Book Thoughts: "The First World War," by John Keegan

I'm not really sure where to start with this book, it's just so immense. However, it's very readable, even for someone who doesn't have a great deal of background in military history, such as myself.

The task of trying to summarize the action of the First World War into one volume is huge, but Keegan manages it quite well. For a reader who is looking for a good basic overview of the action of the war, I'd say this book would be hard to beat. Keegan hits all the highlights and still manages to take time to discuss events in some of the external theaters of the war, such as Africa.

The first part of the book deals with the circumstances in Europe that lead to the outbreak of war, chiefly the competing colonial interests between Britain, France, and Germany. Keegan moves deftly through the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand into the opening moves of the war in 1914, as well as suggesting several instances where the crisis could have been averted had cooler heads prevailed. This part ends with the stalemate on the Western Front in 1914, and the Germans finally propping up the Austrians in the east.

The second third of the book largely deals with most of the major action on the Western Front, including Verdun and the Somme. Here, however, Keegan spends a lot of time on the Eastern Front, as well as the war in Africa and the Middle East. He also spends a good bit of time on the naval war in the North Sea, which I found to be highly interesting.

The final part of the book begins with a treatment of the Russian Revolution, the Russian Civil War, and the end of the war on the Eastern Front, with Russia ceasing to be a military force. From there, Keegan charts the end of events on Western Front, starting with the Third Battle of Ypres, going through the Allied offensive at Amiens and the German offensive "Micheal," which made territorial gains, but weakened the remnants of the German army that the territory was lost again, which fresh American troops coming in to help engage German units with tired, under-supplied, and horribly hungry troops. Finally, the book ends with the abdication of the Kaiser, the disintegration of the Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empires, and a discussion of the ways the Second World War came from the First.

Here's what you won't find in this book. You won't find a lot of discussion on individual soldier's lives in the trenches. Also, you won't find a ton of first hand accounts from the soldiers. There isn't really a discussion of the Treaty of Versailles, since the combat pretty much ended in November, 1918. Also, the book is written from a European perspective, so there isn't a ton of information about how and why America got into the war. This isn't a bad thing. Despite popular opinion here in the states, it all really isn't about us, and the biggest part of The Great War had little or nothing to do with the USA. All I'm saying is, if you're looking for a more in depth discussion of America's involvement, you won't get much of it here.

In the end, I thought the book did a fantastic job of covering such a broad subject in less than 500 pages. When you do that, you're not going to please everybody. The only criticism I would level would be that some of the narrative gets a little windy and long, particularly in the first third of the book. Still, I believe it would be hard to match Keegan's overview of the war as a whole.