Hundred Days

In the late summer of 1918, after four long years of senseless, stagnant fighting, the Western Front erupted. The bitter four-month struggle that ensued--known as the Hundred Days Campaign--saw some of the bloodiest and most ferocious combat of the Great War, as the Allies grimly worked to break the stalemate in the west and end the conflict that had decimated Europe. In Hundred Days, acclaimed military historian Nick Lloyd leads readers into the endgame of World War I, showing how the timely arrival of American men and materiel--as well as the bravery of French, British, and Commonwealth soldiers--helped to turn the tide on the Western Front. Many of these battle-hardened troops had endured years of terror in the trenches, clinging to their resolve through poison-gas attacks and fruitless assaults across no man's land. Finally, in July 1918, they and their American allies did the impossible: they returned movement to the western theater. Using surprise attacks, innovative artillery tactics, and swarms of tanks and aircraft, they pushed the Germans out of their trenches and forced them back to their final bastion: the Hindenburg Line, a formidable network of dugouts, barbed wire, and pillboxes. After a massive assault, the Allies broke through, racing toward the Rhine and forcing Kaiser Wilhelm II to sue for peace. An epic tale ranging from the ravaged fields of Flanders to the revolutionary streets of Berlin, Hundred Days recalls the bravery and sacrifice that finally silenced the guns of Europe.

About the Author :
Nick Lloyd is Senior Lecturer in Defense Studies at King's College London. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Birmingham and is the author of two previous books, Loos 1915 and The Amritsar Massacre: The Untold Story of One Fateful Day. He lives in Gloucestershire, England.

Review :
A Maclean's Best Read of 2014 "A sobering but essential read on the last days of a horrific conflict... The American role in the final victory has been downplayed by Eurocentric historians... Now we have an esteemed British historian...giving America's soon-famed "doughboys" their just due." --The Washington Times "A brilliantly enlightening approach to war and men's lives... Lloyd has provided an accessible overview of how strategic and tactical shifts--like the surge in Iraq and the associated urban outposts--can help alter the course of a war and indeed end it. But much more importantly...he explores how those strategic and tactical shifts affected the lives of soldiers. As history progresses, it is their lives and experiences that are often most at risk of fading. There are no living veterans of the Great War, making it all the more essential that not only the tactics, tools, and economy of war, but also the soldiers themselves, remain the important pieces of history. At its best, Hundred Days does just this." --Daily Beast "A readable, instructive, and compelling narrative of Allied successes and German failures...Hundred Days succeeds in its ambition of covering all the major combatants on the Western Front in the final campaign of World War I. Lloyd adroitly combines sweeping historical scope with the perspectives of the men who did the fighting on the ground. All this in a history that taps the latest relevant scholarship without sidetracking the narrative." --Michigan War Studies Review "His accounts of each battle are both lively and clear...the real strength of Lloyd's work is his treatment of the experience of the war from an individual perspective. He paints vivid portraits of the character and motivations of the various commanders and draws on a variety of first hand accounts from men at all levels on both sides of the front" --History in the Margins "Lloyd... enters the upper tier of Great War historians with this admirable account of the war's final campaign... Lloyd's unfailing eye for telling anecdotes vitalize his narrative... The text brims with archival research." --Publishers Weekly "A fine account of the Allies' dramatic but ultimately unsatisfying victory in World War I." --Kirkus Reviews "Lloyd's narrative is first-rate... With clarity and genuine sympathy for the combatants, Lloyd tells the story of the summer fighting that led to the long and increasingly rapid retreat of the German armies in the fall... Ten million soldiers died fighting in World War I, and perhaps as many as 20 million more were wounded. Their stories deserve to be told. Professor Lloyd has done so very well indeed." --Army Magazine "One of the few truly noteworthy WWI books to issue in the centennial flood from the presses of the Western world in observance of anniversary of the war's beginning... Hundred Days is a bracing re-dramatization of the horrors that were most fresh in the minds of all concerned when those days were over." --Open Letters Monthly "Brisk and thoroughly engrossing... Far from being a pointless stalemate in the mud, the last hundred days of [World War I] saw the Allied armies push their adversaries back from the Paris commuter belt all the way to the German border itself." --Evening Standard (London)