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The Eleventh Hour: 15 Best Books on How WW1 Ended (1918, the Armistice & After)
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items In 1918 the Western Front finally broke open: Germany's last gamble in March, the Allied counterpunch of the Hundred Days, and an armistice that took effect at 11 a.m. on November 11. As a cartographer, I find it the year most worth following on a ma...
Sections
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THE YEAR THE FRONT MOVED
DOUGHBOYS & DEVIL DOGS
NOVELS OF THE LAST DAYS
THE WAR AFTER THE WAR
THE YEAR THE FRONT MOVED
For the reader who wants the big picture and a map open on the table. Four histories that take you from Germany's March breakthrough to the last shots on November 11.
The morning of March 21, 1918, when German stormtroopers came out of the fog and broke the British line on a front of more than 40 miles. Middlebrook built it from hundreds of veterans' accounts, mostly British with German voices too, so you follow t...
The Kaiser's Battle by Martin Middlebrook
Starts with the Allied counterstroke on the Marne in July and runs through Amiens on August 8, the day Ludendorff called the black day of the German army, all the way to the Armistice. The best place to start if you want to understand how the Allies ...
Hundred Days by Nick Lloyd
The title comes from Haig's order of April 11, 1918, when the British line was close to breaking. Stevenson is strong on the things behind the lines that decided the year: railways, shipping, food, oil and manpower. After a narrative opening it is or...
With Our Backs to the Wall by David Stevenson
The armistice was signed at about 5 a.m., but attacks went ahead until 11, and Persico estimates nearly 11,000 casualties on that last morning. He follows the final day and the men in it, including Henry Gunther, usually called the last American kill...
Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour by Joseph E. Persico
DOUGHBOYS & DEVIL DOGS
For the American reader whose great-grandfather went over in 1918. Belleau Wood, Soissons and the Meuse-Argonne, from two Marines who were there, a historian of the Army's biggest battle and a Pulitzer-winning novelist.
The largest and deadliest battle in US military history: about 1.2 million Americans fighting through the Argonne forest and the ridges above the Meuse in the war's last 47 days, with some 26,000 killed. Lengel is honest about the mistakes, from Pers...
To Conquer Hell by Edward G. Lengel
A Marine officer's stories of Belleau Wood, Soissons, Blanc Mont and the Meuse, illustrated with drawings he made at the front. Thomason writes like a novelist and draws like a war artist, so this reads fast. Some of the 1920s attitudes and language ...
Fix Bayonets! by John W. Thomason Jr. (1926 Scribner's Edition)
One Marine company told through 113 short first-person voices, each a page or two long. March served with the 5th Marines in France and won the Navy Cross and the Distinguished Service Cross, and the book is angry about what he saw. The fragments tak...
Company K by William March
A Nebraska farm boy who finds a purpose only when he ships out to France. Cather won the 1923 Pulitzer for it, though Hemingway sneered that her battle scenes came from The Birth of a Nation. Only the last third is set in France, but it shows why so ...
One of Ours by Willa Cather
NOVELS OF THE LAST DAYS
For a long November weekend. Four novels set in the final weeks of the war, on the home front, or in the strange, broken homecoming that came after.
Billy Prior goes back to France in the fall of 1918 and heads toward the Sambre-Oise canal crossing where Wilfred Owen died a week before the Armistice. It won the Booker Prize in 1995. About half the book is the army doctor Rivers remembering his ti...
The Ghost Road by Pat Barker (Signed First Edition)
It opens days before the Armistice, when an officer provokes a pointless attack on Hill 113 to win himself glory. Two survivors then run a scam on grieving France, selling war memorials that will never be built. It won the Prix Goncourt, the humor is...
The Great Swindle by Pierre Lemaitre
Remarque's follow-up to All Quiet on the Western Front begins in the last days at the front and follows a group of survivors home to a Germany in revolution. For readers who finished All Quiet and wondered what came next. It is quieter and sadder, wi...
The Road Back by Erich Maria Remarque
Denver in the fall of 1918: a young newspaperwoman falls for a soldier about to ship out just as the flu sweeps the city. She wakes from the fever to the Armistice bells. This is three short novels in one volume, and the title story is the reason to ...
Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter
THE WAR AFTER THE WAR
The guns stopped in France on November 11, but the shocks kept coming: a revolution in Berlin, a peace conference in Paris and a flu that killed more people than the fighting. For readers who want to know what came after.
On November 9, 1918, the Kaiser's abdication was announced and a republic was proclaimed twice in one Berlin afternoon. Gerwarth shows how a naval mutiny at Kiel became a revolution that ended the monarchy within days, and argues it achieved more tha...
November 1918: The German Revolution
Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau redrawing the map of Europe, the Middle East and beyond with pencils and atlases. As a map-maker, I think this is the book on how borders get drawn in a hurry and why so many still cause trouble. It is long, and Ma...
Paris 1919 by Margaret MacMillan
The flu that peaked as the war ended killed far more people worldwide than the fighting did, including about 675,000 Americans. Spinney follows it from army camps to cities and remote villages around the world, and her title nods to Katherine Anne Po...
Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 by Spinney
Russia's collapse is why Germany could gamble everything in March 1918, and this list tells how that happened.
The Forgotten Front: 15 Best Books on the Eastern Front of WW1 (Histories, Memoirs & Novels)
The war ended on the Piave, in Macedonia and in Palestine too, and this is where to read about the fronts beyond France.
The Crucible of War: 15 Best WW1 Books on the Balkans, Italy & Gallipoli