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The Western Front Association
The Western Front Association (WFA) was inaugurated on 11 November 1980, in order to further interest in the Great War of 1914-1918. The WFA aims to perpetuate the memory, courage and comradeship of all those who fought on all sides and who served their countries during the Great War. The Western Front Association does not seek to justify or glorify war. It is not a reenactment society, nor is it commercially motivated. It is entirely non-political. The object of the Association is to educate the public in the history of The Great War with particular reference to the Western Front. The WFA was established by military historian John Giles, who enlisted the help of the historian John Terraine, who co-wrote the landmark television series ''The Great War'', which was first broadcast by the BBC in 1964. Giles was driven to form The Western Front Association as a result of the creation of such groups as 'The Gallipoli Association' which had been established in 1969, and, in the early 1 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
World War I
World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fighting occurring throughout Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Pacific, and parts of Asia. An estimated 9 million soldiers were killed in combat, plus another 23 million wounded, while 5 million civilians died as a result of military action, hunger, and disease. Millions more died in genocides within the Ottoman Empire and in the 1918 influenza pandemic, which was exacerbated by the movement of combatants during the war. Prior to 1914, the European great powers were divided between the Triple Entente (comprising France, Russia, and Britain) and the Triple Alliance (containing Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy). Tensions in the Balkans came to a head on 28 June 1914, following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Western Front (World War I)
The Western Front was one of the main theatres of war during the First World War. Following the outbreak of war in August 1914, the German Army opened the Western Front by invading Luxembourg and Belgium, then gaining military control of important industrial regions in France. The German advance was halted with the Battle of the Marne. Following the Race to the Sea, both sides dug in along a meandering line of fortified trenches, stretching from the North Sea to the Swiss frontier with France, which changed little except during early 1917 and in 1918. Between 1915 and 1917 there were several offensives along this front. The attacks employed massive artillery bombardments and massed infantry advances. Entrenchments, machine gun emplacements, barbed wire and artillery repeatedly inflicted severe casualties during attacks and counter-attacks and no significant advances were made. Among the most costly of these offensives were the Battle of Verdun, in 1916, with a combined 700 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Terraine
John Alfred Terraine (15 January 1921 – 28 December 2003 ''The Independent'', 23 January 2004) was an English , and a TV screenwriter. He is best known as the lead screenwriter for the landmark 1960s documentary '''', about the , and for his defence of British ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Great War (TV Series)
''The Great War'' is a 26-episode documentary series from 1964 on the First World War. The documentary was a co-production of the Imperial War Museum, the British Broadcasting Corporation, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the Australian Broadcasting Commission. The narrator was Michael Redgrave, with readings by Marius Goring, Ralph Richardson, Cyril Luckham, Sebastian Shaw and Emlyn Williams. Each episode is long. Production In August 1963, at the suggestion of Alasdair Milne, producer of the BBC's current affairs programme ''Tonight'', the BBC resolved to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War with a big television project. The series was the first to feature veterans, many of them still relatively fit men in their late sixties or early seventies, speaking of their experiences after a public appeal for veterans was published in the national press. Those who appeared in the series included Edward Spears, Henry Williamson, Horace Birks, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Cenotaph, Whitehall
The Cenotaph is a war memorial on Whitehall in London, England. Designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, it was unveiled in 1920 as the United Kingdom's national memorial to the British and Commonwealth dead of the First World War, was rededicated in 1946 to include those of the Second World War, and has since come to represent British casualties from later conflicts. The word ''cenotaph'' is derived from Greek, meaning 'empty tomb'. Most of the dead were buried close to where they fell; thus, the Cenotaph symbolises their absence and is a focal point for public mourning. The original temporary Cenotaph was erected in 1919 for a parade celebrating the end of the First World War, at which more than 15,000 servicemen, including French and American soldiers, saluted the monument. More than a million people visited the site within a week of the parade. Calls for the Cenotaph to be rebuilt in permanent form began almost immediately. After some debate, the government agreed and construction wo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Centenary News
{{other uses, Centennial (other), Centenary (other) A centennial, or centenary in British English, is a 100th anniversary or otherwise relates to a century, a period of 100 years. Notable events Notable centennial events at a national or world-level include: * Centennial Exhibition, 1876, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. First official World's Fair in the United States, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia. About 10 million visitors attended, equivalent to about 20% of the population of the United States at the time. The exhibition ran from May 10, 1876, to November 10, 1876. (It included a monorail.) * New Zealand Centennial Exhibition, 1939–1940, celebrated one hundred years since the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 and the subsequent mass European settlement of New Zealand. 2,641,043 (2.6 million) visitors attended the exhibition, which ran from 8 November 1939 until 4 May 1940. * 1967 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hew Strachan
Sir Hew Francis Anthony Strachan ( ), (born 1 September 1949) is a British military historian, well known for his leadership in scholarly studies of the British Army and the history of the First World War. He is currently professor of international relations at the University of St Andrews. Before that Strachan was the Chichele Professor of the History of War at All Souls College, Oxford. Early life Strachan was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He was educated at Rugby School, then in 1968 was a merchant seaman for three months, working his passage around the world on ships of Ben Line Steamers Ltd. He then spent three years at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, graduating BA in 1971 and proceeding to M.A. in 1975. In 1973, he joined a survey of antiquities in the Sudan. Career In 1975, Strachan was elected a research fellow of Corpus Christi College, and in 1977–1978 was a senior lecturer in war studies at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. In 1978, he returned to his Camb ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Professor Peter Simkins MBE FRHistS
Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an academic rank at universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who professes". Professors are usually experts in their field and teachers of the highest rank. In most systems of academic ranks, "professor" as an unqualified title refers only to the most senior academic position, sometimes informally known as "full professor". In some countries and institutions, the word "professor" is also used in titles of lower ranks such as associate professor and assistant professor; this is particularly the case in the United States, where the unqualified word is also used colloquially to refer to associate and assistant professors as well. This usage would be considered incorrect among other academic communities. However, the otherwise unqualified title "Professor" designated with a capital letter nearly always refers to a full professor. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Bagot Glubb
Lieutenant-General Sir John Bagot Glubb, KCB, CMG, DSO, OBE, MC, KStJ, KPM (16 April 1897 – 17 March 1986), known as Glubb Pasha, was a British soldier, scholar, and author, who led and trained Transjordan's Arab Legion between 1939 and 1956 as its commanding general. During the First World War, he served in France. Glubb has been described as an "integral tool in the maintenance of British control." Life Born in Preston, Lancashire, and educated at Cheltenham College, Glubb gained a commission in the Royal Engineers in 1915. On the Western Front of World War I, he suffered a shattered jaw. In later years, this would lead to his Arab nickname of ''Abu Hunaik'', meaning "the one with the little jaw". He was then transferred to Iraq in 1920, which Britain had started governing under a League of Nations Mandate following war, and was posted to Ramadi in 1922 "to maintain a rickety floating bridge over the river uphrates carried on boats made of reeds daubed with bitumen" ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Correlli Barnett
Correlli Douglas Barnett CBE FRHistS FRSL FRSA (28 June 1927 – 10 July 2022) was an English military historian, who also wrote works of economic history, particularly on the United Kingdom's post-war "industrial decline". Early life Barnett was born on 28 June 1927 in Norbury, County Borough of Croydon, the son of Douglas and Kathleen Barnett. He was educated at Trinity School of John Whitgift in Croydon and then Exeter College, Oxford where he gained a second class honours degree in Modern History with his special subject being Military History and the Theory of War, gaining an MA in 1954. Barnett later said: "I can safely say there were only two books that I read at Oxford which strongly influenced my subsequent approach – one part of the Special Subject, and the other something which a friend recommended to me. The first was Clausewitz's ''On War'', which was part of a Special Subject on military history and the theory of war. The other was Lewis Mumford's '' Technics ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Henry Kitchener, 3rd Earl Kitchener
Major Henry Herbert Kitchener, 3rd Earl Kitchener TD DL (24 February 1919 – 16 December 2011), styled Viscount Broome from 1928 to 1937, was a British peer. He was unmarried, and when he died the title Earl Kitchener became extinct. Education and private life He was educated at Sandroyd School in Wiltshire, Winchester and Trinity College, Cambridge. He succeeded his grandfather in the earldom on 27 March 1937. The following month, he was a Page of Honour to King George VI at his coronation. Like his great-uncle before him, he was an English Freemason. He was initiated on 24 November 1947 in the Royal Somerset House & Inverness Lodge No 4 (London), and rose to senior rank, serving as Senior Grand Warden of the United Grand Lodge of England. Henry Kitchener was also a committed supporter of the organic movement and took up a role with the charity Garden Organic (formerly the Henry Doubleday Research Association - HDRA). Having joined the charity's founder, Lawrence Hill ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Toland (author)
John Willard Toland (June 29, 1912 – January 4, 2004) was an American writer and historian. He is best known for a biography of Adolf Hitler and a Pulitzer Prize-winning history of World War II-era Japan, ''The Rising Sun''. Biography Toland was born in 1912 in La Crosse, Wisconsin. He graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire in 1932 and from Williams College in 1936 and attended the Yale School of Drama for a time. His original goal was to become a playwright. In the summers between college years, he traveled with hobos and wrote several plays with hobos as central characters, none of which were performed. He recalled in 1961 that in his early years as a writer he had been "about as big a failure as a man can be". He claimed to have written six complete novels, 26 plays, and a hundred short stories before completing his first sale, a short story for which '' The American Magazine'' paid $165 in 1954. At one point he managed to get an article on dirigibles in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
