The Western Front

A new edition of Richard Holmes' classic text published to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the end of the First World War

Authoritative, concise, wide-ranging and readable ... it is hard to see how Richard Holmes' The Western Front can be bettered

Richard Holmes is Professor of Military and Security Studies at Cranfield University and the Royal Military College of Science. He has written more then a dozen books on military history, including the highly acclaimed Wellington, Redcoat and Tommy, and is the general editor of the Oxford Companion to Military History. He presented the BBC television series The Western Front, War Walks, Battlefields and In the Footsteps of Churchill and wrote the accompanying books.

For most British people, the First World War was the Western Front, the trench line stretching from the Swiss Frontier to the North Sea. It was there that the majority of nearly nine million British and Dominion soldiers who enlisted during the war served, and where most of the 947,000 who were killed met their deaths. 
 
This detailed but accessible account covers everything from how the front was created and the experiences of the British Army in France, to the battle of Verdun and the last hundred days of the war. Holmes' concise and heartfelt narrative is illustrated with photographs, diagrams, maps and quotations that bring this inhuman four years of history to life. 
 
In one of the best single-volume histories of the First World War available, Holmes skillfully clarifies the complexities of the Western Front, and highlights the political, military and human dilemmas of this, the most bitter and bloody of conflicts.

A Traveller's History of the Battlefields of Northern France and Flanders 1346-1945

Fatal Avenue

A unique work, combining military history and travel, studying the most fought-over area on earth.

Enthralling information on everything from archery to fortification, and from strategy to ecology...  It could scarcely be bettered

Exceedingly well written... triumphantly succeeds... Richard Holmes is equally sure-footed when dealing with the human element, writing with equal conviction about Joan of Arc, Malborough, Napoleon, Haig, Foch, Ludendorff, Montgomery, Eisenhower, and many others. His book is an outstanding recruit to the shelves of military history

A panoramic view of the military history of the battle-scarred landscape extending from Lorraine to Normandy

Utterly fascinating. Its combined activities as uplifting route-map of courage and gloire and as sobering geo-history of human folly makes this a shaking, appalling, irresistible read

Richard Holmes is Professor of Military and Security Studies at Cranfield University and the Royal Military College of Science. He was educated at Cambridge, Northern Illinois, and the University of Reading, and carried out his doctoral research on the French army of the Second Empire. For many years he taught military history at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. 
 
A celebrated military historian, Richard Holmes is the author of the best-selling and widely acclaimed Tommy and Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket. His dozen other books include Dusty Warriors, Sahib, The Western Front, The Little Field Marshal: Sir John French, The Road to Sedan, Riding the Retreat, The Second World War in Photographs and Firing Line (also published by Pimlico). 
 
He is general editor of The Oxford Companion to Military History and has presented eight BBC TV series, including 'War Walks', 'The Western Front' and 'Battlefields', and is famous for his hugely successful series 'Wellington: The Iron Duke' and 'Rebels and Redcoats'.

De Gaulle called it a 'fatal avenue' - that broad sweep of low-lying country stretching north-east of Paris. Over the centuries, invading armies have swept back and forth over this bloody terrain, and the names of battles fought here read like a dictionary of military history - from Agincourt, Calais and Crécy to Verdun, Vimy and Ypres. 
 
Fatal Avenue is both a history and a guide - a unique study of a region that has witnessed more bitter military conflict than any other area of its size on earth.

Mons to the Marne 1914 Revisited

Riding The Retreat

In this extraordinary blend of military history and contemporary travelogue, Richard Holmes recounts his journey tracing the route along which the British retreated and the Germans advanced during one of the most dramatic military episodes of the First World War.

The author tells two stories in parallel: that of his own journey and a first-rate account of what happened eighty years before

A book that amuses yet haunts, brisk at one moment, melancholy the next... an effortless blend of past and present

Succeeds admirably in both parts: the travelogue weaves in and out, giving welcome relief from the sweat and fear, the sleeplessness, the fearful wounds and the killing... Masterly

The retreat of the British Expeditionary Force from Mons in the early months of the First World War is one of the great dramas of European history. Blending his recreation of the military campaign with contemporary testimony and an account of his own ride over the route, Richard Holmes takes the reader on a unique journey - to glimpse the summer the old world ended.

