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

Author: Peter Hart

Narrator: Julian Elfer

Unabridged: 13 hr 5 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 11/20/2018


Synopsis

Author of The Great War, as well as celebrated accounts of the battles of the Somme, Passchendaele, Jutland, and Gallipoli, historian Peter Hart now turns to World War One's final months. Much has been made of—and written about—August 1914. There has been comparatively little focus on August 1918 and the lead-up to November. Because of the fixation on the Great War's opening moves, and the great battles that followed over the course of the next four years, the endgame seems to come as a stunning anticlimax. At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918 the guns simply fell silent.

The Last Battle definitively corrects this misperception. As Hart shows, a number of factors precipitated the Armistice. After four years of bloodshed, Germany was nearly bankrupt and there was a growing rift between the military High Command and political leadership. But it also remained a determined combatant, and France and Great Britain had equally been stretched to their limits; Russia had abandoned the conflict in the late winter of 1918. However complex the causes of Germany's ultimate defeat, Allied success on the Western Front, as Hart reveals, tipped the scales—the triumphs at the Fifth Battle of Ypres, the Sambre, the Selle, and the Meuse-Argonne, where American forces made arguably their greatest contribution. The offensives cracked the Hindenburg Line and wore down the German resistance, precipitating collapse.

Final victory came at great human cost and involved the combined efforts of millions of men. Using the testimony of a range of participants, from the Doughboys, Tommies, German infantrymen, and French poilus who did the fighting, to those in command during those last days and weeks, Hart brings intimacy and sweep to the events that led to November 11, 1918.

About Peter Hart

Peter Hart worked as the oral historian of the Imperial War Museum from 1981-2020. He is the author of several military history books on the first and second world wars. His latest book is At Close Range: Life and Death in an Artillery Regiment, 1939-45.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Scott

Wonderful book by a great historian who weaves the narrative with so many personal accounts masterfully.......more

Goodreads review by Arthur

A 13 hour and ten minute unabridged audiobook. Lots of first person accounts, but the vast majority are British and Commwealth soldiers. Some American, but practically no German voices, at least not if the lower ranks. Also entirely focused on the Western front. The other fronts in 1918 essentially......more

Goodreads review by Scott

I received an ARC of this book in return for an honest review. The Great War has fascinated for decades, we are assailed by images of mass slaughter and the pointlessness of the war. Names like Passchendaele and the Somme are well known to all readers of Great War history. The fact that the Allies, a......more