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Can anyone recommend a good book on WWI? I'm especially interested in events that lead up to the conflict. I know Barbara Tuchman has written a book on the subject but I'm looking for something a bit shorter and less detail oriented. I would also prefer something more recent. Thanks in advance.
I would offer up that Dreadnought by Robert Massie is superb in that regard.
Kaiser Wilhelm blundered by building a large navy. There was no strategic reason for doing so, yet it completely alienated the British. Mind you, the Brits saw their navy as essential to national survival and therefore saw the Kaiser's building program as an existential threat. So the Brits slowly came to realize that their national interests lay with France and Russia, two powers that were heretofore geopolitical rivals.
Really an interesting story. The theory of Conservation of Enemies has never been better illustrated.
His sequel, Castles of the Sea, also does an excellent job of covering naval operations in World War I.
I would offer up that Dreadnought by Robert Massie is superb in that regard.
Kaiser Wilhelm blundered by building a large navy. There was no strategic reason for doing so, yet it completely alienated the British. Mind you, the Brits saw their navy as essential to national survival and therefore saw the Kaiser's building program as an existential threat. So the Brits slowly came to realize that their national interests lay with France and Russia, two powers that were heretofore geopolitical rivals.
Really an interesting story. The theory of Conservation of Enemies has never been better illustrated.
His sequel, Castles of the Sea, also does an excellent job of covering naval operations in World War I.
Both excellent books, I have them both.
Another interesting WW1 book is "Myth of the Great War" by John Mosier. This book goes into detail how the Central Powers, especially the Germans, generally fought the war much better then the Allies. It tries to explain how the Central Powers despite being outnumbered and cutoff from supplies from the outside world, managed to keep fighting for so long.
A good general history of WW1 I read is "The Story of the Great War 1914 to 1918" by G. J. Meyer.
Can anyone recommend a good book on WWI? I'm especially interested in events that lead up to the conflict. I know Barbara Tuchman has written a book on the subject but I'm looking for something a bit shorter and less detail oriented. I would also prefer something more recent. Thanks in advance.
There are so many documentaries and publications today on Youtube and Google to the point one wonders whether a book would bring up any other original finding.
Eden to Armageddon is a great look at WWI against the Ottomans. I never knew how close the Allies came to knocking the Ottomans out of the war early on, and how much their failure to do so was simply a choice to do so.
While ending a decade or so before WWI, The Ottoman Gulf is a look at how much the Ottoman Empire at the start of WWI existed mostly on paper and in the imagination of people in charge of the Great Powers. As far as I know this is the only book English language book that looks at this area and period in time through Ottoman archives and not British.
Similarly, while focused on roughly a thousand years of history, the last few chapters of Danubia looks at the collapse of Austria-Hungary and how far in the past its seeds had been sewn as well as how Franz Ferdinand had identified and planned to rectify these weaknesses. I'm not sure his fabricated civil war would have allowed him to gut Hungarian power to the extent he needed to really strengthen the empire, but it was certainly creative thinking.
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