Books by "John Arthur Gibbs"
11 books found
A "well-researched, well-written, humorous and engaging" exploration of soldiers' rations during World War I ( Destructive Music). Napoleon Bonaparte is often credited with saying that "an army marches on its stomach." A hundred years after his time, the soldiers of the Great War would do little marching. Instead, they would fight their battles from cold, muddy trenches, looking out across No Man's Land towards another set of trenches that housed the enemy. It is one of the remarkable successes of the war that they rarely went hungry. During the war, the army grew from its peacetime numbers of 250,000 to well over 3 million. They needed three meals a day and, using the men's own letters and diaries, John Hartley tells the story of the food they ate, how it got to them in those trenches and what they thought of it. It's the story of eating bully beef and army "dog biscuits" under fire and it's the story of the enjoyment of food parcels from home or eating egg and chips in a café on a rare off-duty evening. It's also the story of the lives of loved ones at home—how they coped with rationing and how women changed their place in society, taking on jobs previously held by men, many working as farm laborers in the Women's Land Army. This is a book which will appeal to food lovers as well as those with an interest in military and social history.
Nineteenth-century Chile was an exceptional phenomenon in Latin America: Constitutional procedures were observed, the army remained in its barracks, and development proceeded at a perceptible pace, even to contemporary observers. This book examines the enormous contribution British merchants made toward Chilean prosperity and stability during this period. The prospect of trade initially brought the British to Chile in the early 1800s. Great Britain soon provided the largest markets for Chilean produce, and British factories produced the largest share of Chile’s manufactured imports. British merchants organized the trade and provided services and expertise wherever needed. John Mayo documents the economic aspects of the British presence in Chile, but he also surveys the social, diplomatic, and political relations between the two countries. What emerges is a picture of a mutually profitable partnership based on the simplest of all motives—self-interest.
A global study of how soldiers lived, worked, and fought, and how many died, spanning from the Napoleonic War to World War II. No matter the war, no matter the army, no matter the nationality, common threads run through the experiences of men at war. Soldiers highlights these shared experiences across 150 years of warfare, from the Napoleonic Wars through World War II and everything in between, such as the Mexican and Crimean Wars, the American Civil War, the U.S. Indian Wars and Britain’s imperial bush wars, the Boxer Rebellion, the Boer War, the First World War, and more. Haymond explores the experiences that connect soldiers across time and space and draws heavily from firsthand accounts to craft a narrative with flesh-and-blood immediacy. Soldiers is entertaining and informative: history at its best. Praise for Soldiers “What makes Soldiers an interesting read is Haymond’s writing style and technique of comparing the common experiences of fighting men regardless of uniform and time served during the period.... Highly recommended for both scholars and students alike. It is a must for readers interested in the experience and psychology of being a warrior during this period.”—Military Review: The Professional Journal of the United States Army
Although the youngest of the Regiments in the Household Division, the Welsh Guards have established a reputation on both the battlefield, and on the parade ground, that is fully equal to the proud standards for which Guardsmen have long been famous. The Welsh Guards were formed in 1915, and they saw much hard fighting in both World Wars. Of the first thirty years of their existence, almost a third were spent at war and as a result tradition and regimental spirit were quickly forged. Such is the variety of a modern soldier's life that in the years since the Second World War, the Welsh Guards have been employed in sixteen different countrys, (in some of them two or three times) as diverse as texas and the snows of artic Norway. This swift account takes their story from the regiment's foundation in 1915, from their baptism of fire at loos, through another World War, and on to the tragic business of trying to preserve lives, and some sort of life, in the internecine bitterness of Northern Ireland.