Suicide of the Empires: The Eastern Front 1914-18
Mar 2014 · Bloomsbury Publishing
Ebook
88
Pages
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About this ebook
On the outbreak of war in 1914, the armies of the Western Front soon became bogged down in the mud of Flanders and it is these events that many people associate most strongly with the First World War – but its origins and the strategy which governed all but its closing months lay in the East.
In the wide plains and forests of the Eastern Europe the three great Empires – Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary – grappled in a series of titanic but little known battles involving millions of men and hundreds of miles of front. It was the Germans, with their excellent equipment and intelligent leadership who dominated the battlefield, even when outnumbered. The Russian and Hapsburg armies moved across a truly Napoleonic canvas with huge masses of cavalry, infantry and baggage.
Shortly after the outbreak of war the Russian 'steamroller' had lurched into Prussia only to be hurled back amid the marshes of Tannenberg. Later defeats were caused by the Russian revolution itself with the downfall of the Tsar and the mutiny of their soldiers.
For three years the fighting swung indeterminately back and forth and Alan Clark in the Suicide of the Empires, first published in 1971, describes in clear terms the campaigns which provoked the downfall of three great empires and left the world changed forever.
In the wide plains and forests of the Eastern Europe the three great Empires – Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary – grappled in a series of titanic but little known battles involving millions of men and hundreds of miles of front. It was the Germans, with their excellent equipment and intelligent leadership who dominated the battlefield, even when outnumbered. The Russian and Hapsburg armies moved across a truly Napoleonic canvas with huge masses of cavalry, infantry and baggage.
Shortly after the outbreak of war the Russian 'steamroller' had lurched into Prussia only to be hurled back amid the marshes of Tannenberg. Later defeats were caused by the Russian revolution itself with the downfall of the Tsar and the mutiny of their soldiers.
For three years the fighting swung indeterminately back and forth and Alan Clark in the Suicide of the Empires, first published in 1971, describes in clear terms the campaigns which provoked the downfall of three great empires and left the world changed forever.
About the author
Alan Clark was born in 1928. A British Conservative MP and diarist, Clark is perhaps best known from the years that he served as a junior minister in Margaret Thatcher's governments at the Departments of Employment, Trade, and Defence, and in the Privy Council. Despite being a slightly controversial character politically, he wrote throughout his life and parts of his diaries were published and subsequently televised. He was the author of several books of military history, including his controversial work The Donkeys (1961), which is considered to have inspired the musical satire, Oh, What a Lovely War!, and Aces High, The War in the Air Over the Western Front 1914-18 (1973). He died in 1999.
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