James Perdue examines the Battle of Jutland, fought on 31 May and 1 June 1916, as a test of naval command rather than simply a contest of firepower. The largest naval engagement of the First World War and the only full-scale clash between the British Grand Fleet and the German High Seas Fleet, Jutland exposed the complexity of commanding fleets with early twentieth-century technology. Perdue sets the battle in the strategic context of the North Sea war and explores the technological foundations of both fleets, the intelligence that alerted the British on 30 May that the Germans were preparing to sail, and the contrasting command philosophies of Admirals John Jellicoe and Reinhard Scheer. He traces the communication breakdowns that hampered Vice Admiral David Beatty’s battlecruisers, the course of the engagement, and its outcomes. Jutland’s lasting lesson, Perdue concludes, is that clear intent, shared understanding, and reliable communication are as decisive as firepower, a lesson that shaped interwar improvements in fire control, signaling, and damage control.
James Perdue examines the Battle of Caporetto, fought in October 1917 along the Isonzo Front, as a case study in failed command. The Italian Army did not simply lose a battle; it suffered a systemic breakdown of leadership, communication, morale, and cohesion that sent it into a great retreat to the Piave River. Perdue traces many of these weaknesses to General Luigi Cadorna and the rigid, punitive culture he imposed, in which officers were removed for minor mistakes and units were sometimes decimated as punishment for retreating under pressure. Against an army stifled by inflexible doctrine and mistrust, German and Austro-Hungarian forces used infiltration tactics to break through and advance with astonishing speed. Perdue then follows the aftermath: Cadorna’s removal and his replacement by General Armando Diaz, whose reforms emphasizing morale, initiative, and realistic planning stabilized the front and laid the foundation for victory at Vittorio Veneto in 1918. Caporetto, he concludes, still warns modern leaders against rigidity, mistrust, and poor communication.
James Perdue examines the Battle of Cambrai, fought from 20 November to 7 December 1917, through the principles of mission command set out in current U.S. Army doctrine. Cambrai is remembered as the first large-scale, effective use of tanks, but Perdue argues that its deeper significance lies in its combination of artillery, armor, infantry, and air power, which broke sharply with the attritional warfare that had dominated the Western Front. He shows how General Julian Byng’s clear intent and the disciplined initiative of subordinate units, illustrated by actions such as the capture of Flesquières, produced a remarkable breakthrough on the first day. The advance then stalled on Bourlon Ridge, the cavalry positioned to exploit success was repeatedly delayed, and on 30 November a massive German counterattack recovered much of the lost ground. Perdue concludes that Cambrai was a missed opportunity: the British achieved the breakthrough that had eluded them for years, but a breakdown in the very principles behind their success kept them from exploiting it.
James Perdue analyzes the catastrophic first day of the Battle of the Somme, July 1, 1916, through the lens of modern mission command doctrine. For seven days British guns fired more than a million shells at the German lines, on the assumption that the bombardment would destroy the defenders and allow the infantry to walk across no man’s land. Perdue argues that the staggering casualties that followed were not simply the result of new technology or strong German defenses, but the predictable outcome of a failed command philosophy. Rawlinson’s Fourth Army adopted a rigid, centralized, timetable-driven plan that stifled initiative, suppressed contradictory intelligence, and showed little trust in junior leaders and soldiers. Perdue concludes that the high command violated every tenet of mission command: clear intent, disciplined initiative, shared understanding, and mutual trust. The “lions led by donkeys” verdict, he contends, is doctrinally sound, and the Somme remains a lesson that courage cannot compensate for a failed command philosophy.
Vernon Yates compares the Idealist and Realist approaches that shaped how the First World War was fought and how its peace was made. He begins with the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, which Napoleon III and Otto von Bismarck fought as Realists focused on national power, and traces how rivalries over territory, alliances, and hard power carried Europe toward war in 1914. The war’s destruction, Yates argues, made secret treaties and imperialist ambitions harder to tolerate. He then examines the peace settlement through both lenses, contrasting President Woodrow Wilson’s Idealist Fourteen Points and his hopes for a League of Nations with the Realist aims of the victorious European powers at Versailles, including France’s determination to punish Germany. Wilson staked his political future on the League, Yates notes, but misjudged an American public unwilling to become entangled in European politics. He concludes that national power must be exercised and national interests pursued daily, not invoked only in a crisis.
