Winning and Losing on the Western Front. The British Third Army and the Defeat of Germany in 1918

摘要

This is that rare thing, a book whose title promises less than it delivers. Despite the emphasis in the title on the British Third Army, at least half of the book focuses on the doings of their German opponents. Jonathan Boff has mined archives in Munich, Freiburg, Wellington, and London to answer two questions: why, beginning in August 1918, was the BEF able to end three years of trench stalemate, and why did German resistance collapse, allowing the British to advance nearly 80 miles and capture 180,000 prisoners? Boff has chosen to answer these questions by focusing on the operations of the largest, and one of the most active, components of Haig's force, Sir Julian Byng's Third Army and its German opponents. His answers are built around two hypotheses. The first is that the BEF's success was the result of three years' of attrition which had so worn down the German Army's resistance that its collapse was inevitable. The second was that Haig's armies had learnt better than the Germans the lessons of modern war and by the second half of 1918 was applying them with greater skill than their opponents.