Real War 1914-1918

An excellent work. However, probably the more one has studied WW1, the better one will be able to appreciate the book.

Captain's Hart book fell a bit short of my expectations as I was more concerned about the political causes and consequences of the war. Its focus is the military development, and in this regard is an excelente book, in spite of the horrible maps. A work like this deserved a refreshed edition, and good maps are a must to understand the military flow. This book was published in 1930, so the consequences of the Versailles Treaty could not be fully appraised, but Captain's Hart feeling, exposed in the last chapter offer a hint of the terrible outcome. I recommend for those looking for a compact and comprehensive history of military movements and a very interesting account of the use of then new technologies like machine guns, tanks, submarines, airplanes and their impact in the outcome of the war.

good

This book must be read in the context of who the author was. Sir Basil Liddell Hart was much more than a military historian, although as a historian he did important original work, such as interviewing German generals after World War 2 to obtain their first-hand perspective on important battles of that conflict, and exhaustive archival research on both world wars. Liddell Hart also was a foremost military thinker of his time, on both the strategic and tactical levels, and is often credited with being the father of modern armored warfare. During the interwar period, some of the rising stars in the German officer corps were impressed and influenced by his ideas, and thus Liddell Hart unwittingly became a key architect of the stunning Blitzkrieg tactics that quickly overran Poland in 1939 and France in 1940. Liddell Hart also influenced British defense policy in the 1930s; he argued that instead of sending a large land army to the Continent to aid its allies, Britain should concentrate on naval and air power with securing the British Empire its primary objective, and supporting allies secondary. He suggested backing up France with a strong air force instead of sending troops across the Channel. These ideas shaped Neville Chamberlain's defense policies; but in 1939, the British government did an abrupt about-face, raised a large land army, sent it to France, and in May 1940 had to rescue its remnants from the beaches of Dunkirk. For those who believe in letting history be the judge of who was right or wrong, Liddell Hart's stature as a military thinker has continued to grow with the passage of time, reinforced by the application of his ideas in the Israeli-Arab wars. First and foremost, he was an insistent proponent of mobile warfare, utilizing tactics built around the tank, and of tackling the enemy's defenses by what he called the "indirect approach," including use of diversions and feints to dislocate the enemy and confuse him about the attacker's intentions. Liddell Hart deduced and predicted the D-Day battle plans and landing locations so accurately that British intelligence conducted an investigation in the belief that someone on the British general staff must have leaked the plans to him. In short, Liddell Hart was a superb and forward-thinking strategist and tactician whose ideas revolutionized modern land warfare and are still influential today. His perspective on military problems was enhanced by his personal experiences as a junior officer in the British Army in 1914-1916, including participation in the first day of the 1916 Somme offensive, which saw the British army suffer the bloodiest repulse of its history. Now for the book. It is, to some extent, a bitter criticism of the frontal assault tactics employed in the early years of the First World War by both sides, no doubt colored by Liddell Hart's personal witness at the Somme and other battles, but there can be no dispute with the correctness of his thinking; the advent of the machine gun and barbed wire clearly rendered head-on infantry assault both suicidal and ineffective. In this respect, the book is an appeal to future military authorities to adopt the indirect strategy and mobile tactics that Liddell Hart concluded were both more militarily effective and more economical of soldiers' lives. For the more casual reader, who is less concerned about the methods of the military trade, the book offers a chronologically organized overview of the major campaigns and battles with useful commentary about what worked and what didn't work, and why. There are no descriptions of fighting or personal stories; this book tells the story of the war on a scale of maps, armies, and generals, and does so comprehensively and in a way understandable to non-military-expert readers. Perhaps better overviews of the First World War have been written over the years, but this book, written in the 1920s and first published in 1930, was one of the first and remains among the best of the capsule histories. It was written just after the war, when memories and experiences were still fresh and many of the key players were still alive. This immediacy, together with the author's incisive comprehension of military matters, continues to make Liddell Hart's history authoritative and compelling nearly a century after the opening shots were fired. I have read many World War 1 books, but I keep re-reading this one, and my copy is now dog-eared, worn, and falling apart.

This is an excellent history of WWI, giving insight into the causes, the people, and the battles.

This book is a clear and detailed analysis of the reasons for the blow-out of the WWI and of the development of the conflict. THe author is the famous historian and expert of military theories Sir Basil H. Liddell Hart.The first 80 pages are dedicated to the origins of the war that he attributes to the supremacy of the generals above the politicians, for all the most important nations : Germany was scared by the Russian rearming, Austria was scared by the new Serbia (that doubled her population after the Balcanic wars 1912-13); Russia was scared by the Austro-German alliance and so on.All the others 500 pages are dedicated to the development of the war with a great care to examine the strategical mistakes happened during the war: the British insult to the Ottoman Empire with the requisition of the two dreadnoughts under construction, the movement of the centre of gravity of the first German offensive in France, the confues ideas that brought GReat britain and France to the disastrous landins at Gallipoli, the useless series of Allied offensives on the western Front with their huge amount of losses, and so on.This book is a precious one, don't miss it.

I picked this book up somewhat on a whim. I was looking for a book that would give me good overview of WWI, filling in the details left out in the brief mentions found in our high school history books. And this after reading an abridged version of Winston Churchill's "The Great War". Captain Hart's account is not for someone looking for an "easy read". I don't know of any substaintial account of this war that could be written as an "easy read". Of course Captian Hart is writing with 20-20 hindsight, so he is able to see and give account of the miscalculations and errors. Would we have done any better then Foch and the other allied Generals under the times and circumstances? I have my doubts, but we are in the "now" and can learn from the tragic mistakes of the past. If ever war was "hell", it was so in the trenches of France. Somewhere in France near the Argonne Forest rests the mortal remains of Pvt. George Britton, my great-uncle, killed exactly 4 weeks before the Armistice. In Hart's account, I at least find some facts to help me understand what happened there, and come to grips somewhat with why my Uncle died at a young age, far from home and family. RIP