WW1 further reading
Books to take you further into each episode of The Real First World War, chosen by Michael Baker. Links lead to the historian interviewed in that episode.
Books are not listed in order of importance. The year usually denotes the edition rather than first publication.
The indispensable reference work here is Heather Jones' eve-of-the-centenary article in The Historical Journal, 56, 3 (2013), pp.857-878, in which she reviews the recent historiography of the First World War. Almost all the works mentioned in Episode 1 are to be found in this article. The key authors/publications (in English) are the following:
- Alan Clark, The Donkeys (London, 1961)
- John Keegan, The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme (London, 1976)
- Martin Middlebrook, The First Day on the Somme: 1 July 1916 (London, 1971)
- Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford, 1975)
- Fritz Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War (Norton & Co., 1967 – originally published in German in 1961)
- Annika Mombauer, Helmuth von Moltke and the Origins of the First World War (Cambridge, 2001)
- Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (London , 2012)
- Dominic Lieven, The End to Tsarist Russia: The March to World War I and Revolution (Viking, 2015)
- William Mulligan, The Origins of the First World War (Cambridge, 2010)
- Ute Frevert, A Nation in Barracks: Modern Germany, Military Conscription and Civil Society (New York, 2004)
- Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Cornell University Press, 2006)
- Gary Sheffield, Forgotten Victory: The First World War – Myths and Realities (London, 2001)
- Gary Sheffield, The Chief: Douglas Haig and the British Army (London, 2011)
- Jonathan Boff, Winning and Losing on the Western Front: The British Third Army and the Defeat of Germany in 1918 (Cambridge, 2012)
- David Stevenson, With Our Backs To The Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918 (London, 2011)
- Alexander Watson, Enduring the Great War: Combat, Morale and Collapse in the German and British Armies, 1914-1918 (Cambridge & New York, NY, 2008)
- Alexander Watson, Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria-Hungary at War, 1914-1918 (London 2014)
- Mary E. Cox, Hunger in War and Peace: Women and Children in Germany, 1914-1924 (Oxford, 2019)
- Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau & Annette Becker, 14-18: Understanding the Great War (New York, NY, 2002)
Many of the above publications are useful for the series as a whole, but below is a brief list for suggested further exploration of the more specific topics dealt with in Episodes 2-10 (speaker in each episode marked in red):
- Apart from Gary Sheffield’s two indispensable works in the list above under Episode 1, see also Gary Sheffield & Dan Todman, eds., Command and Control on the Western Front: The British Army’s Experience 1914-1918 (Spellmount, 2004)
- Robin Prior & Trevor Wilson, Command on the Western Front (Oxford, 1992)
- William Philpott, Bloody Victory: The Sacrifice on the Somme and the Making of the Twentieth Century (London 2009)
- Apart from Jonathan Boff’s Winning and Losing on the Western Front (see above, under Episode 1), see also his Haig’s Enemy: Crown Prince Rupprecht and Germany’s War on the Western Front (Oxford, 2018)
- David T. Zabecki, The German 1918 Offensives: A Case Study in the Operational Level of War (London, 2006)
- Alexander Watson, Enduring the Great War (see above, under Episode 1)
- Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction (see above, under Episode 1)
- John Horne & Daniel Kramer, German Atrocities in 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven, 2001)
- Diana Preston, A Higher Form of Killing: Six Weeks in World War I That Forever Changed The Nature of Warfare (London, 2015)
- Isabel V. Hull, A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making of International Law during the Great War (Cornell University Press, 2014)
- Daniel Charles, Between Genius and Genocide: The Tragedy of Fritz Haber, Father of Chemical Warfare (London, 2006)
- John Horne & Daniel Kramer, German Atrocities in 1914 (see above, under Episode 3)
- Taylor Downing, Breakdown: The Crisis of Shell Shock on the Somme, 1916 (London, 2016)
- Peter Leese, Shell Shock: Traumatic Neuroses and the British Soldiers of the First World War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002)
- Fiona Reid, Broken Men: Shell Shock, Treatment and Recovery in Britain 1914-1930 (London, 2010)
- Alexander Watson, Enduring the Great War (see above, under Episode 1)
- George Morton Jack, The Indian Empire at War: From Jihad to Victory – The Untold Story of the Indian Army in the First World War (London, 2018)
- Santanu Das, India, Empire and First World War Culture: Writings, Images and Songs (Cambridge, 2018)
- David Omissi, ed., Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ Letters, 1914-1918 (Palgrave Macmillan, 1999)
- Peter Hart, The Last Battle: Endgame on the Western Front, 1918 (Profile Books, 2018)
- David Stevenson, With Our Backs To The Wall (see above, under Episode 1)
- Derek Clayton, Decisive Victory: The Battle of the Sambre, 4 November 1918 (Wolverhampton Military Studies, 2018)
- Tim Travers, How The War Was Won (London, 1992)
- J. H. Hallas, Doughboy War: The American Expeditionary Force in WWI (Stackpole Books, 2009)
- Jonathan Boff: Winning and Losing on the Western Front (see above, under Episode 1)
- Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished: How the First World War Failed to End, 1917-23 (London, 2016)
- Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace (London, 2013)
- Alexander V. Prusin, The Lands Between: Conflict in the Eastern European Borderlands, 1870-1992 (Oxford, 2010)
- Justin McCarthy, The Ottoman Peoples and the End of Empire (London, 2005)
- Anthony Read, The World on Fire: 1919 and the Battle with Bolshevism (London, 2008)
- Jonathan Smele, The ‘Russian’ Civil Wars 1916-26: Ten Years That Shook The World (Oxford, 2015)
- William Philpott, Attrition: Fighting The First World War (London 2014)
- Hew Strachan, The First World War (London, 2014 – first published in 2003)
- David Stevenson, 1914-18: The History of the First World War (London, 2004)
- Lawrence Sondhaus, World War One: The Global Revolution (Cambridge, 2011)
- Mark Connelly & Stefan Goebel, Great Battles: Ypres (Oxford, 2019)
- David Reynolds, The Long Shadow: The Great War and the Twentieth Century (London, 2013)
- Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge, 1995)
- Dan Todman, The Great War: Myth and Memory (London, 2005)
- Catherine Switzer, Ulster, Ireland and the Somme (Dublin, 2013)
- David Crane, Empires of the Dead: How One Man’s Vision Led To The Creation of WWI’s War Graves (London, 2013)
The historiography of the First World War is vast, so this is not meant to be a definitive list but rather the start of a journey - for the curious, the dabbler and the enthusiast alike. As with all good journeys, these works will inevitably lead you to others.