A Quick History of World War One (Quick Histories)

World War One changed the whole world. The numbers involved in the war are staggering: 70 million personnel, 60 million in Europe, ten million soldiers dead and another ten million civilians killed in the crossfire. At the most famous individual scenes of conflict of the war, the Somme or Verdun, casualties in the field were upwards of half a million and individual battles lasted months. This was entirely a new, frightening, total form of fighting.

The war came to represent for many an old world of heartless imperial monarchs and bloody generals, where the working class were expendable at the whim of the ruling class. This led to real political change as the war ended, with left-wing uprisings in Russia, Germany and elsewhere. The war also came to symbolise the shift in the running of the world away from Europe, first to new powers like the United States and Japan and encouraging Europe's colonies to campaign for independence.

Truly, it was a war that was unprecedented but it was also a war that changed the world. This book gives you the detail of the war, its battles and technology, but also the world it destroyed and the world it created, and how it affected the lives of those who fought it and those who survived.

Quick Histories give you all the main points in a particular historical subject, big or small, in understandable but serious language, facts you can retain and remember. All our books can be read in an hour or two, either in one sitting, or over a few days. Quick Histories are just long enough for a plane or train journey.