Examines the day-to-day life and experiences of the typical American soldier during World War II. Includes a glossary of terms and a brief chronology of the major campaigns of the war.

From Ammo to Zig-Zag, many of the words we use today were invented in World War 1. They provide a unique insight into the experience of the war, and the inventiveness and humour of ordinary soldiers.

Groundbreaking and critically-acclaimed, Tommy is the first history of World War I to place the British soldier who fought in the trenches centre-stage.

The Great War continues to fascinate, and never more so as we approach 2014, the centenary year of its outbreak. There is an abiding fascination in the uniform and equipment of the British Great War soldier. What was it like to wear? What were puttees? What does a gas mask look like? How heavy was the equipment? How did you dig a trench? These and other typical questions will be answered in Haynes Manual style, providing a vivid insight into life during the Great War for the average “Tommy Atkins."

A hundred years have now passed since Britain sent hundreds of thousands of men to fight and to die on the Western Front and elsewhere. This is the perfect introduction to the life and experiences of the ordinary British soldier.

The First World War has left an almost indelible mark on history, with battles such as the Somme and Passchendaele becoming watchwords for suffering unsurpassed. The dreadful fighting on the Western Front, and elsewhere in the world, remains vivid in the public imagination. Over the years dozens of books have been published dealing with the soldier's experience, the military history and the weapons and vehicles of the war, but there has been little devoted to the objects associated with those hard years in the trenches. This book (new in paperback) redresses that balance. With hundreds of carefully captioned photographs of items that would have been part of the everyday life for the British Tommy; from recruiting posters, uniforms and entrenching equipment to games, postcards and pieces of 'trench art', this book brings to life the experience of the Great War soldier through the objects with which he would have been surrounded.

A unique visual perspective of life in the trenches on the Western Front from the forgotten soldier-artist and Somme veteran Private Fergus Mackain who served in France 1916 to 1917.

For soldiers in the Great War, going over the top was a comparatively rare event; much more frequently, they were bored and lonely and missing their families at home. Needing an outlet for their affection, many found it in the animal kingdom. Tommy's Ark looks at the war through the eyes of the soldiers who were there, and examines their relationship with a strange and unexpected range of animal life, from horses, dogs and cats to monkeys and birds - even in one case a golden eagle. Animals became mascots - some Welsh battalions had goats as mascots, some of the Scots had donkeys. And then there were the animals and insects that excited curiosity amongst men drawn into the army from the industrial heartlands of Britain, men who had little knowledge of, let alone daily contact with, wildlife. Civilians turned soldiers observed the natural world around them, from the smallest woodlouse to voles, mice and larger animals such as deer and rabbit. Richard van Emden explores his subject far more radically than previous attempts, revealing how, for example, a lemur was taken on combat missions in the air, a lion was allowed to pad down the front line trenches and how a monkey lost its leg during the fighting at Delville Wood on the Somme. Illustrated with more than sixty previously unseen or rarely published photographs, drawn mainly from the author's own extraordinary collection.