I read the first of the few. It was an excellent book and I really enjoyed it. My opinion is that if you wish to learn about the fighter aircraft of wolrd war one, this is the book for you. I learned a lot.

Hello, my name is Zach. I read an extrordanary book. It was about the aircraft and fighter pilots of The Great War, more commonly known as World War One. It was called the first of the few. The book was written by Denis Winter and published in 1982.

These men all very interesting and brave from Great Britan, the United States, France, Italy, and Belguim fought against equally brave pilots from Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Bulgaria in planes above the trenches. Planes such as the Britsh Sopwith Camel and Se5a, the French Nieport 24 and Spadxv, the German Fokker Eindicker and Fokker Dr1 were flow by Allied (Uk, France, USA etc.)and Cental Powers(Germany,Austria-Hungary etc.)pilots. The fighter planes were armed with Vickers, Maxum and Lewis machine guns. The Pilots would aim at the pilot or the flammible petrol tank in the enemey plane.

There were other but less known planes that were bombers suchas the German Gotha Gv and the Britsh Handley Page. Heavey bombers like these were used to attack railroads and railway stations, factories, ship yards and other industrial sites vital to the war effort. Light Infatry attack bombers, unlike large heavey bombers had a small two to three man crew. These planes often had thick steel plates to protect against anti-aircraft machine gun fire. The crew member in the rear seat was a navigator and was equipted with a Lewis or Maxum machine gun. The German Airforce or Luffwafte made their pilots fly in Two seated aircraft before allowing them in one seated planes.

The fighter plane of 1914 to 1918 had a few basic parts. the engine, usally in the front, the cockpit, the fuesulage and the tail. The Britsh had Rolls-Royce engines and the Germans had BMW made engines. Most propellers had two props on them.There were two main types of engines rotary in which the whole engine spins and stationary engines in which only the propeller and drive shaft spun. Most stationary engines were water cooled. The Sopwith Camel had a rotary engine while the SE5a had a water cooled stationary engine.

For shooting down a certain number of planes down, pilots could become aces. Aces were experienced, quick witted, and had exellent reflexes. Many of these men were shorter, shy men who kept to themselves. The Britsh top ace was Edward Mannock with about sevety some kills. Remarkably, he was almost blind in one eye! The German top ace is probably the most famous aircraft pilot of all time after the Wright brothers, Manfred von Ritchtofen, better known as the Red Baron. He shot down 80 allied aircraft before he was killed in a dogfight was a Sopwith Camel in 1918. First on the French ace list, also with about 70 kills was Rene' Fonck. Eddie Rickenbacker the top gun from the USA, started flying at the age most officers looked for a desk job. Before the war, he was a race car driver and later the personal chauffeur to General "Black Jack" Pershing, commander of all american forces in Europe during the war. Willy Coppens was Belguims top ace.

Planes had other roles during the war. Their first job was only to act as reconnaissance posts blimps were used as observation platforms too. Planes were sent to destroy the enemies blimps. These "balloon busting" raids were very dangerous. Anti-aircraft fire and field telephone poles and wires were a hazard to attacking planes. The Germans had parachutes for both plane and blimp pilots. I enjoyed the book.

I have just finished reading this book which was such a pleasure to read as it was so well researched and crafted. The writer is able to get into the spirit of the times and present a very real picture of what it was like to fly machines constructed from wood and canvas and fly without them without the the aid of parachutes. He gives a particularly vivid account of the perils of a dawn patrol, flying at 20,000ft without pressurized cabins, in open air cockpits where temperatures were sometimes -50c. In addition a pilot had to be fit in these conditions, perform complex aerobatics like the immlemen roll and have split second reflexes. It was particularly fascinating to read about the skills required to be an air ace. One had to master the art of deflection shooting that is knowing when to fire to hit a moving target. Few pilots mastered this skill. The greatest of aces such as Guneymer and Richthoven achieved kills with a minimum of ammunition usage. Under these conditions the average survival time for a debutant pilot was 17 hours in the air. However, the longer one flew the greater the survival odds: roghly double that of staying alive. One interesting point was the authors comparison of training between the English RFC and the German Luftwaffe. The German training was far longer and more thorough. The result was that the RFC had about 50% greater caualties than the Germans.One must add that the policy of the RFC was to attack the Germans behind enemy lines , whereas the Luftwaffes main aim was that of defence. One final note was the excellant chapter on flight maintenance. The Sopwith Camel for example required a fleet of skilled craftsmen of almost mediaeval ability to calibrate the wing struts and enable the plane to fly on even keel. The introduction of all metal momonplanes must have
made the job of aircraft fitter a much easier task. In summary a book to be highly recommended. I have only one complaint. Many of the air aces of the RFC described as British were in fact Canadian

