Manpower and the Armies of the British Empire in the Two World Wars

Manpower and the Armies of the British Empire in the Two World Wars
Author: Mark Frost
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2021-06-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501755862

In the first and only examination of how the British Empire and Commonwealth sustained its soldiers before, during, and after both world wars, a cast of leading military historians explores how the empire mobilized manpower to recruit workers, care for veterans, and transform factory workers and farmers into riflemen. Raising armies is more than counting people, putting them in uniform, and assigning them to formations. It demands efficient measures for recruitment, registration, and assignment. It requires processes for transforming common people into soldiers and then producing officers, staffs, and commanders to lead them. It necessitates balancing the needs of the armed services with industry and agriculture. And, often overlooked but illuminated incisively here, raising armies relies on medical services for mending wounded soldiers and programs and pensions to look after them when demobilized. Manpower and the Armies of the British Empire in the Two World Wars is a transnational look at how the empire did not always get these things right. But through trial, error, analysis, and introspection, it levied the large armies needed to prosecute both wars. Contributors Paul R. Bartrop, Charles Booth, Jean Bou, Daniel Byers, Kent Fedorowich, Jonathan Fennell, Meghan Fitzpatrick, Richard S. Grayson, Ian McGibbon, Jessica Meyer, Emma Newlands, Kaushik Roy, Roger Sarty, Gary Sheffield, Ian van der Waag

How Churchill Waged War

How Churchill Waged War
Author: Allen Packwood
Publisher: Grub Street Publishers
Total Pages: 374
Release: 2018-10-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1473893917

An analytical investigation into Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s decision-making process during every stage of World War II. When Winston Churchill accepted the position of Prime Minister in May 1940, he insisted in also becoming Minister of Defence. This, though, meant that he alone would be responsible for the success or failure of Britain’s war effort. It also meant that he would be faced with many monumental challenges and utterly crucial decisions upon which the fate of Britain and the free world rested. With the limited resources available to the UK, Churchill had to pinpoint where his country’s priorities lay. He had to respond to the collapse of France, decide if Britain should adopt a defensive or offensive strategy, choose if Egypt and the war in North Africa should take precedence over Singapore and the UK’s empire in the East, determine how much support to give the Soviet Union, and how much power to give the United States in controlling the direction of the war. In this insightful investigation into Churchill’s conduct during the Second World War, Allen Packwood, BA, MPhil (Cantab), FRHistS, the Director of the Churchill Archives Centre, enables the reader to share the agonies and uncertainties faced by Churchill at each crucial stage of the war. How Churchill responded to each challenge is analyzed in great detail and the conclusions Packwood draws are as uncompromising as those made by Britain’s wartime leader as he negotiated his country through its darkest days.

Enduring the Great War

Enduring the Great War
Author: Alexander Watson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2008-04-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 1139867253

This book is an innovative comparative history of how German and British soldiers endured the horror of the First World War. Unlike existing literature, which emphasises the strength of societies or military institutions, this study argues that at the heart of armies' robustness lay natural human resilience. Drawing widely on contemporary letters and diaries of British and German soldiers, psychiatric reports and official documentation, and interpreting these sources with modern psychological research, this unique account provides fresh insights into the soldiers' fears, motivations and coping mechanisms. It explains why the British outlasted their opponents by examining and comparing the motives for fighting, the effectiveness with which armies and societies supported men and the combatants' morale throughout the conflict on both sides. Finally it challenges the consensus on the war's end, arguing that not a 'covert strike' but rather an 'ordered surrender' led by junior officers brought about Germany's defeat in 1918.

The Empire is Marching

The Empire is Marching
Author: Glen St. John Barclay
Publisher:
Total Pages: 276
Release: 1976
Genre: Commonwealth countries
ISBN: 9780297771258

The Pity of War

The Pity of War
Author: Niall Ferguson
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 650
Release: 2008-08-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 078672529X

From a bestselling historian, a daringly revisionist history of World War I The Pity of War makes a simple and provocative argument: the human atrocity known as the Great War was entirely England's fault. According to Niall Ferguson, England entered into war based on naive assumptions of German aims, thereby transforming a Continental conflict into a world war, which it then badly mishandled, necessitating American involvement. The war was not inevitable, Ferguson argues, but rather was the result of the mistaken decisions of individuals who would later claim to have been in the grip of huge impersonal forces. That the war was wicked, horrific, and inhuman is memorialized in part by the poetry of men like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, but also by cold statistics. Indeed, more British soldiers were killed in the first day of the Battle of the Somme than Americans in the Vietnam War. And yet, as Ferguson writes, while the war itself was a disastrous folly, the great majority of men who fought it did so with little reluctance and with some enthusiasm. For anyone wanting to understand why wars are fought, why men are willing to fight them and why the world is as it is today, there is no sharper or more stimulating guide than Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War.

For King and Other Countries

For King and Other Countries
Author: Glyn Harper
Publisher: Chp
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780995102996

When war was declared in August 1914, many New Zealanders were travelling or living abroad. In the rush to sign up to defend the Empire, it was often easier to enlist locally than travel back to New Zealand to join the NZEF. That's one of the reasons that more than ten thousand New Zealanders fought the First World War under other flags, in the military forces of other nations. If they are added to the total number of New Zealanders currently understood to have served, then New Zealand's contribution to the war effort becomes even more remarkable, but to date they have not been correctly enumerated, let alone included. These New Zealanders served with the Australian Imperial Force (AIF), with British Army units, the Indian Army, the Canadian Expeditionary Force and the French Foreign Legion, and they include the considerable number of women who served with other nations' medical organisations. Leading military historian Glyn Harper has scoured archives and museums worldwide to show where and when these New Zealanders served, and to tell their remarkable - and sometimes surprising and tragic - stories for the first time. For King and Other Countries makes a unique contribution to our understanding of our military history.