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This book details the history of Fort Douaumont and the men who fought there, providing a detailed narrative of Battle of Verdun, the fall of Fort Douaumont, and the bombardment by French forces compelling the Germans to retreat. It covers critical units and individuals and provides four different car tours of differing lengths and alternative routes. Numerous maps and various aerial and technical drawings accompany this guide of the battlefield.
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A visit to the battlefield of Verdun is usually dominated by the forts of Douamont and Vaux, the museum at Fleury and the striking, huge Ossuary. Although this gives a flavor of the horrific fighting that took place in the area, particularly in 1916, the visitor will be hard pressed to get much more than an impression from such places. This book seeks to guide the battlefield pilgrim into parts of the battlefield that get rarely visited by means of a series of walks, a number of which include the major sites. The four tours have been carefully walked. All are practicable for a reasonably healthy adult; the tours vary in length, most taking a half day to complete and the longest (the last) a ...
The bitter fight for Fort Vaux is one of the most famous episodes in the Battle of Verdun—it has achieved almost legendary status in French military history. The heroic resistance put up by the forts commander, Major Raynal, and his small, isolated garrison in the face of repeated German assaults was remarkable at the time, and it is still seen as an outstanding example of gallantry and determination. But what really happened inside the besieged fort during the German attacks, and how can visitors to the Verdun battlefield get an insight into the extraordinary events that took place there almost a century ago? In this precise, accessible account, Christina Holstein, one of the leading authorities on the Verdun battlefield and its monuments, reconstructs the fight for the fort in graphic day-by-day detail. Readers get a vivid sense of the sequence of events, of the intense experience of the defenders and a wider understanding of the importance of Fort Vaux in the context of the German 1916 offensive.
On 21 February 1916 the German Fifth Army launched a devastating offensive against French forces at Verdun and set in motion one of the most harrowing and prolonged battles of the Great War. By the time the struggle finished ten months later, over 650,000 men had been killed or wounded or were missing, and the terrible memory of the battle had been etched into the histories of France and Germany. This epic trial of military and national strength cannot be properly understood without visiting, and walking, the battlefield, and this is the purpose of Christina Holstein's invaluable guide. In a series of walks she takes the reader to all the key points on the battlefield, many of which have attained almost legendary status - the spot where Colonel Driant was killed, the forts of Douaumont, Vaux and Souville, the Mort Homme ridge, and Verdun itself.REVIEWS A new guide book from one of the most knowledgeable Western Front historians and guides. A New work by long-time battlefield guide and WFA member who also wrote an earlier Pen & Sword book on Ft. Douaumont.e: WWI Historical Association
A tour of the historic French battlefield that goes beyond the usual dates and places, and reveals the full story of the fighting after the fighting. Despite the popular view, the French army did not cease offensive operations after the disastrous Nivelle Offensive of spring 1917 and the subsequent mutinies. Nor did the fighting at Verdun come to an end in 1916. The successful French counteroffensives at the end of that year led to preliminary planning for a two Army operation in 1917 to break out of the Verdun salient and recapture the strategically very significant Briey coal basin. The French Army mutinies of May and June 1917 led to a more limited version of the plan being implemented, w...
In 1916, in an exchange of human flesh for war material, the Russian government sent to France two brigades to fight on the side of their French allies. By the end of World War I, these two brigades had experienced their own form of the Russian Revolution, had been isolated at a southern training post in a discipline move by the French government, had battled against each other in what was one of the first confrontations of the Russian Civil War, and had emerged from the conflict as a single force, the Russian Legion of Honor, which would remain loyal to France until the end of the war. The remarkable story of these Russian soldiers has been overlooked by historians until now. Jamie Cockfield here explores the journey and transformation of these men, and in so doing, he examines the impact of the revolution on the Russians who were caught in the middle of wartime alliances and nationalist ardor.
This book on French soldiers during WWI is “a first-class narrative with an abundance of personal testimony from the officers and men of the regiment” (The Great War Magazine, Editor’s Choice). Although the French fielded the largest number of Allied troops on the Western Front in the First World War, the story of their soldiers is little known to English readers. The immense size of the French armies, the number of battles they fought, and the enormous losses they incurred, make it difficult for us to comprehend their experience. But we can gain a genuine insight by focusing on one of the defining battles of that war, at Verdun in 1916, and by looking at it through the eyes of a small...
Reviewers of this book have praised Christina Hoff Sommer's well-reasoned argument against many feminists' reliance on misleading, politically motivated 'facts' about how women are victimised.
This WWII battlefield guide offers twelve walking tours covering all the major sites of the D-Day landings in Normandy with in-depth historical context. D-Day the momentous first step in the Allied liberation of France and the rest of northwest Europe. The places associated with the Normandy landings are among the most memorable that a battlefield visitor can explore. In Walking D-Day, military historian Paul Reed takes visitors through all the major sites, from Pegasus Bridge, Merville Battery, Ouistrehem and Longues Battery to Juno, Gold, Omaha and Utah Beaches, Pointe du Hoc and Sainte-Mre-glise. Each of the twelve walks includes a vividly detailed historical introduction. Information on the many battlefield monuments and the military cemeteries is included, and there are over 120 illustrations. Walking D-Day introduces the visitor not only to the places where the Allies landed and first clashed with the Germans defenders but also to the Normandy landscape over which the critical battles that decided the course of the war were fought.