The 95th Aero Squadron was the first American pursuit squadron to fly over the front in March 1918 and 1st Lt. Waldo Heinrichs was one of its original members. The history of the Squadron is told through the words of those who served, Heinrichs' richly written diary forms the nucleus of the story supported by contemporary letters, anecdotes, and combat reports from many of the other flyers. Entries from the official Squadron history as contained in the History of the American Air Services A.E.F. (the Gorrell History) round out the narrative. Over 280 photos, most unpublished from the personal albums of the participants, show planes, places and personnel which surrounded this happy band of warriors.

"The First World War demanded revolutionary technology to break the vicious stalemate in which the armies of Europe found themselves, as soon as static, or trench warfare became established. One such technology was aerial reconnaissance and photography, which together with the growing intelligence use of phone tapping and radio intercepts, changed the nature of war forever. Colonel Terry J. Finnegan's Shooting the Front reviews the entire evolution of Allied aerial photography and photographic interpretation during the Great War, in a text packed with data and based upon meticulous research in archives worldwide. The photographs included are both informative and spectacular, charting perforce the early years of aviation itself. Shooting the Front shows not only how important aerial reconnaissance was to the war effort, but also how it became the foundation for modern-day exploitation of imagery and geospatial intelligence used to guide today's decision makers on global issues, and shaped intelligence work for generations to come."--Publisher.

"Pilot, 1st Aero Squadron, Commander, 90th Aero Squadron, Commander, 3rd Corps Observation Group, US Air Service, American Expeditionary Force, World War One: 1917-1918."

Facing Armageddon is the first scholarly work on the 1914-18 War to explore, on a world-wide basis, the real nature of the participants experience. Sixty-four scholars from all over the globe deliver the fruits of recent research in what civilians and servicemen passed through, in the air, on the sea and on land.

A “fascinating” look at hardship, heroism, and civilian life in England during the Great War (World War One Illustrated). The truth about the sacrifice and suffering among British civilians during World War I is rarely discussed. In this book, people who were there speak about experiences and events that have remained buried for decades. Their testimony shows the same candor and courage we have become accustomed to hearing from military veterans of this war. Those interviewed include a survivor of a Zeppelin raid in 1915; a Welsh munitions worker recruited as a girl; and a woman rescued from a bombed school after five days. There are also accounts of rural famine, bereavement, and the effects on families back home—and even the story of a woman who planned to kill her family to save them further suffering.

Photo chronicle of the German-Soviet campaign on the Eastern Front during its first brutal winter after Operation Barbarossa ground to a halt outside MoscowHundreds of photos, many of them rare and never published beforePhotos of men, tanks, weapons, uniforms, terrain, winter conditions, soldier life, and much moreColor insert features uniforms, guns, and equipmentIdeal reference for military history fans, scholars, modelers, and reenactorsPerfect complement to the narrative accounts in the Stackpole Military History Series

One hundred years later, the First World War has returned to public consciousness, often through republished photographs of its horrors: the muddy trenches, the devastated battlefields, the maimed survivors. Because the most popular cameras of the time were the Vest Pocket Kodak and other crude film cameras, the "look" of that Great War is grainy, blurred, and monochrome. This book presents a startlingly different First World War, one seen through rare glass plate photographs made by the war's most gifted cameramen, selected and digitally restored by Magnum photographer Carl De Keyzer. Scanned from the original plates, with scratches and other flaws painstakingly removed, these oversized reproductions reveal the war in uncanny and previously unseen clarity. Also startling are the unfamiliar scenes selected by De Keyzer and elucidated by historian David Van Reybrouck: staged scenes of men in training (and of children imitating them), dramatic industrial photographs, landscapes of astonishing destruction, pictures of African colonial troops on the Western front, and postmortem portraits of thirteen Belgian soldiers killed in battle on the second day of the war. A quarter of the photographs in this book are in color, made with the autochrome process. The book includes a preface by Geoff Dyer, who refers to "the extraordinary power and surprise of this hoard of photographs" and discusses the disconcerting temporal effects of seeing such unusual pictures of a historical event we strongly associate with entirely different imagery.