Kansas City, Missouri is home to the National World War I Museum, and I visited while I was attending the annual conference of the Society for Military History. Let’s take a look at what makes this museum tick: Quality of research The availability of technical specs for the weaponry on display, and the broad strokes…
Tag: France
Book: The Monuments Men
How to thwart a pillager With his book, The Monuments Men, Robert Edsel has brought a little-known piece of the Allied effort in World War II to the front of our consciousness. The MFAA, or “Monuments Men” were a tiny group of American, British, and French soldiers who scoured Europe for the thousands of pieces…
World War I: Not just trench warfare
One of the conventional ideas about World War I (especially the Western Front), is that technology outpaced tactics. We wrap up the war’s problems this way: Commanders had a pre-machine-gun idea of how battles worked, and they were now living in a post-machine-gun world. In Andrew Weist’s Haig: The Evolution of a Commander, one paragraph…