Technical and Narrative Studies
Tony Ashworth, Trench Warfare 1914–18: the Live and Let Live System (London: Macmillan, 1980). Splendid analysis of how the war wasn't fought on the ‘quiet’ sections of the front.
Correlli Barnett, The Swordbearers: Studies in Supreme Command in the First World War (first published London: Eyre & Spottis- woode, 1963). Excellent studies of some of the key commanders of all nations, in some of the key battles.
John Bourne and Gary Sheffield (eds), The War Diaries and Letters of Douglas Haig (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2005). A scholarly presentation of a basic text for the Western Front, generally taking the side of the man who won the war.
Paul F Braim, The Test of Battle: the American Expeditionary Forces in the Meuse-Argonne Campaign (first published 1987; new edn, Shippensburg, PA: White Mane Books, 1998). A detailed account of the AEF's achievement that is prepared to be critical where necessary.
Anthony Bruce, An Illustrated Companion to the First World War (London: Michael Joseph, 1989). The next best thing to a ‘dictionary’ of the Great War, although it misses out the poets and gets tediously technical about different varieties of aircraft and ships.
Stephen Bull, Stosstrupptaktik, the First Stormtroopers (Stroud, Gloucs: Spellmount, 2007). A welcome modern account of an important subject.
Rose E B Coombs, Before Endeavours Fade: a Guide to the Battlefields of the First World War (first published 1976; 6th edn, London: Battle of Britain Prints International, 1990). The first modern guidebook for the Western Front tourist, and still probably the best in a single volume. However, in recent years there has been an enthusiastic multiplication of more detailed guidebooks to individual battlefields, in step with the enthusiastic multiplication of battlefield tourists.
Michael Cox and John Ellis, The World War I Databook (London: Aurum Press, 1993). A modern presentation of facts and statistics.
Christopher Duffy, Through German Eyes: the British and the Somme 1916 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2006). A rare insight in English into how the Germans viewed their opponents on the Somme. On one side they found that many of the POW they captured expressed deep disaffection with their officers; on the other hand it is clear that the scale and force of the allied attack came as a very great setback to the Kaiser's men.
Paddy Griffith, Battle Tactics of the Western Front: the British Army's Art of Attack, 1916–18 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994). An account of how the BEF improved its fighting methods towards the end of the war, following a painful process of trial and error.
Paddy Griffith, Fortifications of the Western Front 1914–18 (Oxford: Osprey, 2004). A picture book illustrating how the techniques of fortification evolved.
Bruce Gudmundsson, Stormtroop Tactics: Innovation in the German Army, 1914–18 (New York: Praeger, 1989). An excessively teuto- phile account which nevertheless lays out the (belated) development of German assault methods.
J P Harris, Men, Ideas and Tanks: British Military Thought and Armoured Forces 1903–39 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). All the truth about tanks!
Paul Harris, Amiens to the Armistice (London: Brassey's, 1998). An excellent modern narrative of the ‘Hundred Days’ offensive, from 8 August to 11 November 1918.
Alistair Horne, The Price of Glory (London: Macmillan, 1962). The classic English-language account of the Verdun battle.
Peter Liddle (ed.), Passchendaele in Perspective: the Third Battle of Ypres (Barnsley: Leo Cooper, 1997). A wonderfully diverse collection of essays on this most controversial of all battles. Of particular note is John Hussey's account of the weather during the battle, which was a major determinant of the outcome.
Martin Middlebrook, The First Day on the Somme (London: Penguin, 1971). Microscopic dissection of the British army's worst day ever.
Martin Middlebrook, The Kaiser's Battle (London: Allen Lane, 1978). Microscopic dissection of the British army's second worst day.
Jonathan Nicholls, Cheerful Sacrifice: the Battle of Arras 1917 (London: Leo Cooper, 1990). A fine account of an important battle that has somehow dropped out of public memory.
Terry Norman, The Hell They Called High Wood (London: Kimber, 1984). An illuminating narrative of the key fighting in the Somme battle that is often overlooked by those who think that ‘the first day’ was everything.
Barrie Pitt, 1918: the Last Act (London: Cassell, 1962). Succinct and fast-moving account of the whole of 1918.
Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson, Command on the Western Front (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). Ostensibly an account of the war as seen by General Rawlinson, this book led the way into the new generation of technical studies of how the battles were actually fought.
Julian Putkowski and Julian Sykes, Shot at Dawn: Executions in World War One by Authority of the British Army Act (London: Leo Cooper, 1989). The classic study at the heart of what has become a major subject-area in recent times.
Gary Sheffield and Dan Todman (eds), Command and Control on the Western Front: the British Army's Experience, 1914–18 (London: Spellmount, 2004). A modern analysis of generalship.
Leonard V Smith, Between Mutiny and Obedience: the Case of the French Fifth Infantry Division during World War I (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994). It is only in very recent times that serious analyses of the French army's experiences have begun to appear in English. This sociological approach is one of the forerunners.
John Terraine, The First World War 1914–18 (first published 1965; Papermac edn, 1984). An excellent succinct account.
Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August (London: Random House, 1962). An accessible dissection of the complex manoeuvres that started the war.
Terence Zuber, Inventing the Schlieffen Plan: German War Planning 1871–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). A controversial modern analysis of just what Schlieffen did and did not actually plan, as well as the ways in which subsequent generations have tried to ‘spin’ it.
Autobiography and Literary Treatments
John Dos Passos, Three Soldiers (New York: Doran, 1921). A classic American view.
Brian Gardner (ed.), Up the Line to Death: the War Poets 1914–18 (first published 1964; Magnum edn, London, 1977). A good anthology.
Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That (London: Jonathan Cape, 1929). The mould-breaking fictionalized (and semi-fictitious) account of a subaltern's experience on the Western Front, which opened the floodgates of ‘protest’ literature when it first appeared.
Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (first published 1929; Penguin edn, London, 1966). A powerful novel of the Italian front, and war in general.
Ernst Jünger, The Storm of Steel (first English edn 1929; new edn, London: Constable, 1994). Remarkable autobiography of a thrusting German assault infantryman who believed in living dangerously. He collected twenty wounds in the Great War but survived as a German national hero for over a century.
Wilfred Owen, Poems (first published 1931; new edn, London: Chatto & Windus, 1946). The most remarkable distillation of the pity of war.
William St Clair, The Road to St Julien: the Letters of a Stretcher Bearer from the Great War, ed. John St Clair (Barnsley: Leo Cooper, 2004). As great a rage against the war as anyone could wish, regrettably published only very recently.
Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (first edn 1930; new edn, London: Faber & Faber, 1965). Memoirs complementing those of his friend Robert Graves, by an officer who sold himself further into the military ethos, and then sold himself further out of it.