Showing titles in World War I

From the young airmen who took their frail machines high above the trenches of World War I and fought their foes in single combat, there emerged a renowned company of brilliant aces - among them Ball, Bishop, McCudden, Collishaw, and Mannock - whose legendary feats have echoed down half a century. But behind the elite pilots in the Royal Flying Corps, there were many hundreds of airmen who flew their hazardous daily sorties in outdated planes without ever achieving fame.

One of the most popular accounts by an Australian veteran of WWI - written entirely from the private soldier's point of view.

"Good-Bye to All That: An Autobiography" by Robert Graves is a seminal work that vividly captures the harrowing experiences of a young British officer during World War I.

Eugene Bullard lived one of the most fascinating lives of the 20th century. The son of a former slave and an indigenous Creek woman, Bullard fled home at the age of 11 to escape the racial hostility of his Georgia community. When his journey led him to Europe, he garnered worldwide fame as a boxer, and later as the first African-American fighter pilot in history. After the war, Bullard returned to Paris a celebrated hero. But little did he know that the dramatic, globe-spanning arc of his life had just begun.

In 1960, the Imperial War Museum began a momentous task. A team of academics, archivists and volunteers set about tracing ordinary men and women who had lived through one of the most harrowing periods of modern history, the First World War. Veterans were interviewed in details about their day-to-day experiences, on and off the front. The project has since grown to be the most important archive of its kind in the world, and provides a unique account of life during the Great War.

Captain Eddie V. Rickenbacker, originally from Ohio, was best known as one of the commanders of the 94th "Hat-in-the-Ring" Squadron, a crack unit of World War I pilots that included many former members of the famed Lafayette Escadrille. The 94th ended the war in France with the highest number of air victories of any American squadron.

Frederick Rutland was an accomplished aviator, British WWI war hero, and real-life James Bond. He was the first pilot to take off and land a plane on a ship, a decorated warrior for his feats of bravery and rescue, was trusted by the admirals of the Royal Navy, had a succession of aeronautical inventions, and designed the first modern aircraft carrier. He was perhaps the most famous early twentieth-century naval aviator. Despite all of this, and due mostly to class politics, Rutland was not promoted in the new Royal Air Force in the wake of WWI.

Frank Luke, Jr., was an unlikely pilot. In the Great War, when fliers were still "knights of the air", Luke was an ungallant loner, a kid from Arizona who collected tarantulas, shot buzzards, and boxed miners. But during two torrid weeks in September 1918, he was the deadliest man on the Western Front. In only 10 missions, he destroyed 14 heavily defended German balloons and four airplanes, a rampage unequalled even by the dreaded von Richtofen, and the second highest American tally of the entire war.

As a young soldier in the battlefields of Gallipolia, Sydney Loch witnessed the horror of war first-hand. On his return to Australia he detailed what he saw in his book The Straits Impregnable. Hoping to avoid military censorship his publishers dubbed Sydney's book a novel. But as the war ground on and the numbers of casualties grew the publisher inserted a note saying the story was factual.

In 2007, after almost 40 years of operations, the SAS ceased operations in Northern Ireland and ended the longest operational commitment in the unit's history. Starting in 1969, Mark Urban reveals the extraordinary history of the special forces' operations in Northern Ireland and the unenviable dilemmas faced by intelligence chiefs engaged in a daily struggle against one of the world's most sophisticated terrorist organisations.

On the centenary of the Great War, there are now no longer any veterans alive of the six million men who served on the Western Front. Although this means that the Great War as a living history is to all intents and purposes over, the twenty years Richard van Emden spent interviewing and carefully recording the memories of over 270 veterans, makes this extraordinary collection of stories even more poignant.

Sent to France with the Royal Flying Corps at just 17, and later a member of the famous 56 Squadron, Cecil Lewis was an illustrious and passionate fighter pilot of the First World War, described by Bernard Shaw in 1935 as 'a thinker, a master of words, and a bit of a poet'. In this vivid and spirited account the author evocatively sets his love of the skies and flying against his bitter experience of the horrors of war. We then follow his progress from France and the battlefields of the Somme to his pioneering defence of London against deadly nighttime raids.

The First World War was the defining event of the last century. It claimed the lives of more than 16 million people across the globe and had an enormous impact on all who experienced it. No nation in Europe was left untouched and even neutral states felt its devastating impact. Yet it was the ordinary men and women who were affected the most. This gripping, revealing and poignant collection of stories tells the First World War from the perspective of those who were there, using letters, diaries and memoirs from Imperial War Museum's unparalleled archives.

William Arthur Human was 22 years old and serving as a British soldier in India when war broke out in 1914. This is his story, in his own words, covering his first eight months on the Western Front and featuring the Battle of Neuve Chapelle. An extraordinarily vivid account that is heartfelt, captivating, and challenging in equal measure.

Brought together first as enemies in the Anglo-Boer War and later as allies in the First World War, the remarkable and often touching friendship between Winston Churchill and Jan Smuts is a rich study in contrasts. In youth, they occupied very different worlds: Churchill, the rambunctious and thrusting young aristocrat; Smuts, the aesthetic, philosophical Cape farm boy who would go on to Cambridge. Both were men of exceptional talents and achievements, and between them the pair had to grapple with some of the 20th century's most intractable issues, not least of which was the task of restoring peace and prosperity to Europe after two of mankind's bloodiest wars.

A joint operation between Britain and France, the 1916 Battle of the Somme was an attempt to gain territory and dent Germany's military strength. By the end of the action, the Allied Forces had made just twelve kilometres. For this slight gain, more than a million lives were lost. In this classic military memoir, Staff Sergeant Sidney Rogerson vividly captures the last spell of frontline duty performed by the 2nd Battalion of the West Yorkshire Regiment.

Wounded traces the journey made by a casualty from the battlefield to a hospital in Britain. It is a story told through the testimony of those who cared for him - stretcher bearers and medical officers, surgeons and chaplains, orderlies and nurses - from the aid post in the trenches to the casualty clearing station and the ambulance train back to Blighty. We feel the calloused hands of the stretcher-bearers; we see the bloody dressings and bandages; we smell the nauseating gangrene and, at London’s stations, the gas clinging to the uniforms of the men arriving home.

In the autumn of 1915 Will Bird was working on a farm in Saskatchewan when the ghost of his brother Stephen, killed by German mines in France, appeared before him in uniform. Rattled, Bird rushed home to Nova Scotia and enlisted in the army to take his dead brother's place. And We Go On is a remarkable and harrowing memoir of his two years in the trenches of the Western Front, from October 1916 until the Armistice.

Lawrence of Arabia is one of the most iconic figures of the First World War, seen by many as a heroic and romantic guerrilla leader in a period of savage and deeply impersonal industrial warfare. While Lawrence himself has been the subject of many biographies and an award-winning film, the context of his war in the desert, and his ideas on war itself, are less well-known. Lawrence of Arabia on War is a study of those ideas and of his campaign of irregular warfare which has informed tactical theory and decision-making down to the present day.

Few participants in World War I are more famous than Manfred Albrecht Freiherr von Richthofen, better known as the Red Baron. A German known for victories in a war that his country lost, a cavalry officer made famous as mounted combat disappeared, and an aristocratic hero in a century dominated by democracy; Richthofen's celebrity stands in stark contrast to the era.