Yes, this book is an atlas, like an atlas must be: with many, many pictures, big pictures (the majority use all size of the page) and a easily text to read. I really recomend. I am sorry by the language, please, corretc before, OK. PS: I don't know if pictures are the correct word, the atlas has colored designs, ok

This novel is filled with love, hate, comedy, and anything you can think of! The story of a strage mixup of characters trying to bring peace back to their world is about to continue. This book is filled with complex characters and magnificent dialogue. A masterpeice without paint is created by two of the worlds best authors.....once again!(It's not the end of my getaway ticket!)

The party of Tanis is searching for the legendary dragonorb so they can control the evil dragons that are currently trying to take over the world with help of their Dragon Highlords. If the party can take over them with the powerfull dragonorbs, they just may save Krynn from all destruction! With the help of Tanis, half-elven, Raistlin, frail mage, Tasselhoff, kender\theift, Caramon, warrior, Laurana, elf maiden, and Flint, dwarf, they try to stop the queen of darkness from taking over Krynn.

A great book for ages 12 and up. Please read Dragons of Autumn Twilight first.

Thank you for reading my review and may the Force be with you!

Frans, (SnArf)

Dragons of Winter Night is my favorite of the three original Dragonlance novels. This book is darker than the other two, filled with much pain and sorrow. The story picks up several months after the end of Dragons of Autumn Twilight, with the Companions of the Lance continuing their search for the ancient Gods of Krynn. They have been swept up into a war that is begining, and are separated in the city of Tarsis the Beautiful. This is a tale of lost love and lost innocence. Tanis is torn between two women, and Raistlin flirts with the black robes of evil. Across the continent, Laurana and Sturm face many challenges, some leading to glory and some to the sword. The character development is supreme and the plot moves quickly. Watch out, the end of this book will bring you to tears if you have a heart.

Tanis, Flint, Tass, Sturm, Caramon, Raistlin, and the rest are back. Tanis' part must recover the Great Dragon Orbs and Dragon Lance. If they fail to recover these relics, all hope of fighting the Dragon Armies will be lost.

This book is marvelous. It combines humor, love, action, mystery, and suspense to create a perfect novel. For an example of a little humor, When there is no hope of escape from captivity; Tass is stealing things and cracking funny jokes about the guards and such, as they are being taken to the dungeons.

This book is good because it is long, but never boring. This book is a book that you never want to end. Unlike other book it does not progressively get better, it is perfect all the way through! At the beginning when you normaly are getting to know the setting and characters, it jumps you right into a little action and suspense.

I recommend this book to everyone! It is the second book in the Chronicles trilogy so I recommend you read Dragons of Autumn Twilight first.

The World War I British infantryman's life, whose story has been minimized or neglected by traditional histories of the war and the public at large, was "made up of small details and large emotions." (16) So argues Denis Winter in Death's Men: Soldiers of the Great War. He focuses primarily on the "inner lives of 'the Other Ranks,'" (ibid.) whose memoirs and reminiscences allow for the creation of what he describes as "the 'inner history'" of the Great War.
Winter structures Death's Men both chronologically and thematically. This approach allows him to show how typical British enlistees ("Kitchener's Men") progressed from being new recruits to frontline soldiers and, if they were lucky, to returning veterans after 1918. Military historians as well as casual readers will certainly admire Winter's thorough and vivid handling of trench warfare and the tremendous toll it took on men's lives, both physically and emotionally.
The strength of Winter's book is its graphic depiction of the men in the trenches and the nature of modern warfare on the western front from 1914 to 1918. Technologically advanced weaponry such as high explosive artillery ammunition, the machine gun and flame throwers made combat hellish beyond description. "The order of life," Winter concludes, "seemed beyond the comprehension of a soldier under a barrage of gas and shells...even if a man could gather himself to contemplate anything beyond survival." (115) At times, Winter's prose is remarkable, as when he describes the infantryman as "object not subject. He saw himself as the rodent occupier of a pockmarked, grassless zone, whose forward limit was determined by the very limit of human endurance. What was he but the counter in a game..." (Ibid.) No squalid detail is too small to evade mention by the numerous soldiers Winter employs to tell his story. Dozens of first hand accounts culled from diaries, memoirs and letters depict the minutiae of the British foot soldier's life in France, including shrapnel wounds, trench foot, bread weevils, brothels, mustard gas attacks, and grave digging-just to list a few.
Winter does not neglect the psychological effects of this modern war on the men fighting it, and devotes an entire chapter-"The Strain of Trench Warfare"-to it. The hideous, modern "arsenal of weapons" led to a war in which "infantry became merely hunters and hunted." (128) The Great War, he asserts, "posed a greater test than any previous war." He rightly points to the reality that unlike previous wars in which battles lasted for hours or days at most, the trench-bound British soldier of the First World War "was hardly ever out of danger," (131) where death loomed constantly.

