battle of Jutland in 1916, where the German failure to break the British fleet led inexorably to the gamble on submarine warfare that would precipitate American intervention in the war. Massie also assembles a memorable cast of larger-than-life characters, at least on the British side, from First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill to the playboy Admiral David Beatty.
The Unsubstantial Air: American Fliers in the First World War: Author Samuel Hynes served as a fighter pilot in World War II, and he brings that background to bear on this superb account of the American experience in the world’s first air war. It’s not a systematic history of the American contribution to the air war nor an intimate personal narrative, but Hynes paints a portrait of what flying and fighting in World War I was like for the cadre of American pilots in France—and reminds us that flying itself was then almost as dangerous as aerial combat. And aerial combat was indeed brutal, especially as American airpower entered the fray en masse for the first time against still-ferocious German opposition as well as poor weather and the inherent limitations of their primitive flying machines. All in all, it’s a visceral, you-are-there account of what it was like to be an American combat pilot during the First World War.
Storm of Steel: German soldier and author Ernst Jünger clearly enjoyed war. But as much as war obviously enthralled Jünger, his largely dispassionate and matter-of-fact account of his time as an infantryman on the Western Front makes the miserable and frequently terrifying nature of life in the trenches exceptionally clear. The routine brutality of industrial warfare is laid bare in his narrative, which draws much of its power from the impersonal nature of his prose—Jünger is not an author given to excessive introspection or reflection. It’s also possible to see the wheels come off the German war machine as Storm of Steel progresses; British troops, Jünger and his comrades discover, are astonishingly well-provisioned compared to their own meager rations, and succumb to pandemic influenza with greater ease as a result.
Breaking the Heart of the World: Woodrow Wilson and the Fight for the League of Nations: Historian John Milton Cooper tackles the defining failure of Woodrow Wilson’s presidency: his failure to convince the nation to join the League of Nations and, more broadly, play the international role dictated by its power and influence. Cooper chronicles Wilson’s diplomatic maneuvers at the Versailles peace conference as well as his battles with recalcitrant partisans and die-hard isolationist legislators who would torpedo his attempt to create durable international order following the carnage of World War I. Wilson, Cooper persuasively argues, “cared far less about the particular provisions of the treaty [of Versailles] and [League of Nations] Covenant and far more about ensuring his nation’s commitment to an active role in preserving peace.” Though isolationists would win this battle, moreover, their victory did not “indicate widespread or natural tendencies toward isolationism among the mass of Americans.” That’s something we’d do well to remember today.
World War I is an enormous subject, one that of course cannot be captured in just five books. Here are some additional works I’ve found interesting or intriguing:
On the war at sea, Nick Jellicoe’s Jutland: The Unfinished Battle provides a detailed account of the battle and its persistent controversies, while Erik Larson’s Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania spins a gripping yarn about the 1915 sinking of the ocean liner Lusitania by a German submarine.
Theo Emery’s Hellfire Boys: The Birth of the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service and the Race for the World's Deadliest Weapons tells the largely unknown story of America’s World War I-era chemical weapons program—and the role a fledgling American University in Washington, DC played in devising and testing this deadly arsenal.
Historian Robert Gerwarth’s The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End looks at how the war spawned a series of brutal, vicious conflicts in Eastern Europe that persisted well beyond the armistice that ended the war on the Western Front.
World War I and America: Told By the Americans Who Lived It, a volume edited by the biographer A. Scott Berg, documents the American experience of the First World War via political speeches, journalistic accounts of the war, and opinion pieces from a diverse array of voices.
The hundredth anniversary of the war itself produced a number of stellar documentaries about the war and its various facets, with Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson’s moving and remarkable They Shall Not Grow Old standing head and shoulders above all others. NOVA, the PBS documentary series, aired several interesting short films about the First World War in the air, including “Zeppelin Terror Attack” and “First Air War.”
When it comes to cinematic depictions, Lawrence of Arabia probably remains the best and most popular film set during World War I. More recent entries include director Steven Spielberg’s criminally underrated War Horse and the pseudo-single take of director Sam Mendes in his 1917.
