The Great War had a profound impact on Britain. Not only did families risk their sons in active combat; every member of society was required to make a contribution to the war effort. National initiatives like rationing affected all, and civilians were now regarded as a legitimate military target. Reminders of this turbulent time survive today, in rituals such as Summer Time and Remembrance, nationwide war memorials, and the powerful myth of a lost generation slaughtered in a futile war. Here Ian Beckett examines the mobilization of the British people for the war effort and reassesses its impact on state and society. As evidence, he presents 40 key documents, including the King's rallying cry to the nation to 'eat less wheat', reports on social phenomena from anti-German riots to the drinking habits of women and juveniles, and Kitchener's initiatives to raise his New Armies.

The story of First World War deserters who were shot at dawn, then pardoned nearly a century later has often been told, but these 306 soldiers represent a tiny proportion of deserters. More than 80,000 cases of desertion and absence were tried at courts martial on the home front but these soldiers have been ignored. Andrea Hetherington, in this thought-provoking and meticulously researched account, sets the record straight by describing the deserters who disappeared from camps and barracks within Great Britain at an alarming rate. She reveals how they employed a range of survival strategies, some ridding themselves of all connection with the military while others hid in plain sight. Their reasons for desertion varied. Some were already living a life of crime whilst others were conscientious objectors who refused to respond to their call-up papers. Boredom, protest, troubles at home or physical and mental disabilities all played their part in men deciding to go on the run. Andrea Hetherington’s timely book gives us a vivid insight into a hitherto overlooked aspect of the First World War.

Endorsed by Edexcel, this book covers the topic of Britian at home in World War I. It provides background information on the topic.

World War I was the first large-scale industrialized military conflict, and it led to the concept of total war. The essays in this volume analyze the experience of the war in light of this concept's implications, in particular the erosion of distinctions between the military and civilian spheres.

A “fascinating” look at hardship, heroism, and civilian life in England during the Great War (World War One Illustrated). The truth about the sacrifice and suffering among British civilians during World War I is rarely discussed. In this book, people who were there speak about experiences and events that have remained buried for decades. Their testimony shows the same candor and courage we have become accustomed to hearing from military veterans of this war. Those interviewed include a survivor of a Zeppelin raid in 1915; a Welsh munitions worker recruited as a girl; and a woman rescued from a bombed school after five days. There are also accounts of rural famine, bereavement, and the effects on families back home—and even the story of a woman who planned to kill her family to save them further suffering.

Challenges the tired orthodoxy that the Church of England had a bad First World War.

The Great War had a profound impact on Britain. Not only did families risk their sons in active combat; every member of society was required to make a contribution to the war effort. National initiatives like rationing affected all, and civilians were now regarded as a legitimate military target. Reminders of this turbulent time survive today, in rituals such as Summer Time and Remembrance, nationwide war memorials, and the powerful myth of a lost generation slaughtered in a futile war. Here Ian Beckett examines the mobilization of the British people for the war effort and reassesses its impact on state and society. As evidence, he presents 40 key documents, including the King's rallying cry to the nation to 'eat less wheat', reports on social phenomena from anti-German riots to the drinking habits of women and juveniles, and Kitchener's initiatives to raise his New Armies.

This book represents the most comprehensive history of Germany during the First World War.

World War I heralded a new global era of warfare, consolidating and expanding changes that had been building throughout the previous century, while also instituting new notions of war. The 1914-18 conflict witnessed the first aerial bombing of civilian populations, the first widespread concentration camps for the internment of enemy alien civilians, and an unprecedented use of civilian labor and resources for the war effort. Humanitarian relief programs for civilians became a common feature of modern society, while food became as significant as weaponry in the fight to win. Tammy M. Proctor argues that it was World War I—the first modern, global war—that witnessed the invention of both the modern “civilian” and the “home front,” where a totalizing war strategy pitted industrial nations and their citizenries against each other. Civilians in a World at War, 1914-1918, explores the different ways civilians work and function in a war situation, and broadens our understanding of the civilian to encompass munitions workers, nurses, laundresses, refugees, aid workers, and children who lived and worked in occupied zones, on home and battle fronts, and in the spaces in between. Comprehensive and global in scope, spanning the Eastern, Western, Italian, East African, and Mediterranean fronts, Proctor examines in lucid and evocative detail the role of experts in the war, the use of forced labor, and the experiences of children in the combatant countries. As in many wars, civilians on both sides of WWI were affected, and vast displacements of the populations shaped the contemporary world in countless ways, redrawing boundaries and creating or reviving lines of ethnic conflict. Exploring primary source materials and secondary studies of combatant and neutral nations, while synthesizing French, German, Dutch, and English language sources, Proctor transcends the artificial boundaries of national histories and the exclusive focus on soldiers. Instead she tells the fascinating and long-buried story of the civilian in the Great War, allowing voices from the period to speak for themselves.

“A tour de force of scholarship, analysis and narration.… Lloyd is well on the way to writing a definitive history of the First World War.” —Lawrence James, Times The Telegraph • Best Books of the Year The Times of London • Best Books of the Year A panoramic history of the savage combat on the Western Front between 1914 and 1918 that came to define modern warfare. The Western Front evokes images of mud-spattered men in waterlogged trenches, shielded from artillery blasts and machine-gun fire by a few feet of dirt. This iconic setting was the most critical arena of the Great War, a 400-mile combat zone stretching from Belgium to Switzerland where more than three million Allied and German soldiers struggled during four years of almost continuous combat. It has persisted in our collective memory as a tragic waste of human life and a symbol of the horrors of industrialized warfare. In this epic narrative history, the first volume in a groundbreaking trilogy on the Great War, acclaimed military historian Nick Lloyd captures the horrific fighting on the Western Front beginning with the surprise German invasion of Belgium in August 1914 and taking us to the Armistice of November 1918. Drawing on French, British, German, and American sources, Lloyd weaves a kaleidoscopic chronicle of the Marne, Passchendaele, the Meuse-Argonne, and other critical battles, which reverberated across Europe and the wider war. From the trenches where men as young as 17 suffered and died, to the headquarters behind the lines where Generals Haig, Joffre, Hindenburg, and Pershing developed their plans for battle, Lloyd gives us a view of the war both intimate and strategic, putting us amid the mud and smoke while at the same time depicting the larger stakes of every encounter. He shows us a dejected Kaiser Wilhelm II—soon to be eclipsed in power by his own generals—lamenting the botched Schlieffen Plan; French soldiers piling atop one another in the trenches of Verdun; British infantryman wandering through the frozen wilderness in the days after the Battle of the Somme; and General Erich Ludendorff pursuing a ruthless policy of total war, leading an eleventh-hour attack on Reims even as his men succumbed to the Spanish Flu. As Lloyd reveals, far from a site of attrition and stalemate, the Western Front was a simmering, dynamic “cauldron of war” defined by extraordinary scientific and tactical innovation. It was on the Western Front that the modern technologies—machine guns, mortars, grenades, and howitzers—were refined and developed into effective killing machines. It was on the Western Front that chemical warfare, in the form of poison gas, was first unleashed. And it was on the Western Front that tanks and aircraft were introduced, causing a dramatic shift away from nineteenth-century bayonet tactics toward modern combined arms, reinforced by heavy artillery, that forever changed the face of war. Brimming with vivid detail and insight, The Western Front is a work in the tradition of Barbara Tuchman and John Keegan, Rick Atkinson and Antony Beevor: an authoritative portrait of modern warfare and its far-reaching human and historical consequences.