100 books like Jutland

The book is a stunning tale of death and disaster. In February 1915 one Austro-Hungarian army and one German army tried to relieve the Russian-besieged Habsburg fortress of Przemyśl and its 120,000-man garrison. The Austro-Hungarian troops advanced along the 1,200-meter high ridges of the Carpathian Mountains in snowstorms and dense fog. Intermittent sleet, snow, wind, and ice battered the men. Temperatures plummeted to -25 degrees Celsius. Sudden thaws turned the battlefields into seas of mud. Men either froze to death or drowned in the ooze. Hunger, starvation, disease (typhus and cholera), frostbite, and wolves took their toll. Horses and dogs became a dietary staple. Life expectancy was down to five or six weeks. Countless troopers committed suicide.

The butcher’s bill was astronomical: 800,000 casualties, more men than would fall at Verdun or the Somme one year later. Despite the deadly relief effort, the Przemyśl garrison surrendered to the Russians on… show more.

Some books, like Alistair Horne’s The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916, have stood the test of time. The same is true of this work, first published in 1965. Caporetto (Karfreit to the Germans) was an epic mountain struggle, brutal and deadly. It was fought in October and November 1917 in the 2,000-meter-high Julian Alps. Snow, sleet, rain, fog, and poisonous gas dominated the battlefield. Otto von Below’s German Fourteenth Army, using new innovative infiltration tactics, surprised Luigi Capello’s Italian Second Army. By the end of October, the Italians had been driven south to the Piave River. Only the hasty dispatch of five British and six French divisions helped stabilize the front. Rome’s postwar investigation of the disaster revealed that there had been 43,000 casualties, 265,000 to 275,000 prisoners of war taken and 3,000 artillery pieces lost. Most shockingly, roughly 350,000 deserters and civilian stragglers clogged the roads. The adversary… show more.

Although originally published almost 60 years ago, this work remains a classic account of the longest battle of the war, a battle that still stands as the most symbolic of the war for France. The only book on my list that is not focused on an individual’s experiences, or those of a few people, this broader account of the huge battle nonetheless captures the many ways individuals experienced its horrors. Horne is a vivid writer and skilled historian, and this work has stood the test of time as a key work not only about the Great War but also about the modern French nation as a whole.

Gallipoli occupies an infamous place in the history of amphibious operations. The British and Allies hoped in 1915 to wrest control of the Gallipoli peninsula from Turkish forces, then aligned with the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary. This attack in turn would open the way for the defeat of Turkey, link up with friendly Russian forces, and ultimately defeat the Central Powers. However, as Robin Pryor explains, the British amphibious assault suffered from poor planning, incompetent leadership, ineffective logistics, and inadequate weapons and vehicles. The Turks enjoyed the advantages of high ground and good leadership. Following the assault in April 1915, ground operations cost 130,000 British and Allied casualties and ended in their evacuation and failure in January 1916. Pryor’s book paints Gallipoli as a cautionary tale of how not to conduct amphibious operations.  

Of the many books available on the Battle of Jutland, this one is a very professional look at what went wrong.

It acknowledges the key issue that no one in either fleet had any experience of handling fleets of this size and type, or fighting a battle at the ranges their guns were capable of reaching. Admirals Harper and Bacon remain thoroughly professional in their analysis of the failings on the British side, identifying such things as poor communication of orders by signal, poor signal security—Beatty’s flagship signalled by lamp a request for the night’s challenge and reply and received them from Princess Royal. So did at least one of the German ships which later used the challenge to confuse a British cruiser…

A key finding was that many of the British admirals had no ‘staff’ trained to process information, draft orders in a sensible manner, and transmit them. Key… show more.

I usually get bored by very long books too full of dates, people you have never heard of, and endless details, and I am a historian! But I make an exception for this book.

Clark took me back vividly to a period in history that has been covered so often by rewriting the old storylines of WWI with flair and freshness. I came to better understand why World War I was not just a fluke, started by the black swan event of the assassination of the Austrian heir to the throne and his wife in a backwater of the empire on June 28th, 1914.

In spite of the title, if the European leaders were sleepwalkers, and in a narrow sense they were, Clark also provides plenty of evidence that the underlying tensions in the Austro-Hungarian empire were like huge dry piles of straw just waiting for a flame to ignite… show more.

This book makes fascinating reading as it examines the German Battlecruisers (the Germans actually referred to them as Panzerkreuzers—Armoured Cruisers) and they carried smaller calibre main guns than their British counterparts, sacrificing gun power for better protection with heavier armour. They took an enormous amount of punishment at Jutland, but only one was lost to battle damage, the others survived to fight again another day—and they did, though not in the North Sea, but against the Russians in the Baltic.

Anyone who has read anything at all about the Battle of Jutland will have realised that the British and German ‘Battlecruisers’ did most of the fighting, and suffered the heaviest losses. This book gives details of the German ships involved, their design, evolution, build and most interesting, the actual log accounts of the engagement make for even more fascinating study.

This is the ‘Appreciation’ that Admirals Harper and Bacon responded to. It was never published or edited for publication at the time it was written by Captains A C and G B Dewar in 1920-21.

Both were firmly in the Beatty “charge the guns and slug it out ship to ship” faction and even Admirals Chatham and Keys, both Beatty supporters found it far, far too one-sided and likely to divide the RN into factions (Jutland still does). Though it was never published, copies did circulate and Churchill obviously had a copy since he quotes it in his own book “The World Crisis”. Eventually, in 1928, orders were given that all copies were to be collected and destroyed…some survived.

This book is remarkable in that it is the work of two historians who reproduce the original text with explanatory notes, annotations, and additional material. Reading it soon leads the reader… show more.

My grandfather fought in the Battle of Jutland, as a young gunnery lieutenant; the hero of The Redeemed, Leo, would do likewise as a boy seaman. I needed insight into men’s experience and found it above all in this book (put together by two naval officers who’d themselves taken part.) It is composed of sixty personal accounts from men of all ranks and is edited to give a gripping chronology of what remains the largest naval battle in history.

Gordon’s book delights and displeases in turn.

He shows how the baked in traditions of blind obedience to orders, together with the class-based culture and selection for command, hindered the actions of the Royal Navy during WW1. Not all of his statements are correct and sometimes his naval history is shaky but the tale is well told and it is an absorbing read.