Daniel McEwen asks whether the alliances that divided Europe before 1914 deterred war or made it inevitable. He opens in November 1918, as exhausted German soldiers walk home from a war that killed some 40 million people and reset the global order. Although history has placed most of the blame on Germany’s military leaders, McEwen examines the culpability of the two blocs: the Triple Entente of Britain, France, and Russia, and the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy. He traces how each of the six powers, circling the declining Ottoman Empire and competing for influence in the Balkans, used its commitments after Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip’s assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. McEwen gives special attention to Italy, which at first stayed out of the war, then switched sides for the best offer, and emerged with a peace its nationalists called a “mutilated victory,” a grievance Benito Mussolini later exploited. His conclusion is that an alliance is only as strong as the character of those charged with honoring it.
Peter Kauffner revisits Alfred von Schlieffen’s famous plan to invade France through Belgium, drawing on scholarship and translated deployment plans published around the war’s centenary in 2014. Schlieffen led the German General Staff from 1891 to 1906, and a modified version of his plan was used when war broke out in August 1914. Kauffner challenges the common claim that the plan was a response to the threat of a two-front war, showing that Schlieffen’s own writings point elsewhere. He argues that the plan is better understood as an expression of the “cult of the offensive,” an aggressive approach to military planning popular across Europe at the time, and that political pressure from Kaiser Wilhelm II and others may also have shaped it. Kauffner examines the plan Schlieffen passed to his successor, Helmuth von Moltke, and the 1914 campaign that carried German armies into northeastern France before they ran short of supplies and dug in along the Marne, beginning four years of trench warfare.
Michael G. Stroud examines the Battle of Amiens in August 1918, which he calls the beginning of the end for the German army. The German spring offensives, the Kaiserschlacht, had driven deep into Allied lines but failed to force a settlement before the American Expeditionary Forces arrived in strength, and cost Germany more than 340,000 casualties. Recognizing that the German army was exhausted, troubled by unrest at home, and weakened by influenza, Marshal Ferdinand Foch planned a series of Allied attacks to seize the initiative, beginning at the logistically important city of Amiens. Stroud describes how Sir Henry Rawlinson’s Fourth Army, with British, Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand divisions supported by tanks, aircraft, and artillery, used surprise and the cover of heavy morning fog to advance on August 8 farther than at any time since 1914. Low German morale compounded the defeat. Amiens, Stroud concludes, restored mobility to the battlefield through combined arms and foreshadowed how the next war would be fought on an even larger scale.
Herman Warden of Stellenbosch University examines how a divided South Africa has remembered its participation in the First World War through two very different events. The Battle of Delville Wood, fought from 14 July 1916 during the Somme offensive, saw the First South African Infantry Brigade ordered to secure the wood near Longueval and hold it against German counterattacks at terrible cost. The sinking of the SS Mendi off the Isle of Wight in 1917, after a collision with the SS Darro, brought heavy loss of life to men of the South African Native Labour Corps. Warden traces how the apartheid-era state celebrated Delville Wood as South Africa’s “finest hour,” while Black South Africans kept the memory of the Mendi alive. Since 1994, he shows, the Mendi has largely surpassed Delville Wood as the nation’s most celebrated sacrifice, though both are still commemorated. He also considers how school curricula and public memory shape which stories younger South Africans learn.
Del Kostka tells the story of the Battle of the Somme in 1916, when two great armies fought to the brink of annihilation over ground neither considered strategically important. The story begins in August 1914, when Britain entered the war with a small professional army and Lord Kitchener called for volunteers. Kostka explains how Edward Stanley, the 17th Earl of Derby, raised battalions in Liverpool by promising that friends and neighbors could serve together, creating the “Pals” battalions that soon spread across Britain. He follows these volunteers to Picardy and the first day of the offensive, July 1, 1916, when mines exploded beneath the German trenches at 7:28 a.m. and whole communities suffered devastating losses within hours. Kostka reflects on why the Somme has come to symbolize the futility of war and describes the Thiepval Memorial, which bears the names of more than 72,000 missing men. He closes with practical advice for travelers who wish to visit the battlefields, memorials, and villages of the region today.
