Overview

While World War I on the Western Front developed into trench warfare, the battle lines on the Eastern Front were much more fluid and trenches never truly developed. This was because the greater length of the front ensured that the density of soldiers in the line was lower so the line was easier to break. Once broken, the sparse communication networks made it difficult for the defender to rush reinforcements to the rupture in the line to mount a rapid counteroffensive and seal off a breakthrough. There was also the fact that the terrain in the Eastern European theatre was quite solid, often making it near impossible to construct anything resembling the complicated trench systems on the Western Front, which tended to have muddier and much more workable terrain. In short, on the Eastern front the side defending did not have the overwhelming advantages it had on the Western front. Because of this, front lines in the East kept on shifting throughout the conflict, and not just near the beginning and end of the fighting, as was the case in the West. In fact the greatest advance of the whole war was made in the East by the German Army in the summer of 1915. With the aid of numerous black and white and color photographs, many previously unpublished, the World War I series recreates the battles and campaigns that raged across the surface of the globe, on land, at sea and in the air. The text is complemented by full-colour maps that guide the reader through specific actions and campaigns.

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9781838861179

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David Jordan is Senior Lecturer at the Joint Services Command and Staff College, Shrivenham, where he teaches Intermediate and Advanced Staff courses. He joined the Defence Studies Department of Kings College London in June 2000 from the University of Birmingham. He is Chairman of the Board of Examiners for the MA in Defence Studies. He is the author of several books, including The Timeline of World War II, Wolfpack and the History of the French Foreign Legion. Michael S. Neiberg is Professor of History and Chair of War Studies at the United States Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. His published work specializes on the First and Second World Wars in global context. The Wall Street Journal named his Dance of the Furies: Europe and the Outbreak of World War I (Harvard University Press) one of the five best books ever written about that war. In October 2016 Oxford University Press published his Path to War, a history of American responses to the Great War in Europe, 1914-1917 and in July 2017 Oxford published his Concise History of the Treaty of Versailles. In 2017 he was awarded the Médaille d'Or du Rayonnement Culturel from La Renaissance Française, an organization founded by French President Raymond Poincaré in 1915 to keep French culture alive during the First World War.

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