Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918, World War I and Its Violent ClimaxNovember 11, 1918. The final hours pulsate with tension as every man in the trenches hopes to escape the melancholy distinction of being the last to die in World War I. The Allied generals knew the fighting would end precisely at 11: 00 A.M, yet in the final hours they flung men against an already beaten Germany. The result? Eleven thousand casualties suffered-more than during the D-Day invasion of Normandy. Why? Allied commanders wanted to punish the enemy to the very last moment and career officers saw a fast-fading chance for glory and promotion. Joseph E. Persico puts the reader in the trenches with the forgotten and the famous-among the latter, Corporal Adolf Hitler, Captain Harry Truman, and Colonels Douglas MacArthur and George Patton. Mainly, he follows ordinary soldiers' lives, illuminating their fate as the end approaches. Persico sets the last day of the war in historic context with a gripping reprise of all that led up to it, from the 1914 assassination of the Austrian archduke, Franz Ferdinand, which ignited the war, to the raw racism black doughboys endured except when ordered to advance and die in the war's last hour. Persico recounts the war's bloody climax in a cinematic style that evokes "All Quiet on the Western Front, Grand Illusion, "and" Paths of Glory." The pointless fighting on the last day of the war is the perfect metaphor for the four years that preceded it, years of senseless slaughter for hollow purposes. This book is sure to become the definitive history of the end of a conflict Winston Churchill called "the hardest, cruelest, and least-rewarded of all the wars that have been fought." |
Contents
A Lovely War | 3 |
Goya at His Most Macabre | 34 |
Upon a Midnight Clear | 43 |
Copyright | |
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Adolf Hitler Albertine Allied American armistice Arthur Jensen artillery attack battalion battle bayonets began Black Jack Pershing boys brigade British Brittain Bullard Canadian Cantigny captain casualties Colonel commander comrades Corps Cude dead death Desagneaux diary Division Donovan doughboys Duffy enemy face field fighting Fighting 69th fire Foch force France French German Germany's ground Haig hand Harry Truman headquarters Hindenburg Hitler Ibid Infantry Jensen kaiser Kielmeyer killed Lanz later Lieutenant lines Lloyd George Ludendorff MacArthur machine guns Marshal Meuse Meuse-Argonne miles months morning never NOVEMBER 11 offensive officer Panichas and Read Passchendaele peace Pershing Pershing's recalled Regiment rifle Rizzi runner Sassoon sector sergeant shells shot Siegfried Sassoon soldiers Somme staff Stenay Stillness Heard Round Sulzbach Testament of Youth told Tommies Triplet troops Truman U.S. Army Vera Brittain Verdun victory war's western front wire World wounded wrote York
References to this book
Ready, Begin! Practical Strategies for Cultivating Courage Lawrence M. Kryske No preview available - 2008 |