Bob Seals examines the U.S. Army Model 1913 Cavalry Saber, the last saber issued to American mounted troops and popularly known as “the Patton Saber.” For some 159 years, Army cavalrymen, dragoons, and light horse carried an edged sword, but some historians have doubted that a mere second lieutenant could have shaped the Army’s choice of a new weapon. Seals traces Second Lieutenant George S. Patton Jr.’s advocacy of a straight-bladed saber designed for the thrust rather than the cut, inspired by Napoleon’s instruction to his cavalry, “Don’t cut! The point!” He follows Patton’s study at the French cavalry school at Saumur, his visit to Springfield Armory to confer on the design, and his appointment as the Army’s first Master of the Sword at the Mounted Service School at Fort Riley. Seals also considers the saber’s later fate, including blades converted into fighting knives in the Second World War, and concludes that the M1913 deserves to be remembered as the Patton saber.
Edward J. Langer looks beyond the immediate causes of the First World War to the ideas that shaped how Europe’s rulers justified it. He begins with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, by Gavrilo Princip of the Black Hand, and follows the month of diplomacy that failed to prevent Austria-Hungary’s war on Serbia from spreading as Russia, Germany, France, and Britain mobilized. Langer then traces the intellectual roots of the conflict, from Saint Augustine’s concept of the just war and the ideas of Martin Luther to the doctrine of the divine right of kings. Langer also shows how each belligerent government, bound to show that its cause was just, issued an official “color book” of diplomatic documents explaining its decision to fight. He closes by asking whether nationalism, greed, or religious belief carried Europe into a war that was anything but a splendid little war.
James J. Warrick examines the Second Battle of Ypres in April 1915, which saw the first large-scale use of poison gas in war. He tells the story through Private Percy Kingsley of the Canadian Expeditionary Force’s 5th Battalion, a young volunteer from Humboldt, Saskatchewan, who had spent a week in the trenches of the Ypres salient when, on the afternoon of April 22, a yellow-green cloud of chlorine drifted across no man’s land. Warrick explains that the danger of chemical weapons had been recognized as early as the Hague Convention of 1899, and that captured German soldiers, including deserters, had warned of the gas canisters. Yet the French and British did not take the threat seriously. The gas fell on French colonial troops, opening a four-mile gap that left the Canadians exposed, but the Germans, unprepared for their new weapon’s success, could not exploit it. Warrick concludes that the Allies learned a hard lesson about heeding intelligence, and follows Kingsley through a long life that ended in 1982.
Roger Daene challenges the popular image of the Western Front as a series of senseless battles in which infantry ran across open ground to be slaughtered while generals clung to outdated tactics. Quoting the German commander Wilhelm Balck, “Bullets quickly write new tactics,” he traces how the British Army adapted after the Battle of the Marne turned the war into a struggle of positions. The war introduced or transformed the airplane, the tank, poison gas, the machine gun, and heavy artillery, and Daene shows how British infantry learned to fight alongside them. He follows the evolution of platoon and section tactics, including the introduction of the Lewis gun to restore firepower, the development of creeping barrages, and the growing importance of communications and close air support through the costly lessons of the Somme and Passchendaele. Daene concludes that the British integrated infantry, artillery, tanks, and aircraft more effectively than the Germans, and that this combination of arms ultimately brought victory in 1918.
