The Great War of 1914–1918 was the first mass conflict to fully mobilize the resources of industrial powers against one another, resulting in a brutal, bloody, protracted war of attrition between the world's great economies. Now, one hundred years after the first guns of August rang out on the Western front, historian William Philpott reexamines the causes and lingering effects of the first truly modern war.
Drawing on the experience of front-line soldiers, munitions workers, politicians, and diplomats, War of Attrition explains for the first time why and how this new type of conflict was fought as it was fought, as well as how the attitudes and actions of political and military leaders, and the willing responses of their peoples, stamped the twentieth century with unprecedented carnage on—and behind—the battlefield.
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“William Philpott has written an incisive, colorful book that details the race by both sides first to understand and then to master a long war of attrition that had been planned by every power as a short war of annihilation. War of Attrition succeeds both as an argument and as a gripping narrative of the dreadful process by which the armies (and navies) swerved from the objective of breaking though to that of killing men in a vast, globe-spanning war of exhaustion.”
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Geoffrey Wawro, author of A Mad Catastrophe and director of the University of North Texas Military History Center