Ham, Paul – The Bell Bookshop

Passchendaele

Emma — Thu, 17 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

‘Outstanding . . . thought-provoking, readable and informative’ Soldier

One hundred years on…

On 18 July 1917, a heavy artillery barrage was unleashed by the Allied forces against an entrenched German army outside the town of Ypres. it was to be the opening salvo of one of the most ferociously fought and debilitating encounters of the First World War.

Few battles would encapsulate the utter futility of the war better that what became known as the Battle of Passchendaele. By the time the British and Canadian forces finally captured Passchendaele village on 6 November, the Allies had suffered over 271,000 casualties and the German army over 217,000.

Passchendaele: Requiem for Doomed Youth shows how ordinary men on both sides endured this constant state of siege, with a very real awareness that they were being gradually, deliberately felled. Here, Paul Ham tells the story of an army caught in the grip of an extraordinary power struggle – both global and national. As Prime Minister Lloyd George and Commander Haig’s relationship deteriorated beyond repair, so a terrible battle of attrition was needlessly and painfully prolonged.

Ham lays down a powerful challenge to the ways in which we have previously seen this monumental battle. Through an examination of the culpability of governments and military commanders in a catastrophe that destroyed the best part of a generation, Paul Ham argues that Passchendaele, far from being a breakthrough moment, was the battle that nearly lost the Allies the war.

‘Paul Ham brings new tools to the job, unearthing fresh evidence of a deeply disturbing sort. He has a magpie eye for the telling detail.’ Ben Macintyre, The Times

Young Hitler: The Making of the Fuhrer

Emma — Thu, 28 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

When Adolf Hitler went to war in 1914, he was just 25 years old. It was a time he would later call the 'most stupendous experience of my life'. That war ended with Hitler in a hospital bed, temporarily blinded by mustard gas. The world that he opened his newly healed eyes on was new and it was terrible: Germany had been defeated, the Kaiser had fled and the army had been resolutely humbled. Hitler never accepted these facts. Out of his fury rose a white-hot hatred, an unquenchable thirst for revenge against the 'criminals' who had signed the armistice, against the socialists who he accused of stabbing the army in the back and, most violently, against the Jews - a direct threat to the master race of his imagination - on whose shoulders he would pile all of Germany's woes. This book seeks the man behind the myth. How did the defining years of Hitler's life affect his rise to power?

1914 The Year The World Ended

Emma — Thu, 01 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

In this searing indictment of the rationale behind the First World War, Paul Ham argues that European leaders did not ‘sleepwalk’ into war, but that they fully accepted and understood the consequences of the decisions they were making.

In August 1914, the European powers plunged the world into a war that would kill or wound 37 million people, tear down the fabric of society, uproot ancient political systems and set the world on course for the bloodiest century in human history.

On the eve of the 100th anniversary of that terrible year, Ham takes the reader on a journey into the labyrinth, to reveal the complexity, the layered motives, the flawed and disturbed minds that drove the world to war. What emerges is a clear sense of what happened and why. ‘To understand the past,’ Ham concludes, ‘and share that understanding, is the chief role of the historian. To understand the past is to liberate ourselves from its awful shadow and steel ourselves against it happening again.’