Andrew Wright asks whether Britain was right to enter the First World War, a question shaped by the horrendous casualties, lost wealth, and diminished world position that followed. Protected by the English Channel and the Royal Navy, Britain could have stayed out of the conflict after Germany invaded Belgium, yet it chose to stand with Belgium and France. Wright argues that the decision was justified on strategic, legal, and moral grounds. Strategically, Britain depended on seaborne trade, and a German victory would have given a hostile power control of the continent and a navy able to threaten British sovereignty. Legally, the Treaty of London of 1839 bound the great powers, Germany included, to respect Belgian neutrality, and Britain had made assurances to its allies. Morally, Germany’s conduct and war aims were unjust, even if Allied propaganda exaggerated German atrocities. As in the Napoleonic Wars and the Second World War, Wright concludes, Britain had little choice but to fight, and its sacrifice was neither mistaken nor in vain.
David W. Tschanz recounts the influenza pandemic of 1918, which spread across the globe in two months while the First World War raged. Its victims were mostly young adults, many of whom went from perfect health to death in less than a day, and by conservative estimates it killed at least 27 million people, including twelve million in India. Tschanz traces early outbreaks among soldiers at Fort Riley, Kansas, and shows how crowded camps and troopships carried the disease to the front, where it crippled troop movements, slowed the reinforcement of General Pershing’s army, and further broke Germany’s fragile morale. Nearly three times as many American soldiers died of influenza as from enemy action in the same period. He describes the dilemma faced by President Woodrow Wilson as military leaders weighed the risks of continuing to ship men overseas. Tschanz closes with the pandemic’s reach into the families of the powerful, including a young Assistant Secretary of the Navy named Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who barely survived.
Roger Daene examines how German offensive and defensive tactics evolved during the First World War, and why those changes still failed to win the war in 1918. Starting from Wilhelm Balck’s observation that “bullets quickly write new tactics,” he follows the German Army from the costly lessons of the First Battle of Ypres through major reforms in the winters of 1916–17 and 1917–18. Daene describes the development of defense in depth and the elastic defense, the debates among German commanders over how much ground to yield, and the creation of stormtrooper units for infiltration attacks. He then analyzes the 1918 Spring Offensive, in which Operation Michael nearly severed the British and French armies and drove the British Fifth Army to the verge of collapse. Instead of concentrating for a decisive blow, Ludendorff divided his effort and later squandered his reserves. Daene concludes that the Allies, not the Germans, developed the winning combination of infantry, tanks, aircraft, and artillery.
Alan R. McGahey examines the Battle of Jutland in 1916 in the shadow of Nelson’s triumph at Trafalgar, the victory that had secured British naval supremacy for a century and raised expectations of another decisive success. Instead, Jutland left the Royal Navy asking, in Vice Admiral Sir David Beatty’s famous words, whether there was “something wrong with our bloody ships.” McGahey follows the battlecruiser action in which HMS Indefatigable, Queen Mary, and Invincible blew up, and weighs the decisions of Beatty and Admiral Sir John Jellicoe that may have cost Britain another Trafalgar. He argues that the deeper causes of disaster lay in Admiralty choices: the adoption of Commander Frederic Dreyer’s system of “rapid-independent fire” and the decision to overload ships with ammunition and cordite. Drawing on surveys of the wreck of Invincible, McGahey shows how fire passed from turret to magazine, and concludes that these decisions sent more than 3,000 sailors to their deaths.
Birrion Sondahl examines the Battle of Tannenberg in August 1914, the first major battle of the First World War on the Eastern Front. With most of its army committed to the Schlieffen Plan in the west, Germany faced a Russian invasion of East Prussia with a single army, the Eighth, initially commanded by General Prittwitz. Sondahl explains how a minor German setback at Gumbinnen shaped the campaign and how the Eighth Army then concentrated against General Samsonov’s Russian Second Army, encircling and nearly annihilating it while General Rennenkampf’s First Army failed to intervene. He analyzes the factors behind the German victory, including logistics, intelligence, reconnaissance, terrain, and communication, and the Russian failures in supply and coordination. While Hindenburg and Ludendorff received the credit, Sondahl argues that Colonel Max Hoffmann, who devised the plan and persuaded his superiors to keep to it, deserves much of it. Tannenberg, he concludes, was a rare battle of maneuver in a war remembered for static fronts.
