Battles East: A History of the Eastern Front of the First World War

[Guest]

Hello all. Has anyone read this one? I have not; just discovered it today while surfing the web. Curious to see if anyone has an opinion or knows something about it.

Thanks.......

[Paul Hederer]

Hello all. Has anyone read this one? I have not; just discovered it today while surfing the web. Curious to see if anyone has an opinion or knows something about it.

Thanks.......

Andy,

Being interested in this front I have to admit to not having seen this. I looked for a review, but it seems the historical journals have either ignored the book or not got to it as of yet.

Paul

[Halder]

Andy,

Being interested in this front I have to admit to not having seen this. I looked for a review, but it seems the historical journals have either ignored the book or not got to it as of yet.

Paul

There's a very cursory one on Amazon US, but it's not enough to make me decide yay or nay, unfortunately. It certainly looks intriguing - and apart from Norman Stone's book from 30 years ago, there's not a whole lot else out there.

This is very good Vergessene Front if limited in scope to the first 15 or so months of the war.

[Guest whitney]

Battles East: A History of the Eastern Front of the First World War was given to me as a Christmas gift. It is one of the very few histories of the Eastern Front ever published and unlike Stone's work which ends in 1917 this one carries on through the end of the war. It is well researched, easily readable and contains numerous first-hand accounts of the times. There are approximately 385 pages; the only illustrations are maps and there are many of these which appear to be quite detailed but are difficult to read because they were not reproduced properly. Besides the ground campaigns the air and naval aspects of the theatre are covered as well. Well worth reading, I personally liked it very much.

[bushfighter]

Andy

Whitney is very right about the readability.

The big omission is that of an index, so you have to know the book before you can do a quick look-up.

As the scope is so vast and the sketch-maps are so small, I would recommend that you have alongside the book something like the WW1 Times War Atlas and Gazeteer, or at least have photocopied pages from such an atlas. (Then you can see the political boundaries as they were in 1914.)

But thank you Irving Root for a good, useful book.

Harry