The Great War

Gordon Corrigan’s Great War series approaches the First World War from three complementary angles: the Battle of Loos, the service of the Indian Corps on the Western Front, and the careers of Douglas Haig, John J. Pershing and Erwin Rommel. The books move between battlefield narrative, imperial manpower and command, showing how armies adapted to industrial war between 1914 and 1918.

Corrigan pays particular attention to organisation, training, weapons, logistics and the pressures placed on commanders and ordinary soldiers. The sequence challenges simplified stories of the war while preserving the scale of its losses and the difficulty of learning how to fight effectively on fronts transformed by artillery, trenches, machine guns and mass armies.