Intrigued by #Amiens100 but want to find out more about the battle and its contribution to the end of #WW1? This thread will provide a few recommendations to get you started...
John Terraine, 'To Win a War: 1918, the year of victory' (1978). Terraine made his name as one of very few historians to question the dominant narrative of the war as a futile bloodbath overseen by incompetent, obstinate 'donkeys' during the 1960s. 'To Win a War' represents...
Terraine's argument in its clearest form, building upon nearly two decades of refinement. However, it is largely based upon published accounts rather than archival material, and covers 1918 as a whole rather than just the Hundred Days. For those seeking a readable alternative...
See @nick_lloy 'The Hundred Days' (2013). Based upon archival research in Germany, Canada, France, UK and the US, Lloyd takes a chronological approach to the final months of the war, perfect for the reader seeking to track the progress of the fighting across France and the...
cumulative effects of the Allied offensives upon the abilities of the Germans to respond. Two alternatives to Lloyd, with a focus on the British component of the offensive, are: J.P. Harris with Niall Barr, 'Amiens to the Armistice' (1999), a military assessment of the campaign;
And Peter @PeterHart1915 '1918: A Very British Victory' (2008) and 'The Last Battle' (2018). Both of Hart's books on this period draw heavily upon the voluminous collections held by @I_W_M to bring the words of those who fought the battles to the fore...
Away from the broad accounts, those seeking a forensic view of the fighting can find a range of texts. On the one hand, the Official History of the war, written by James Edmonds, contains 5 volumes on 1918, the final 2 of which (pub. 1947) cover the fighting from 8 Aug. These...
weighty tomes are not by any means page turners, but provide a remarkable level of detail in their accounts of the planning and execution of the operations undertaken by the Allied forces. The Australian account, volume 6 (1942) like much of the Australian documentation from...
the war, can be freely downloaded from the @AWMemorial website: awm.gov.au/collection/C14…. The Canadian official history (1962), which covers the whole war, is available at: canada.ca/en/department-…
The New Zealand official history (1921) can also be viewed online: nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/t…. For the official views of the British Empire's key allies, see the 2 vols of Tome 7: memoiredeshommes.sga.defense.gouv.fr/fr/arkotheque/… (when opened in the National Library of France website, these documents...
can be read using a 'Text and Image' tool, which - when used in conjunction with online translation - provides a serviceable English translation for non-French speakers). Maintaining the close study of military operations, two studies of individual formations are worth noting...
Archibald Montgomery, 'The Story of the Fourth Army in the Battles of the Hundred Days' (1920) is an exhaustive account of events within the BEF's spearhead formation. Fourth Army was central to the prosecution of #Amiens100 and advanced the furthest of any British force...
during the Hundred Days that followed. The text is available at: archive.org/details/storyo… and was republished (with a separate volume of maps, by @navalmilitary in 2009. The experiences of Third Army, which operated to the north of Fourth Army, have been covered in detail by...
@JonathanBoff 'Winning and Losing on the Western Front' (2012). Boff's work provides a comparative assessment of Third Army and her direct opponents in the German Second and Seventeenth Armies, to identify the extent to which the Allies 'won' and/or the Germans 'lost' the war...
Two final books of potential interest for those following #Amiens100, one broad in focus the other narrow are: a collection of essays edited by Peter Dennis and Jeff Gray, '1918: Defining Victory' (1998), with contributions from @prior_robin @ProfGSheffield and @AlbertPalazzo ...
which can be found [PDF] here: army.gov.au/sites/g/files/…; and Charles Messenger 'The Day We Won the War', (2008), a highly Anglo-centric account of events 100 years ago today which, as with Peter Hart's work noted above, contains a large number of quotations from those who took...
part in the fighting.
Hopefully this by no means exhaustive look at the available literature will give anyone interested in finding out more about the final months of #WW1 a stepping stone into the scholarship. If you are interested in my single recommendation for what to...
Hopefully this by no means exhaustive look at the available literature will give anyone interested in finding out more about the final months of #WW1 a stepping stone into the scholarship. If you are interested in my single recommendation for what to...
read in order to understand #Amiens100 in its proper military and global context, then I would suggest David Stevenson's 'With Our Backs to the Wall' (2011). But beware, it is not one for the casual reader. It is a big, bold, sophisticated treatment of 1918 as a whole.
If you have any other recommendations, or anything I've forgotten, then let me know and hopefully we can provide as thorough a set of next steps for those inspired to learn more about #Amiens100 today.
