No Empty Chairs - The Short and Heroic Lives of the Young Aviators Who Fought and Died in the First World War by Ian Mackersey

$12.00 NZD

Category: World War I | Reading Level: very good

The empty chairs belonged, all too briefly, to the doomed young First World War airmen who failed to return from the terrifying daily aerial combats above the trenches of the Western Front. The edict of their commander-in-chief was the missing aviators were to be immediately replaced. Before the new fac es could arrive, the departed men's vacant seats at the squadron dinner table were sometimes poignantly occupied by their caps and boots, placed there in a sad ritual by their surviving colleagues as they drank to their memory. Life for most of the pilots of the Royal Flying Corps was appallingly short. If they graduated alive and unmaimed from the flying training that killed more than half of them before they reached the front line, only a few would for very long survive the daily battles they fought over the ravaged moonscape of no-man's-land. Their average life expectancy at the height of the war was measured only in weeks. Parachutes that began to save their German enemies were denied them. Fear of incarceration, and the daily spectacle of watching close colleagues die in burning aircraft, took a devastating toll on the nerves of the world's first fighter pilots. Many became mentally ill. As they waited for death, or with luck the survivable wound that would send them back to 'Blighty', they poured their emotions into their diaries and streams of letters to their loved ones at home. Drawing on these remarkable testimonies and pilots' memoirs, Ian Mackersey has brilliantly reconstructed the First Great Air War through the lives of its participants. As they waited to die, the men shared their loneliness, their fears, triumphs - and squadron gossip - with the families who lived in daily dread of the knock on the door that would bring the War Office telegram in its fateful green envelope. ...Show more

Room 40 - British Naval Intelligence 1914-18 by Patrick Beesly

$16.00 NZD

Category: Espionage | Reading Level: good-very good

Voices of Gallipoli by Maurice Shadbolt

$20.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand | Reading Level: near fine

In the 1980s, Maurice Shadbolt began to research New Zealand's part in the tragic Gallipoli campaign of 1915, research which was to lead to s stage play and a television documentary and culminated in this book. "Voices of Gallipoli" is compeling testimony to a pilgrimage which began and ended with visit s to Trukey's haunted Gallipoli peninsula where the bones of nearly 3000 New Zealanders rest. This is a remarkable document, the distilled memories of a dozen old men who innocently set out to do battle as loyal sons of the British Empire and returned home betrayed, embittered and disillusioned, and New Zealanders. ...Show more

The Vanquished - Why the First World War Failed to End by Robert Gerwarth

$10.00 NZD

Category: World War I | Reading Level: good

Winner of the Tomlinson Book PrizeA Times Literary Supplement Best Book of 2016An epic, groundbreaking account of the ethnic and state violence that followed the end of World War I--conflicts that would shape the course of the twentieth centuryFor the Western Allies, November 11, 1918, has always been a solemn date--the end of fighting that had destroyed a generation, but also a vindication of a terrible sacrifice with the total collapse of the principal enemies: the German Empire, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire. But for much of the rest of Europe this was a day with no meaning, as a continuing, nightmarish series of conflicts engulfed country after country.In The Vanquished, a highly original and gripping work of history, Robert Gerwarth asks us to think again about the true legacy of the First World War. In large part it was not the fighting on the Western Front that proved so ruinous to Europe's future, but the devastating aftermath, as countries on both sides of the original conflict were savaged by revolutions, pogroms, mass expulsions, and further major military clashes. In the years immediately after the armistice, millions would die across central, eastern, and southeastern Europe before the Soviet Union and a series of rickety and exhausted small new states would come into being. It was here, in the ruins of Europe, that extreme ideologies such as fascism would take shape and ultimately emerge triumphant.As absorbing in its drama as it is unsettling in its analysis, The Vanquished is destined to transform our understanding of not just the First World War but the twentieth century as a whole. ...Show more

