The Last Battle

by Peter Hart (Author)

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.

Review
"Written by one of Britain's best scholars of the Great War, The Last Battle follows Hart's usual synergy of well-paced analytical text with first-hand accounts by participants. These are especially well chosen: Hart's knowledge of and sensitivity to this material reflects his years of work at the Imperial War Museum. He evaluates the respective contributions of the Allies and the growing debility of the Germans with a sharp eye for both battlefields and home fronts as the combatants put their last, best efforts into a war that had exhausted both sides, and whose physical and spiritual scars endure today." –Dennis Showalter, Colorado College

"Well written, with an exceptional collection of personal narratives, this book provides a fascinating look at the last four months of World War I."–New York Journal of Books

About the Author
Peter Hart is Oral Historian of the Imperial War Museum. He is the author of Gallipoli, The Great War, and Fire and Movement, all published by Oxford University Press.



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