A comprehensive new history of the shaping and performance of the British army during the First World War.

The Great War was the first conflict to draw men and women into uniform on a massive scale. From a small regular force of barely 250,000, the British Army rapidly expanded into a national force of over five million. A Nation in Arms brings together original research into the impact of the war on the army as an institution, gives a revealing account of those who served in it and offers fascinating insights into its social history during one of the bloodiest wars.

Historians have portrayed British participation in World War I as a series of tragic debacles, with lines of men mown down by machine guns, with untried new military technology, and incompetent generals who threw their troops into improvised and unsuccessful attacks. In this book a renowned military historian studies the evolution of British infantry tactics during the war and challenges this interpretation, showing that while the British army's plans and technologies failed persistently during the improvised first half of the war, the army gradually improved its technique, technology, and, eventually, its' self-assurance. By the time of its successful sustained offensive in the fall of 1918, says Paddy Griffith, the British army was demonstrating a battlefield skill and mobility that would rarely be surpassed even during World War II. Evaluating the great gap that exists between theory and practice, between textbook and bullet-swept mudfield, Griffith argues that many battles were carefully planned to exploit advanced tactics and to avoid casualties, but that breakthrough was simply impossible under the conditions of the time. According to Griffith, the British were already masters of "storm troop tactics" by the end of 1916, and in several important respects were further ahead than the Germans would be even in 1918. In fields such as the timing and orchestration of all-arms assaults, predicted artillery fire, "Commando-style" trench raiding, the use of light machine guns, or the barrage fire of heavy machine guns, the British led the world. Although British generals were not military geniuses, says Griffith, they should at least be credited for effectively inventing much of the twentieth-century's art of war.

At the outbreak of World War I in August 1914 the British Army was unique: it was a small force raised entirely by voluntary recruitment. The first campaigns of the British Expeditionary Force brought admiration from the enemy, but by the end of 1914 it had been virtually eliminated. Kitchener's call for new volunteers drew such a patriotic response that by mid-1916 the BEF had grown to 55 divisions. This book explains and llustrates the uniform, equipment and organization of the British Army up to the end of the battle of the Somme.

"Historians have paid little attention to the British Army's experience with signals intelligence during the First World War. However, this was one of the Army's most important sources of information about crucial matters such as the order of battle and intentions of the German and Turkish Armies. Britain's successes and failures in signals intelligence profoundly affected battles ranging from the race for the Channel Ports, first Somme, third Gaza and Amiens, among many others." "While efforts to weed the records on these topics have created major gaps in the sources, surviving evidence throws an entirely new light on the British Army in the Great War. It allows one to trace the evolution of the Army's signals intelligence organisations, to determine many of their successes and failures, to show how this intelligence affected various operations and, indeed, to demonstrate that signals intelligence influenced the operations of the British Army as much as those of the Royal Navy." "The material reproduced in this volume includes excerpts from reports by Army Headquarters in France, Italy and Mesopotamia and the Military Intelligence Directorate. It includes the memorandum "Enemy Codes and their Solution" by the G.H.Q. codebreaking section in January 1918, which is one of the two best sources known to exist about the techniques of "codebreaking"; surviving reports on the enemy radio networks in the Balkans and Anatolian Turkey, which are the most illuminating evidence from any theatre on the approach toward "traffic analysis" and a report on the breaking of German and Turkish Army ciphers in Mesopotamia during 1917, which is the best source known about the techniques of "cryptanalysis" used by an Army in the Great War."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The National Archives' celebrated First World War holdings include personal files of officers and other ranks, campaign medals, gallantry and meritorious service awards, courts martial and casualty lists. Its remarkable collection has records of Dominion forces and the Indian Army, the WAAC, the Royal Flying Corps and RAF, as well as auxiliary and nursing services. Over 10,000 individual unit war diaries cover all operational theatres of the British Army, while original trench maps illustrates areas from the Western Front to Salonica, Gallipoli to Mesopotamia, Palestine to Italy.

This book contains over 600 rare and never before published photographs of the British Soldier in World War I. The quality images selected were photographed in peace and wartime, in the studio and the field, and show in detail the service dress uniform, equipment and weapons in use by the British Army between 1900-1918. The chapters contain photographic postcards of: Infantry officers and other ranks, Dominion Troops, Infantry Weapons, Machine Gun and Tank Corps, Royal Artillery, Wheels and Transport, Army Service Corps, Royal Army Medical Corps, Royal Engineers, Royal Flying Corps and Battle Insignia. Also included is a full color section of Army, Corps and Divisional signs. Each photograph caption has been carefully and thoroughly researched affording the reader information not to be found in any other single source. The introduction discusses early war photography and goes into further detail on the service dress and equipment to make this a must book for the military historian, collector, researcher, modeller and general enthusiast.