Despite Winter's skill in vividly illustrating the dreadful struggles of the western front, Death's Men suffers from two major problems. First, this is primarily an impressionistic book, with little statistical or analytical work involved. Winter often cites his own experiences (or those of his relatives) and makes dubious extrapolations from them, such as his first-hand knowledge of shell shock victims. "Each week," he reports, " I see in Leavesden mental hospital...a man whose memory is perfect...to 1917. Thereafter he can remember nothing." (140) Aside from the question of Winter's medical qualifications to make judgments about post-combat stress victims, one wonders how accurate an extrapolation can be from just one veteran the author happens to know. This error is known as "the fallacy of the lonely fact[:]...a statistical generalization from a single case." Examples of impressionistic generalizations abound in Death's Men. Winter's sweeping claims such as "cleanliness was always the highest priority" of the soldier; (146) "all men feared artillery"; (121) and "all soldiers were bitterly depressed when time came to return to France" from leave, (169) serve to brush off exceptions to his broad, imprecise statements, most of which lack citations and statistical support. Although he writes that against such a diversity of soldier's war experiences "generalization must clearly have its limits," (17) Winter fails to heed his own advice.
The second, and perhaps bigger flaw of Death's Men is that it is largely an anecdotal collection of war stories, all of which serve to answer his preconceived declarative question: the war was horrible for the men who fought it. With this closed-end hypothesis in mind, Winter seems to have trudged off to the archives and, unsurprisingly, found exactly what he was looking for. His survey is not so much an historical inquiry as it is a compilation of individual accounts from only one of the war's theatres that he for the most part fails to interpret, quantify and contextualize. He provides only eight footnotes in this 265-page book, a limitation that lessens the book's usefulness to other scholars, or to readers wishing to learn more.
Death's Men lacks a proper historical question. It is instead a compilation of soldiers' experiences about which the author's opinion often substitutes for interpretation, such as when he harshly criticizes the army's induction and basic training system for subduing the individual in a dehumanizing manner. "Our soldiers," Winter opines, "until the last year of the war, continued to be trained as blockishly as had been Wellington's men." (49) Winter fails to provide context for his impressionistic assertion, or alternative explanations. Was basic training harsh in the Great War because the army had so many civilians to train? Did military authorities grasp the fundamental need to prepare troops for the modern battlefield, to ward off mutiny, and to harden the men in advance? He does not consider this, and provides few accounts from officers or NCOs about the obvious need for discipline. Death's Men will certainly satisfy those readers searching for absorbing tales of World War I combat and the misery of the trenches. A scholarly, interpretive study of British foot soldiers, however, this is not-such an empirical analysis remains to be written.

This is an amazing historical book. The author collected memoirs from British soldiers from WWI and organized them into various chapters: The Kitchener Armies Form, The Training of 'Other Ranks', Coming to Terms With The Army, Training the Officers, Over to France, Trench Life, The Weapons of Trench Warfare, The Strain of Trench Warfare, Into Rest, Home Leave, Battle, After Battle, Attitudes to the Germans, Attitudes to the War as a Whole, and After the War. Though not all of them are superb, all of them are very good. The most gruesome are Trench Life, The Weapons of Trench Warfare, and The Strain of Trench Warfare. After the War was an excellent close up chapter with some great commentary.

The entire book is from the British perspective. Though the majority of the Allied soldiers of World War I's Western Front were French, this captures the experience and affects of World War I brilliantly. The picture of the cover is an exquisite choice; all throughout the book I would read horrific things of the war and look at the picture on the cover and think, "you poor ..." The only negative thing I have to say about this book is the small print. The margins are more than enough to allow a larger print and still fit in the same existing dimensions. There is only one map and the British slang isn't defined, but you can find most of it ...

Some of the more gory details concern snipers, machine guns, decomposing body, the deplorable conditions of the trenches, the horrific affects of phosphene gas and mustard gas (and of course tear and chlorine), mortar and artillery fire, and rats. This isn't an action story. Although there is plenty of action in it, it's an accumulation and narration of memoirs of World War I organized in a well manner. I highly recommend this to historian hobbyists, true historians, or people who just like understanding war. It won't be a dissapointment.

