Victory through Coalition
Germany's invasion of France in August 1914 represented a threat to the great power status of both Britain and France. The countries had no history of cooperation, yet the entente they had created in 1904 proceeded by trial and error, via recriminations, to win a war of unprecedented scale and ferocity. Elizabeth Greenhalgh details the civil-military relations on each side, the political and military relations between the two powers, the maritime and industrial collaboration that were indispensable to an industrialized war effort and the Allied prosecution of war on the western front.
- A groundbreaking contribution to the military history of the First World War
- A broad-ranging study of the mechanisms of coalition warfare looking at the challenges of strategy, command, logistics and supply
- The first genuinely comparative study of the Anglo-French alliance to be based on British and French archives
Reviews & endorsements
"This work is destined to become a major contribution to the historiography of the Great War and a significant new source for military historians. Essential." -- Choice
"Elizabeth Greenhalgh's perceptive and well-researched book is the third title in the Cambridge Military History series.... Victory through Coalition presents a straight forward thesis summed up in its title....Greenhalgh has provided not just a fine exploration of the subject at hand but a useful model for thinking about how to write the history of coalition warfare elsewhere."
--Leonard V. Smith, Oberlin College, Journal of Modern History
"This work does...add to our understanding of the nature of the Allies' coalition war, showing that it was, indeed, won because of cooperation, despite the various minor and major issues that were thrown up in the course of the war." - Ross Mahoney, H-War
"...well-researched account of Franco-British coalition warfare that would be of interest to historians and general readers alike." -Werner D. Lippert, The Historian
Product details
January 2009Paperback
9780521096294
324 pages
229 × 152 × 18 mm
0.48kg
10 b/w illus. 3 maps 4 tables
Available
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- 1. Coalition warfare and the Franco-British alliance
- 2. Command 1914–15
- 3. The Battle of the Somme, 1916
- 4. The liaison services, 1914–16
- 5. The allied response to the German submarine
- 6. Command 1917
- 7. The creation of the supreme war council
- 8. The German offensives of 1918 and the crisis in command
- 9. The allies counterattack
- 10. Politics and bureaucracy of supply
- 11. Coalition: a defective mechanism?