The best World War 1 books

While Rosie the Riveter had fewer paid employment options after being told to cede her job to returning World War II veterans, her sisters and daughters found new work opportunities in national defense. The 1948 Women’s Armed Services Integration Act created permanent military positions for women with the promise of equal pay. Her Cold War follows the experiences of women in the military from the passage of the Act to the early 1980s.

Tanya L. Roth shows us that the battles these servicewomen fought for equality paved the way for women in combat, a prerequisite for promotion to many leadership positions, and opened opportunities for other service people, including those with disabilities, LGBT, and gender-nonconforming people, noncitizens, and more.

It is 1916. The world has gone to war, and young Leo Sercombe, hauling coal aboard the HMS Queen Mary, is a long way from home. The wild, unchanging West Country roads of his boyhood seem very far away from life aboard a battlecruiser -- a universe of well-oiled steel, of smoke and spray and sweat, where death seems never more than a heartbeat away.

Three years into the Great War, England's greatest asset is their intelligence network--field agents risking their lives to gather information, and codebreakers able to crack every German telegram. Margot De Wilde thrives in the environment of the secretive Room 40, where she spends her days deciphering intercepted messages. But when her world is turned upside down by an unexpected loss, for the first time in her life numbers aren't enough.

The definitive guide to U.S. infantry weapons of World War I. Best-selling author and arms expert Bruce N. Canfield gives you the inside scoop on everything that was carried into combat by the Army and Marines, including rifles, pistols, shotguns, automatic rifles, machine guns, bayonets, knives, grenades, mortars, flame throwers, and accessories. It's all in here! Filled with the kind of practical, "hands-on" advice and information that you will turn to again and again, with unique "collector's notes" that tell you what you need to know about markings, rarity, rebuilds, and fakes. Nowhere else will you find this amount of useful information under one cover - and it's complete with exciting combat reports describing how this equipment performed at the front!

On September 29, 1918, a regiment of volunteers from New York State, many of them rich boys from Manhattan, attacked the feared Hindenburg Line, one of the strongest defensive systems ever devised. At a frightful cost, suffering more killed on a single day than any other regiment in American history, they broke the enemy and helped conclude World War.

Zamoyski documents the dramatic and little-known story of how, in the summer of 1920, Lenin came within a hair's breadth of shattering the painstakingly constructed Versailles peace settlement and spreading Bolshevism to Western Europe.

Based on over twenty years of reading soldiers’ letters, diaries, and memoirs, this book explores the lives of Canadian soldiers in the trenches and behind the lines. It focuses on the unique soldiers’ culture of songs, trench newspapers, rumours, theatre, superstitions, ghost stories, and death culture that helped to shield soldiers from the unending strain of war and to bind them together in the face of the storm of steel.

Known for his collaborations with Neil Gaiman, David Almond, Heston Blumenthal and Richard Dawkins, Dave McKean defied expectations with his stunning debut as writer and artist in Cages, winner of multiple awards for Best Graphic Album. Dark Horse proudly presents an original graphic novel by the legendary artist based on the life of Paul Nash, a young artist and officer during World War I, finding his voice and his social conscience in the trenches in Ypres. Black Dog; The Dreams of Paul Nash fuses real soldiers’ memoirs and Nash's life and work, becoming a moving evocation of how the extremities of war change us and how we deal with the resultant shock—in Nash’s case, by turning his landscapes into powerful and dreamlike 'psychoscapes'.

In 1914, Britain faces a new kind of war. For Edward and Beatrice Hunter, their children, servants, and neighbours, life will never be the same again. For David, the eldest, war means a chance to do something noble; but enlisting will break his mother's heart. His sister Diana, nineteen and beautiful, longs for marriage. She has her heart set on Charles Wroughton, son of Earl Wroughton, but Charles will never be allowed to marry a banker's daughter. Below the stairs, Cook and Ada, the head housemaid, grow more terrified of the German invasion with every newspaper atrocity story. Ethel, under housemaid, can't help herself when it comes to men and now soldiers add to the temptation; yet there's more to this flighty girl than meets the eye.

In 1914, Britain faces a new kind of war. For Edward and Beatrice Hunter, their children, servants, and neighbours, life will never be the same again. For David, the eldest, war means a chance to do something noble; but enlisting will break his mother's heart. His sister Diana, nineteen and beautiful, longs for marriage. She has her heart set on Charles Wroughton, son of Earl Wroughton, but Charles will never be allowed to marry a banker's daughter. Below the stairs, Cook and Ada, the head housemaid, grow more terrified of the German invasion with every newspaper atrocity story. Ethel, under housemaid, can't help herself when it comes to men and now soldiers add to the temptation; yet there's more to this flighty girl than meets the eye.