If you want to read a true historical account of the Great War and how it affected the men & women involved this is the book. The author does not hide the gruesome accounts of the survivors of artillery fire and the affects upon mens body of the modern weapons of war. He tells the story of what men went through as soldiers in WWI, from training to the end of the line. This is a story about the soldiers not the Generals and their doomed tactics. Its a must read if you want to understand the Great War fully.

This book is very factual and has creative photos. I love how the author covers her experiences in a unique and informative way. This is a great item for a collector!

Denis Winter's nickname in Great War history circles is "The self-appointed Witchfinder General of the Great War". It's not catchy, but it's pretty accurate.

This book is a nonsense that would be ridiculous were it not worryingly popular. Winter's thesis is effectively a vehicle to advance his own agenda and has been debunked by a number of highly reputable historians, including Australia's two most eminent historians of World War 1, Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson (neither of whom could be described as fans of Haig). It has also been disowned by the staff at the Australian War Memorial. Not a very glittering endorsement.

Winter accuses a lot of people (pretty much everyone in Britain, basically) of covering up Haig's deficiencies and generally lying. Aside from that fact that it is generally unwise to buy into any conspiracy that requires more than three people to keep their mouths shut, Winter's thesis doesn't have much credibility when one considers that fact that half the people accused of conspiring harboured massive personal animus agaisnt Haig and would have taken delight in sticking the knife in where possible (as Brigadier James edmonds did on more than one occassion). Given the shockingly bad reputation Haig enjoys among the public at large, Winter's book has been described by one historian as "surely the most unsuccessful conspiracy in history". Well, quite.

On top of this, ironically given the relish with which he accuses others of lying and distorting history, it has been demonstrated that Winter systematically misquotes and selectively edits sources and distorts the evidence. For example, from a letter by a staff officer saying "You might think that the quality of the army has not improved a jot in the four years since the outbreak of the war but I would most strongly disagree with this assessment and would argue that our performance has demonstrably improved in leaps and bounds", Winter will simply lift the bit that says "the quality of the army has not improved a jot in the four years since the outbreak of the war" and present that as evidence of British generals covertly condeming themselves out of their own mouths. Of course, for people without the time to look or access to archived material it is fairly difficult to refute this sort of thing and for a long time Winter's claims went unquestioned (aided in no small part by the fact that he was often telling people what they wanted to hear). Judging by some of the reviews of the book on this website, some things haven't changed.

In summary, this is a terrible book. It is bad history. It is polemical. And above all it is intellectually dishonest. There are far better books on great war generalship out there, if only people would care to look. Sadly, most people seem happier reinforcing their prejudices with this sort of thing and as long as this is the case I don't doubt Winter's books will continue to sell like hot cakes while more worthy academic works will continue to gather dust on the shelves.

Douglas Haig was not the only general to re-write history in order to exalt himself in the eyes of posterity. Montgomery was another such general albeit in a much milder form than Haig.
Haig was promoted beyond his capability using his undoubted connections. The battle of Loos where British infantry advanced in rows in the face of German machine guns and in which 8000 were killed within the first few hours was the first example of command stupidity. However, Haig then went on to repeat the debacle time and time again. The Somme, for example, where 20,000 were killed on the first day. Enormous casualties for little or no gain with Haig seemingly unable to grasp the fact that men against fortified positions, machine guns, artillery and mile after mile of barbed wire were simply unable to advance more than a few yards before being stopped in their tracks.
This volume by Winter presents another side to the official view of Haig and also, it must be said, of the British establishment who aided and abetted Haigs efforts to falsify history. Haig was damned by the country and the establishment after the war and rightly so. An excellent read.

Confirming generally accepted shortcomings among an outclassed 'officer class' at the end of an era of British dominance in trade and power, Winter brings home the reasons for the decline and the terrible price paid by the common soldier for the towering incompetence of Haig and his ilk. Haig was it seems in many ways an exemplar for the expertise vaccuum at the very top of the British army. Just as in consecutive Afghanistan campaigns and the Boer war, where soldiers were compelled to march to their slaughter in highly visible red uniforms, Haig seemed not to be able to grasp the reality of modern warfare, such as the fortified machine gun, while the Germans patiently mowed down a generation of young Englishmen with methodical precision. Heartbreaking and compelling reading, and though emotionally charged, Winter brings us a detailed work of scholarship.