Hew strachan the first world war

Strachan, Hew.
The First World War
. New York: Penguin Books, 2013.


The mud-filled fields of Flanders and poems such as Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et decorum est” fill popular imagination about the First World War, the cataclysmic conflict fought between the empires of Europe for continental hegemony and the security of their empires. Much is made of the First World War’s apparent futility, the needless waste of life on the battlefields of the Western Front, and the seeming incompetence of military and political leaders on both the sides of the Central Powers and the Entente. Hew Strachan, however, in his defining short-history of the war, boldly demolishes this concept of the war. In his new and updated introduction for the centenary of the war, Strachan makes clear that the popular memory of the war as a futile and senseless confrontation fought on the Western Front ignores the truly global scale of  conflict and ignores the ideas, perspectives, and motivations of the leaders who orchestrated the armies that prosecuted the war, the soldiers who fought in it, and the people who endured the war at home. This was a conflict fought for the security of Europe on the one hand a


Reviewed over the next few weeks, books, for you or the History lover in your life. #1



Review #1: 
The First World War.
  by Hew Strachan:

It will not have escaped your notice in these centenary years of 1914-18, that WWI books are everywhere. Many are readable and interesting, some are excellent. Even in that later category, here is a book that stands high.

The author is Chichele Professor in the History of War at Oxford University, at All Souls College (the one college with no undergraduates, but rather populated solely by elite academics, engaged in pure research)

The Chichele chair is itself worth a mention: set up in 1908 by the British Government, when conscious of relative industrial/Imperial decline- relative most pressingly of course to an increasingly muscular and ambitious Germany. They established the chair in order to understand better the history, theory, and lessons of war, drawn from study from previous conflicts. It is thus effectively a think tank, which advises governments on how, if wars cannot be avoided, then how to successfully prosecute them. (Industrial production, supply,
materiele,
strategy and tactics, maneuvers, technology, staffing, trainin




Hew Strachan.

The Outbreak of the First World War.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. x + 299 pp. $19.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-19-925726-3.
Hew Strachan.

The First World War in Africa.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. x + 224 pp. $19.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-19-925728-7.


Reviewed by
Bryan Ganaway (Department of History, Presbyterian College)

Published on
H-German (June, 2006)


The volumes under review are reprints taken from parts of the first volume of Hew Strachan's monumental history of World War I,
To Arms
(2001). Although they contain almost no new material, they are compact, well-written books that present aspects of the author's thought in digestible fashion to academics looking to revise their World War I lectures or students searching for an overview of diplomatic, strategic and tactical issues. Strachan has spent an academic lifetime reading about the Great War and it shows in the global reach of his knowledge. I find it hard to believe that anyone could ever write a more detailed tactical account of the colonial wars in Africa from 1914-1918. Nonetheless, this impressive erudition produced a strikingly traditional interpretation of the conflict.

I


Oxford University press, 2001, £30. ISBN: 0-19- 820877-4 

Faced with outstanding reviews of Hew Stachan's book in the Economist, the Daily Telegraph, The Spectator - and by our own President in the Sunday Telegraph - it behoves any lesser reviewer to be cautious when expressing an opinion on this massive new work. But, in reality, the challenge is not that taxing, since
The First World War, Volume l
, is incontestably the most important addition to the published work on the war for many years. 

Although originally commissioned to replace C. R. M Crutwell's one volume
A History o f the Great War
(published by OUP in 1934), Hew Strachan's complete manuscript will fill three on completion. Volume I, To Arms, comprises a massive 1139 pages of text, supported by a 50- page bibliography and - that increasingly rare thing, an effective index. The second volume, No Quarter, will cover 1915 and 1916, the third, Fall Out, the last two years of the war. 

The apparent adoption of a chronological approach is merely the logical skeleton to which Strachan attaches the muscles and sinews of a huge body of Great War history, biography and account of battle. His exercise is to treat with, a