Casualty Figures - How Five Men Survived the First World War by Michele Barrett

$15.00 NZD

Category: World War I | Reading Level: very good

Gallipoli - Untold Stories from war correspondant Charles Bean and front-line Anzacs by Jonathan King; Michael Bowers

$25.00 NZD

Category: Australia | Reading Level: very good

"Nothing can alter what happened now: Anzac stood and still stands for reckless valour in a good cause, for enterprise, resourcefulness, fidelity, comradeship and endurance that will never admit defeat." - World War I correspondent Charles Bean. The Gallipoli campaign of 1915 was a series of deadly batt les followed by a brilliantly executed retreat. In just eight months, more than 11,000 Australians and New Zealanders died 'for the glory of Empire'. GALLIPOLI: UNTOLD STORIES provides a day-by-day review of these defining events from the perspective of Charles Bean, Australia's official war correspondent and Sydney Morning Herald journalist. The entries are supported by his private diaries and newspaper reports. The immediacy of his testimony is illustrated by graphic and rarely seen photographs taken by Age photographer Phillip Schuler. There are also precious accounts of daily life at war, collected in an exhaustive seach for letters, diaries and memorabilia from the families of the young Anzac soldiers who served so gallantly. GALLIPOLI: UNTOLD STORIES takes the reader deep into the thick of the campaign.Through these gripping words and images we can consider again what Gallipoli meant for the nation in 1915 and what it continues to mean to us today. Paperback 368pp h256mm ...Show more

The Memorial to the Missing of the Somme by Gavin Stamp

$10.00 NZD

Category: World War I | Series: Wonders of the World Ser. | Reading Level: very good

The definitive account of the history and significance of a world landmark - reissued in time for the anniversary of the Somme.

An Awfully Big Adventure: New Zealand World War One Veterans Tell Their Stories by Jane Tolerton (Editor)

$16.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand | Reading Level: good

*New Zealand Listener's '100 Best Books of 2013' What was it like to be a New Zealand soldier in the First World War? What impact did the war have on those who returned? Let them tell you. An Awfully Big Adventure traces the reminiscences and reflections of 80 veterans interviewed for the World War One Oral History Archive. Respected journalist Jane Tolerton revisits the interviews and sets pieces in a chronology for 21st-century readers to follow the progress and human experience of the war in the words of those who were there. The men relive their time abroad, offering private moments as well as the unvarnished realities of life at the front. A century on, their voices are vivid, strong and direct, and often humorous. Deeply affecting and absorbing, An Awfully Big Adventure is an important historical memoir that reads as if it all happened yesterday. '[F]ew publications will be quite as engrossing as this one . . . I found the stories of these very real people, who went to war almost a century ago, enormously interesting, moving and compelling.' Lt Gen the Rt Hon Sir Jerry Mateparae, Governor-General 'You never took any notice of a dead man. When we were going over in the Battle of Messines, before I got hit, we were passing wounded men, dead men, dead Germans, but we just went straight on. It's a terrible thing to talk about what I'm talking about, you know. But I saw it, I was there.' Stan Herbert 'Never let your mates down - that was a good motto. People used to say to me, 'Were you scared?' I'd say, 'Yes, who wouldn't be? But my biggest worry was not to let me mates think I was scared.' Mustn't let them down.' Thomas Eltringham 'I thought it would be a great adventure, and it'd be real fun. And so it was - up to a point. Past that point it wasn't funny at all.' Sydney Stanfield ...Show more

1915 - The Death of Innocence by Lyn Macdonald

$14.00 NZD

Category: World War I | Reading Level: very good

No Marketing Blurb

The Middle Parts of Fortune - Somme & Ancre 1916 by Frederic Manning

$35.00 NZD

Category: World War I | Reading Level: near fine

The Truth about the Dardanelles by Sydney A Moseley

$45.00 NZD

Category: World War I | Reading Level: very good

At The War by Alfred Northcliffe

$20.00 NZD

Category: World War I | Reading Level: good