Books by "Charles à Court Repington"
7 books found
".... this is an excellent primer for someone starting to read about the Great War. Roy delves into the personalities of several leaders, exploring strengths and weaknesses, and how these contributed to victories, defeats, and disasters." – Roads to the Great War While battles and wars and 'the clash of civilizations' are as old as time itself, there is little doubt that the conflagration of 1914–1918 was something unique and terrifyingly new. There was not a corner of the globe that did not feel its effects, some more than others, but the scope of its impact on economies, populations, food supplies, the character of governments in general and the day-to-day lives of numberless ordinary people, were such as the world had never experienced, nor expected. Little did anyone dream that the assassination of relatively minor figures of the Habsburg royal family, Archduke Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, carried out by an unknown Serbian teenager on the street corner of an obscure town called Sarajevo that few had ever heard of, could possibly provide a spark that would plunge the entire European continent into an industrialized war of catastrophic destruction. But it did: the two shots that youth fired were surely 'heard around the world', and several million people would perish or be maimed as a result. The story of World War I has been told by many different writers, historians and participants in many different ways, especially so before and during the centennial of its events that just concluded. All the World at War stands apart from many of these standard studies. It presents a familiar story from points of view that many readers might find surprising: unexpected details, different perspectives, atypical and generally insightful observations from contemporaries (often obscure to modern readers), who witnessed the events and personalities that pushed the war along from phase to phase. The narrative is chronologically arranged, beautifully written, with something new or intriguing on every page. This is a unique and finely paced account of 'The War to End all Wars' that didn't.
This is the first book in the English language to offer an analysis of a conflict that, in so many ways, raised the curtain on the Great War. In September 1911, Italy declared war on the once mighty, transcontinental Ottoman Empire – but it was an Empire in decline. The ambitious Italy decided to add to her growing African empire by attacking Ottoman-ruled Tripolitania (Libya). The Italian action began the rapid fall of the Ottoman Empire, which would end with its disintegration at the end of the First World War. The day after Ottoman Turkey made peace with Italy in October 1912, the Balkan League attacked in the First Balkan War. The Italo-Ottoman War, as a prelude to the unprecedented hostilities that would follow, has so many firsts and pointers to the awful future: the first three-dimensional war with aerial reconnaissance and bombing, and the first use of armored vehicles, operating in concert with conventional ground and naval forces; war fever whipped up by the Italian press; military incompetence and stalemate; lessons in how not to fight a guerrilla war; mass death from disease and 10,000 more from reprisals and executions. Thirty thousand men would die in a struggle for what may described as little more than a scatolone di sabbia – a box of sand. As acclaimed historian Charles Stephenson portrays in this ground-breaking study, if there is an exemplar of the futility of war, this is it. Apart from the loss of life and the huge cost to Italy (much higher than was originally envisaged), the main outcome was to halve the Libyan population through emigration, famine and casualties. The Italo-Ottoman War was a conflict overshadowed by the Great War – but one which in many ways presaged the horrors to come. A Box of Sand will be of great interest to students of military history and those with an interest in the history of North Africa and the development of technology in war.