Böcker av Nick Lloyd

Nick Lloyd's Hundred Days: The End of the Great War explores the brutal, heroic and extraordinary final days of the First World War.On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day in November 1918, the guns of the Western Front fell silent. The Armistice, which brought the Great War to an end, marked a seminal moment in modern European and World history. Yet the story of how the war ended remains little-known. In this compelling and ground-breaking new study, Nick Lloyd examines the last days of the war and asks the question: how did it end? Beginning at the heralded turning-point on the Marne in July 1918, Hundred Days traces the epic story of the next four months, which included some of the bloodiest battles of the war. Using unpublished archive material from five countries, this new account reveals how the Allies - British, French, American and Commonwealth - managed to beat the German Army, by now crippled by indiscipline and ravaged by influenza, and force her leaders to seek peace.'This is a powerful and moving book by a rising military historian. Lloyd's depiction of the great battles of July-November provides compelling evidence of the scale of the Allies' victories and the bitter reality of German defeat' Gary Sheffield (Professor of War Studies)'Lloyd enters the upper tier of Great War historians with this admirable account of the war's final campaign' Publishers WeeklyNick Lloyd is Senior Lecturer in Defence Studies at King's College London, based at the Joint Services Command & Staff College in Shrivenham, Oxfordshire. He specialises in British military and imperial history in the era of the Great War and is the author of two books, Loos 1915 (2006), and The Amritsar Massacre: The Untold Story of One Fateful Day (2011).

'The First World War from a refreshingly unfamiliar angle . . . masterly' Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times 'Compelling . . . The Eastern Front is essential reading' Margaret Macmillan, Financial Times'A masterwork . . . This is the history of the Eastern Front I've waited all my life to read' Simon Sebag MontefioreThe definitive history of the Eastern Front in the First World War, from the acclaimed military historian and author of Passchendaele and The Western Front***********In the second volume of his landmark First World War trilogy, Professor Nick Lloyd tells the story for the first time of what Winston Churchill once called the 'unknown war': the vast conflict in Eastern Europe and the Balkans that brought about the collapse of three empires. Much has been written about the fighting in France and Belgium, yet the Eastern Front was no less bloody. Between 1914 and 1917, huge numbers of people - perhaps as many as 16 million soldiers and two million civilians - were killed, wounded or maimed in enormous battles that sometimes ranged across a front of 100 km in length. Through intimate eyewitness reports, diary entries and memoirs - many of which have never been translated into English before - Lloyd reconstructs the full story of a war that began in the Balkans as a local struggle between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, and which sucked in Russia, Germany and Italy, right through to the final collapse of the Habsburg Empire in 1918. The Eastern Front paints a vivid and authoritative picture of a conflict that shook the world, and that remains central to understanding the tragic, blood-soaked trajectory of the twentieth century, and the current war in Ukraine.

Writing in the 1920s, Winston Churchill argued that the First World War on the Eastern Front was "incomparably the greatest war in history. In its scale, in its slaughter, in the exertions of the combatants, in its military kaleidoscope, it far surpasses by magnitude and intensity all similar human episodes." It was, he concluded, "the most frightful misfortune" to fall upon mankind "since the collapse of the Roman Empire before the Barbarians." Yet Churchill was an exception, and the war in the east has long been seen as a sideshow to the brutal combat on the Western Front. Finally, with The Eastern Front-the first major history of that arena in fifty years-the acclaimed historian Nick Lloyd corrects the record.Drawing on the latest scholarship as well as eyewitness reports, diary entries, and memoirs, Lloyd moves from the great battles of 1914 to the final collapse of the Central Powers in 1918, showing how a local struggle between Austria-Hungary and Serbia spiraled into a massive conflagration that pulled in Germany, Russia, Italy, Romania, and Bulgaria. The Eastern Front was a vast theater of war that brought about the collapse of three empires and produced almost endless suffering. As many as sixteen million soldiers and two million civilians were killed or wounded in enormous battles that took place across as much as one hundred kilometers. Unlike in the west, where stalemate ruled the day, the war in the east was fluid, with armies embarking on penetrating advances. Lloyd narrates the repeated invasions of Serbia as well as the great battles between Russian, German, and Austrian forces at Tannenberg, Komarów, Gorlice-Tarnów, and the Masurian Lakes. All along, he takes us into the strategy of the generals who decided the war's course, from the Germans Ludendorff and Hindenburg to the Austro-Hungarian chief, Conrad von Hötzendorf, to the brilliant Russian Brusilov.Perhaps the most radical aspect of the struggle in the east was that the violence was not confined to combatants. The Eastern Front witnessed calculated attacks against civilians that ripped the ethnic and religious fabric of numerous societies, paving the way for the horrors of the Holocaust. Lloyd's magisterial, definitive account of the war in the east will fundamentally alter our understanding of the cataclysmic events that reshaped Europe and the world.

The battle of Loos was one of the most hard-fought battles that the British Expeditionary Force waged during the First World War. This work presents an interpretation of Loos, placing it not only within its political and strategic context, but also discussing command and control and the tactical realities of war on the Western Front during 1915.