In the Footsteps of Churchill

Richard Holmess insightful new biography of one of Britains greatest leaders is both a study in character and the story of an extraordinary career. Much has been written about Churchills role as British prime minister during the crisis years of the Second World War, but in this book Holmes uses new material to investigate the influences that shaped the man: his troubled schooldays, his flamboyant politician father, Randolph, and his famously attractive American mother, Jennie. Holmes argues that the qualities that made Churchill great also led him to commit catastrophic blunders. The same recklessness that made him a hero when he was a young correspondent during the Boer War arguably cost thousands of Allied lives during the Gallipoli campaign in 1915, and may also have contributed to the fall of Singapore in 1942.    'In the Footsteps of Churchill' takes us on an exhilarating journey through Harrow School, the North-West Frontier, the Sudan, South Africa, 10 Downing Street and his beloved Chartwell; a journey that begins in the aristocratic splendour of Blenheim Palace and ends in the quiet of a country churchyard not far away  the compass of an extraordinary life in a few Oxfordshire acres.        'Richard Holmes provides a truly fresh interpretation of the great man  Holmess mature and wise portrait is studded with facts about the period and episodes in Churchills life that amuse, engage and entice. The authors eye for the telling detail, as well as his deep immersion in all the relevant archives, raises this book far above the common ruck of Churchilliana.  Andrew Roberts    This supremely skilful military historian   achieves a freshness of approach that makes Churchill hard to put down.  Max Hastings, Mail on Sunday

The Complete War Walks

This one-volume edition comprises both Richard Holmes' well-loved War Walks and War Walks 2.   Dates such as 1066 and names such as Dunkirk often strike a chord of nostalgia, but the details of the historic events associated with them are forgotten. In The Complete War Walks Richard Holmes takes us on fascinating journey through time to visit twelve battlefields throughout Britain, Northern France and Belgium that mark crucial moments in Britain's bloody and turbulent history. From Hastings to Dunkirk, Agincourt to The Somme, Richard vividly recreates the atmosphere of these key battles in our history.   With his expert knowledge of weapons and warfare and using specially commissioned maps, Richard Holmes provides a brilliantly clear picture of the events which led up to each battle, the conflicts themselves, and the people who fought them. Using practical 'views of the field', he travels the battlefields as they exist today, pointing out their places of interest, paying tribute to the men who fought there, and bringing history to life.    This book focuses on a selection of battles, six fought in Britain - or, in one case, on a struggle that straddled the Channel. A further six are set in a few hundred square miles of northern France and southern Belgium, a space so confined that a single day's drive could take us across all our battlefields. Choosing the battles from a long list of potential candidates was far from easy, but a certain logic prevails. Battles that had far-reaching consequences, historically and politically, were brought to the forefront of the possible choices. In some cases, because of a battle's importance, it entered part of an enduring mythology that demands attention. There were other obvious considerations that favoured certain battles over others: battles that were particularly decisive, or ones that were well documented, or have battlefields that remain striking today. I shied away from some battles that had already been  described so well in print or on film, that I felt there was nothing new to add. In the twentieth-century France: Hastings, Agincourt, Bosworth, Naseby, The Boyne, Waterloo, Mons and Le Cateau, the Somme, Arras, Dunkirk, the Blitz and Operation Goodwood.

Battlefields (of the Second World War)

'Battlefields of the Second World War' is what every Richard Holmes fan has been waiting for. In this fascinating and brilliantly articulated study of the Second World War, he clarifies the complexities of four of its campaigns: El Alamein, Monte Cassino, Operation Market Garden (of which Arnhem formed a crucial part)and the RAF's bomber offensive against Germany. The book originates in his firm conviction that the sacrifices made by British service personnel are not properly understood. It uses eye-witness accounts to illuminate the horror, confusion and sheer enormity of war, and puts this in the context of the conflict's broader strategy.   'The name Richard Holmes is to military history what Made in Britain once was to maufactured goods. There is no shoddiness in materials or labour; reliability is the hallmark, not flashiness, John Bull the proud emblem'.  'The Times'

Richard Holmes

The World at War was one of the greatest television series of all time. It demonstrated the potential power of history on television and inspired a generation. It is tremendously exciting that the complete interviews with the participants from The World at War are now published here for the first time. Most of the people who were interviewed for the series are now dead, but their vital history - thanks to this book - still lives

The Landmark Oral History from the Previously Unpublished Archives

The World at War is the definitive television work on the Second World War. It set out to tell the story of the war through the testimony of key participants - from civilians to ordinary soldiers, from statesmen to generals. First broadcast in 1973, the result was a unique and irreplaceable record since many of the eyewitnesses captured on film did not have long to live. 
 
The programme's producers committed hundreds of interview-hours to tape in its creation, but only a fraction of that recorded material made it to the final cut. For more than 30 years the interviews have never been allowed to be published - until now. 
 
The well-known names interviewed for the series include Albert Speer, Karl Wolff (Himmler's adjutant), Traudl Junge (Hitler's secretary), James Stewart (USAAF bomber pilot and Hollywood star), Anthony Eden, John Colville (Parliamentary Private Secretary to Winston Churchill), Averell Harriman (US Ambassador to Russia) and Arthur 'Bomber' Harris (Head of RAF Bomber Command). 
 
Highly respected historian and bestselling author Richard Holmes has skilfully woven this valuable original material into a compelling narrative, creating a truly phenomenal oral history of the Second World War.

Richard Holmes

Praise for The World at War

The World at War was one of the greatest television series of all time. It demonstrated the potential power of history on television and inspired a generation. It is tremendously exciting that the comp ...

A treasure trove of eyewitness accounts

Books by Richard Holmes

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