Germany’s Western Front: Translations from the German Official History of the Great War – Vol. II: 1915 edited by Mark Osborne Humphries and John Maker, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Waterloo, Ontario (Canada), 2010, 413 pp., 6¼" x 9¼", hardcover, maps, appendices, bibliography, index; ISBN 978-1-55458-051-4; $85.00 (Canadian); publisher’s website:
WLU Press - Germany’s Western Front
According to noted World War I historian and Oxford Professor Hew Strachan: “English-language historians … have done more than … [historians] writing in French and German to deepen our understanding of the conduct of operations on the Western Front. However, their research is too often written from the perspective of one side only. It pays little or no attention to the sources available for the Germans, for what they tell us about German intentions, German reactions, or even German perspectives on British and French efforts.”
Strachan, writing in his foreword to
Germany’s Western Front: Translations from the German Official History of the Great War – Vol. II: 1915, suggests that such a “gap is all the more extraordinary because [most of] the German official history of the war on land, Der Weltkrieg,” has been available since the multi-volume series was begun in 1925. Until now, however, this landmark (and relatively non-political) series has not been available in English. That aspect of scholarship is resolved by the new series -- the first of seven English-language volumes of translations of Der Weltkrieg -- being produced by Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada. The current title contains material from Volumes VII, VIII and IX of the original German source and has been masterfully edited and translated by a team of scholars that only a university press (with governmental and other funding) could assemble. That dedicated effort includes reproduction or adaptation of very fine maps used in the German tomes.
While the current volume of
Germany’s Western Front is devoted to land operations, it includes proportional references to aircraft use (e.g., early
Kagohl flights), all of which are found in the index. By any measure, this volume is exceptionally well done and belongs on the bookshelf of scholars, serious students and dedicated World War I buffs. It is recommended highly. (This review appears in the Spring 2011 issue of
Over the Front, the quarterly journal of the non-profit League of World War I Aviation Historians.)
Peter Kilduff
Book Review Editor
Over the Front
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