First World War

During the First World War, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist William Lawrence Bragg devised a system to locate enemy guns, which made a dramatic impact on the Allied war effort and beyond, says Taylor Downing.

The tragic figure whose death led to the outbreak of the First World War was born on 18 December 1863.

J. Garston describes how for eleven years, amid political and economic storms, first from Cologne and then from Wiesbaden, the British Army kept watch over the Rhine.

The intervention of Mr. Churchill and the Royal Naval Division at Antwerp in early October, 1914, failed to save the city, writes David Woodward, but the vital Channel ports were thereby saved.

David Mitchell describes the postwar peace-making efforts employed by Woodrow Wilson in 1919.

Defeated in the field, Germany sought peace. But, writes John Terraine, her proposals for a negotiated peace were rejected by the Allies.

Disastrous battle raged on the Somme from July until November, 1916; John Terraine describes how it marked the ‘ruddy grave’ of the German field army.

From February until December 1916, Verdun was the scene of the longest and heaviest series of battles.

John Terraine describes how the Allied offensive of spring 1917 promised victory but ended in failure and mutiny.

The First World War precipitated a housing crisis in London, which affected all classes of the populace and had a profound effect on the capital, says Jerry White.