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5.0 out of 5 stars
When the "Glory" had long gone..., November 25, 2011
This book was written in the `60's, and there were immediate comparisons, rightly in my opinion, with Barbara Tuchman's
The Guns of August. The two books serve as "bookends" for the First World War. Tuchman's covers the first month of the war, August, 1914, when it was a war of movement, and there were possibilities for a quick ending. "Glory" was much on the minds of the elites of Europe, as well as the men who fought for them. By 1918, the Glory had long gone, save for some new arrivals from across the Atlantic. As Pitt states, that was one of the two major developments that changed the dynamics, and possible "winners" of the war, and once again the outcome was as finely balanced as it was in 1914. Due to the Russian revolution, and the withdrawal of their troops from the Eastern Front, this gave the Germans the opportunity to transfer their troops from the East, and throw everything they had at the Western Front, in the hopes of beating the English and French before the arrival of the Americans in substantial numbers. The author tells the drama of this story well.
Pitt sets the stage for the final year, aptly describing the immense gulf that existed between the officers and men who were fighting. Consider: "By this time, it was the Staff who were regarded by the British front-line soldier as his main enemy (a not uncommon development in any army) and for them he nursed a bitter hatred and an undying contempt...The fault lay basically in the peacetime structure of the Army, in which the officers were separated from the other ranks by an impassable social and mental barrier." Included in the book are numerous black and white pictures I had not seen before. The first two dramatic underscore this gulf. The first shows some field officers looking down into a "model" trench, all properly sandbagged, with six rows at the top. The second shows the awful reality of the mud holes that serve as a trench at Passchendaele.
The author writes well, and contrasts the state of the British and French armies with the Americans who had just arrived: "Five yards apart, in four ranks, twenty yards between each rank, the marines advanced. Nothing had been seen like it, in mass innocence, in hope and at the end in unavailing heroism and self-sacrifice, since the British attack on the Somme in 1916--it is quite possible that the lack of immediate reaction from the enemy was due to disbelief that in 1918 such naiveté could still exist." He then goes on to describe the carnage as the American Marines were mowed down.
Pitt has a deep understanding of war, and can equally describe the thinking at the General Staff level, as well the privates in the trenches. Concerning another tough fight, by the American 2nd Division, at Belleau Woods, Pitt says: "By evening many of the companies were commanded by sergeants, a breed quicker to jettison Staff theories than are those holding commissioned rank."
Pitt is British, and reserved his harshest criticism for their military leaders. His epilogue and aftermath is rich in anecdotes that should be long remembered. Apocryphal, or not, he has the following unattributed quote: "'Thank Heavens the war is over is over', one of them is reputed to have said'...now we can get back to real soldiering.'" And in terms of learning anything, in preparation for the next war, Pitt says that "...as late as 1940 a candidate for a war-time commission was asked by the interviewing board at Cambridge three questions--and three only: What school did he attend? What was his father's income? Did he ride a horse?"
A solid military history, with excellent maps, by one who understood, and depicted all the madness of that war as it truly was. 5-stars.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
looks good at 48, December 22, 2010
This review is from: 1918: The Last ACT (Pen & Sword Military Classics) (Paperback)
Since 1962, a great deal of scholarly research has been done on the Western Front in World War I. This has involved the search of primary archives, unpublished memoirs and detailed technical and topographic research. Yet the conclusions reached by Barrie Pitt that, 1) By 1918 the contending armies had, each in their own way, worked out how to overcome and breakthrough the entrenched defences of the time 2) none of the armies had the operational ability to create sustained offensive drives like those seen some twenty years later 3) by the fall of 1918 the German Army was being unwillingly and systematically driven out of the territory it had occupied since 1914 yet it still had some level of relative military effectiveness, hold up well to the light of the most modern work.
Barrie Pitt's work is distinguished by a continued tone of moral outrage at the level of human carnage inflicted by the two sides on each other and his attempts to balance considerations of high level politics with the awful reality on the ground. He does not appear to disagree with modern scholars that dedicated and intelligent men on each side did a great deal to work out their battlefield problems in a rational and thoughful way. He just seems to remember 10 million reasons they cannnot be said to have been highly successful.
The book has a useful number of clear large scale maps and a good section of photographs which are not so directly connected with the text. As suggested, this is not a scholarly book with footnotes and so on and seventy secondary works are cited in the bibliography including seven by B H Lidell Hart the once famous and now maligned military critic.
The reasons this book gets only four stars is that it is really about the Western Front only and in many cases you have to accept the author's judgements without a lot of facts to back them up. For example, he talks at some length about the significance of the Allied blockade in undermining Germany's power to resist but there are not any numbers for those of us who look back from the distance of ninety years.
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