Ring of Steel - Germany and Austria-Hungary at War, 1914-1918

Sunday Times History Book of the Year 2014br>br>Winner of the 2014 Wolfson History Prize, the 2014 Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military History, the Society for Military History''s 2015 Distinguished Book Award and the 2015 British Army Military Book of the Yearbr>br>For the empires of Germany and Austria-Hungary the Great War - which had begun with such high hopes for a fast, dramatic outcome - rapidly degenerated as invasions of both France and Serbia ended in catastrophe. For four years the fighting now turned into a siege on a quite monstrous scale. Europe became the focus of fighting of a kind previously unimagined. Despite local successes - and an apparent triumph in Russia - Germany and Austria-Hungary were never able to break out of the the Allies'' ring of steel.br>br>In Alexander Watson''s compelling new history of the Great War, all the major events of the war are seen from the perspective of Berlin and Vienna. It is fundamentally a history of ordinary people. In 1914 both empires were flooded by genuine mass enthusiasm and their troubled elites were at one with most of the population. But the course of the war put this under impossible strain, with a fatal rupture between an ever more extreme and unrealistic leadership and an exhausted and embittered people. In the end they failed and were overwhelmed by defeat and revolution.>

Product details

• Authors: Alexander Watson, Watson Alexander
• Publisher: Penguin Books Uk
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 04.06.2015
• EAN: 9780141042039
• ISBN: 978-0-14-104203-9
• No. of pages: 816
• Dimensions: 129 mm x 198 mm x 35 mm
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History > 20th century (up to 1945); Non-fiction book; Non-fiction book > History > Modern era up to 1918; HISTORY / Europe / Germany, European History, Germany, 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000, HISTORY / Europe / Austria & Hungary, 20th century, c 1900 to c 1999, c 1910 to c 1919, c 1914 to c 1918 (including WW1), Austro-Hungarian Empire