The Last Battle: Victory, Defeat, and the End of World War I, Hardcover/Peter Hart

Descriere

An account of the final months of the Great War, and how the Allies, including freshly arrived American soldiers, defeated Germany on the Western Front. While much has been made of--and written about--the guns of August 1914, the story of the guns of August 1918 is a different matter. Yet the campaigns of the summer and fall were the climactic battles of the Great War and determined its outcome. The triumph was not by any means ``sudden,`` but rather the result of four months of bitter fighting. In The Last Battle, preeminent World War I historian Peter Hart offers an account of those final months and their main features: the Allied victories at the Fifth Battle of Ypres and the Battle of the Meuse-Argonne, where American forces made their decisive contribution; and the offensives coordinated by the Allied Supreme Command that cracked the Hindenburg Line and wore down the German resistance. Millions of men contributed to the eventual Allied victory, ending a conflict that had bled Europe dry. As The Last Battle illuminates, victory was partly a matter of German political unrest and internal collapse, but the Allied success on the battlefield precipitated it. As with The Great War and Fire and Movement, The Last Battle features Hart's gift for illuminating the interplay of figures and events, bringing both intimacy and sweep to the history. He allows those who were there to tell the story, immersing the reader in the days leading up to November 11, 1918.