Too Important for the Generals: Losing and Winning the First World War - Hardcover

Mallinson, Allan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593058186 ISBN 13: 9780593058183

Verlag: Bantam Press, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

Published as the world marks the centenary of one of the most infamous battles of the First World War, the Somme, this powerfully-argued and polemical new history of the war by one of Britain's most respected military historians explores how the war was fought, how near we came to losing it - and why winning proved so costly and why the Allied generals and politicians failed to find a less bloody strategy for victory.

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Allan Mallinson was a soldier for thirty-five years, serving first with the infantry and then the cavalry. He began writing while still serving. His first book was a history of four regiments of British light dragoons, one of whose descendant regiments he commanded. It was followed by A Close Run Thing, the first novel in the acclaimed and bestselling series chronicling the life of a fictitious cavalry officer, Matthew Hervey, before and after Waterloo. His The Making of the British Army was shortlisted for several prizes, while his centenary history, 1914: Fight the Good Fight – Britain, the Army and the Coming of the First World War won the British Army's Book of the Year Award. Its sequel, Too Important for the Generals, is a provocative look at leadership during the Great War. Allan Mallinson also writes for The Times, is history editor for Unherd.com and reviews for the TLS and the Spectator. He lives on Salisbury Plain.

Aus dem Klappentext

‘War is too important to be left to the generals,’ snapped future French prime minister Georges Clemenceau on learning of yet another bloody and futile offensive on the Western Front.

The question persists: why did the First World War take so long to win and exact so appalling a human cost? In this major new analysis, acclaimed military historian Allan Mallinson provides controversial and disturbing answers.

He disputes the growing consensus among historians that British generals were not to blame for the losses and setbacks and that, given the magnitude of their task, they did as well as anyone could have. He takes issue with the popular view that the ‘amateur’ strategic opinions of politicians such as Lloyd George and, especially, Winston Churchill, prolonged the war and increased the death toll. On the contrary, he argues, even before the war began Churchill had a far better grasp of strategy than any of the admirals or generals. And he repudiates the notion that Churchill’s stature as a wartime prime minister after 1940 owes much to the lessons he learned from his First World War ‘mistakes’ – notably the Dardanelles campaign – maintaining instead that Churchill’s achievement in the Second World War owes much to his determination that the thwarting of his better strategic judgement by the ‘professionals’ in the First would not be repeated.

From day one of the war, Mallinson argues, Britain was wrong-footed by faulty French military doctrine and paid the price in casualties. He shows that Lloyd George understood only too well the catastrophically dysfunctional condition of military policy-making and struggled against the weight of military opposition to fix it. And he asserts that both the British and the French failed to appreciate what the Americans’ contribution to victory could be – and, after the war, to acknowledge fully what it had actually been.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Bantam Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593058186
• ISBN 13: 9780593058183
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 400
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar