The German Army on the Western Front: 1914 – 1918

This major historical project concerning the German army during the First World War will provide an original, revisionist and complete series of carefully researched books, which will equip the Anglophone audience for the first time with a detailed description from the German perspective of all the major campaigns and battles along the Western Front 1914 – 1918. Each book, five of which have so far been published, stands alone, but complements those already written and those still to be produced. The books are a synthesis of a narrative historical approach, analysis and original archival materials.
A major preoccupation since the research programme began some nine years ago, has been to devise ways of dealing with the loss of the bulk of the Prussian archives when Potsdam was bombed by the Royal Air Force in April 1945. The solution, which has permitted work of complete originality and lasting value to be produced, has been to exploit fully the resources of the surviving archives of the non-Prussian contingents of the old German army and to blend the analysis of these documents with material derived from the approximately 1,600 regimental and other histories which were written during the interwar period. In the process, maximum use has been made of predominantly Prussian published personal accounts, so as to compensate as far as possible for the absence of so much other primary documentation.
The single book and selected chapters from two other books which comprise this submission represent only a fraction of the work I have achieved to date, but they are strong exemplars of my approach, argumentation and unique revisionist version of four turbulent years on the decisive front of the war.