While admitting that Haig was no genius, revisionist historians have argued that by 1918, he was able to co-ordinate successfully all elements of military force – artillery, armour, airpower, and infantry – to achieve a decisive victory in the series of operations known collectively as ‘The Hundred Days’. Does this argument stand up to critique? Chris Bambery tests the case.
WWI
They Shall Not Grow Old
Taylor Downing reports on Peter Jackson’s new WWI centenary film. New Zealander Peter Jackson is known to cinema-goers for the lavish spectacles in which he specialises in breathtaking digital effects, including The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-2003) and The Hobbit trilogy (2012-14), both adapted from the novels of J R R Tolkien. He has now just released a remarkable […]
MHM December 2018
The December issue of MHM, the British military history magazine, is now on sale. To subscribe to the magazine, click here. To subscribe to the digital archive, click here. In this issue: Crimea: the last great charge of the redcoats, 1854 Only the incompetence of the enemy prevented it from becoming a national disaster. Neil Faulkner revisits the British […]
The Hundred Days Offensive – Whose Victory?
A century ago, between 8 August and 11 November 1918, after four years of trench stalemate, the Allied armies on the Western Front went onto the offensive, broke through the enemy line, and maintained their advance for three months until the German Army had been brought to final defeat. How was it done? Debate has raged ever since about the combination of factors that delivered Allied victory in the autumn of 1918.
MHM November 2018
The November issue of MHM, the British military history magazine, is now on sale. To subscribe to the magazine, click here. To subscribe to the digital archive, click here. In this issue: The legend of Roland at Roncesvalles, AD 778 Fred Chiaventone takes a closer look at the medieval Chanson de Roland and debunks the myths relating to Charlemagne’s […]
In Pictures: William Kentridge’s The Head and the Load
William Kentridge’s The Head and the Load brings to light the experiences of 1.5 million African porters during the First World War. Seema Syeda reports. The past year has seen a whole raft of performance art, poignant memoir, and academic enquiry proliferate across the world stage in commemoration of the centenary of the end of the […]
RAF Museum London: into the future
Seema Syeda reviews the newly remodelled RAF Museum. Museums, I thought in a rather prosaic way as I sat underneath the bomb bay of an Avro Vulcan B2 in the RAF Museum’s Hangar 5, usually chronicle the events of the past. Meandering through the corridors of the British Museum, for instance, gazing at the ossified warriors […]
WWI: Pershing on the Western Front
No general in American history held the kind of absolute power General Pershing wielded. With complete backing from President Woodrow Wilson and Secretary of War Newton D Baker, Pershing could shape the American Expeditionary Force, due to deploy on the Western Front of the First World War, as he saw fit. But how successful was his military strategy?
Shell shock cover-up at Passchendaele
Taylor Downing reveals an official cover-up of mental illness in the later years of the war. It was not just the scale of the physical casualties that overwhelmed the British Army in the summer of 1916 on the Somme, terrible though these were – 38,000 wounded to be processed through medical facilities on the first day […]
The Somme’s forgotten history
Film-maker Ross Barnwell is crowdfunding for a new documentary drama based on Geoffrey Malins, the cameraman who famously shot footage of the Battle of the Somme in 1916. Here’s a sneak preview of the stories Barnwell uncovered while filming.
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