(Part 2) Top products from r/wwi

Really recommending the Forgotten Voices of the Somme for a British perspective on the whole battle, including the first day. I think it's best to learn about the Somme from a soldiers' perspective and this book is a great starting point. There is a similar book called Forgotten Voices of the Great War which is a book of British solders' stories and extracts from letters regarding the whole of the war.

Also, contrary to popular belief, I really like the Pen and Sword Military books on snipers, artillery and horses as they are not as detailed as some of the books I've read but a nice bit of easy reading if you're feeling a bit overwhelmed by some of the more advanced suggestions above.

I was very excited to find a copy of Military Strategy and the Origins of the First World War (1991) on a local bookstore's discount table this week. The owner had dropped it from $10 down to $2 because the previous owner had highlighted some stuff in one of the chapters. The book is otherwise unmarked. It's a very good collection, and I'm particularly pleased that it contains an essay by Holger Herwig on German patriotic self-censorship in the post-war years that I seem to have occasion to cite all the time.

This is not the first time I've had good fortune in this regard -- the same storekeeper is friends with a fairly prominent Canadian popular historian, and this fellow recently liquidated a large section of his library to make room for new arrivals. This included a very, very large WWI collection, which he had used in the course of researching this.

As a consequence, I ended up buying something like twenty hugely discounted books that would not only have been useful in their own right, but which were also just full of the historian's marginal notes. I've been having a lot of fun making my way through them.

I don't know which category this would go under- it best fits "Broad overviews" but it's so in-depth I would hesitate to place it there. Maybe a new category of something like "Great Britain" or "English Perspective"?

Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front (link) by Richard Holmes (2005)

Incredibly in-depth overview of England during the War that thoroughly explains the experience of the average Tommy and how the English army operated. Uses extensive primary sources (letters, diaries, etc.) and is a good place to go if you're interested in England during the War, although it's pretty long for a casual read (~750 pages).

I have a strong interest in WWI aviation, and would suggest the following books by Peter Hart for anyone looking to learn more about the air war conducted by the Royal Flying Corps (later the Royal Air Force):

• Somme Success: The Royal Flying Corps and the Battle of the Somme 1916 - Overview of the Fokker Scourge and aerial tactics in 1916 (link)
  
• Bloody April: Slaughter in the Skies over Arras 1917 - Detailed look at RFC operations during March, April and May of 1917, with a strong focus on artillery cooperation and photo recon and the role they played in supporting ground operations. (link)
  
• Aces Falling: War Above the Trenches 1918 - The formation of the Royal Air Force in 1918 and the rise of massed tactics, rather than the cult of personality surrounding individual ace scout pilots. (link)
  
  Hart is a fantastic writer and draws extensively from published correspondence from pilots directly involved in the campaigns named.

This is three very good books that I've read on WW1

Storm of Steel is a good book from the German Point of view, http://www.amazon.com/Storm-Steel-Penguin-Classics-J%C3%BCnger/dp/0142437905

Her Privates We, Hemingway said that he read the book every year to remind him how it really was. http://www.amazon.com/Her-Privates-We-Frederic-Manning/dp/8087888596

Unknown Soldiers: The Story of the Missing of the First World War, I really liked this book its complied from letters the soldiers wrote and the last few chapters are about what France, Britain and the US did to honor the Unknown. http://www.amazon.com/Soldiers-Story-Missing-First-World/dp/0307276546/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1416969906&sr=8-1&keywords=unknown+soldiers&pebp=1416969916143

Louis Barthas' account (a French conscript, also on the social-democratic left if I recall correctly) is pretty popular. http://www.amazon.com/Poilu-Notebooks-Corporal-Barrelmaker-1914-1918/dp/0300212488

German perspective

Infantry Attacks by Erwin Rommel
link
The best personal account of the war I have read. Not as well-written as Junger's book (that is also very good btw) but good for the many detailed descriptions, including sketches he made right after the events, of tactical battles he was in. Not so much about troops freezing in trenches and having no food, although there is some about that, but a lot of insight in how a small-unit officer had to act in combat and how much more was going on in battles than the stereotypical massed assaults.

Conduct of the War

Command or Control? Training and Tactics in the British and German Armies 1888-1918 by Martin Samuels (1996)
link
Very detailed analysis with good examples highlighting differences in doctrine and training before and during the war. A bit heavy, but it explains many things, and good analysis of what happened in a few battles and why.

Stormtroop Tactics - Innovation in the German Army 1914-1918 by Bruce I Gudmundsson (1995)
link
Not only about the stormtroopers, but also German (infantry) tactics in general and how they evolved. It starts out with a description of a German attack in 1940, and then goes back to 1914 to explain in detail how the tactics used in 1940 evolved.

Dynamics of Doctrine, by Timothy T Lupfer
link
This is also a description of how German stormtroop tactics evolved, but much shorter. It is worth to mention because it is available as a free PDF, and good enough that you will find it quoted in books now and then. I prefer the Gudmundsson book, but this isn't a bad (free) introduction to the topic as I remember it (was several years since I read it).

Specific Battles

Loos 1915 by Nick Lloyd (2008)
link
Very good and detailed description of the battle. Of all the books on typical BEF trench battles I read this is the one I liked the best.

Operation Albion: The German Conquest of the Baltic Islands by Michael B. Barrett (2008)
link
Amazing operation. One of the biggest, if not the biggest, amphibious assaults in the war, and it is barely ever mentioned (I had never heard about it to be honest before someone on a forum mentioned this book). It is not only the details about the many battles on land and at sea that took place, but the book also has a lot of the tragedy of the disintegrating Russian units. Much of the book is based on researching previously closed Russian/Soviet archives and I hope we will see more fascinating books on things that happened on the eastern front we never heard about.

I can recommend two. 1) politics https://www.amazon.com/Sleepwalkers-How-Europe-Went-1914/dp/0061146668. Military https://www.amazon.com/First-World-War-John-Keegan/dp/0375700455.

A Solidier of the Great War, by Mark Helprin.

[Link] (http://www.amazon.com/Soldier-Great-War-Mark-Helprin/dp/0156031132)

The hopelessness and the inevitability leading up to it fascinate me. I find WWI (more so than any other) to be a pointless, depressing affair; it is like watching a train wreck in slow motion, with a 2 mile lead up. If you are interested in the causes, Robert Massie's book Dreadnought is a phenomenal read, and its followup Castles of Steel regarding the navel battle is equally interesting.

If you are interested in German Artillery in World War 1 there is also "Steel Wind: Colonel Georg Bruchmuller and the Birth of Modern Artillery" by David T. Zabecki Ph.D.
https://www.amazon.ca/Steel-Wind-Colonel-Bruchmuller-Artillery/dp/0275947505/ref=sr_1_9?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1550504706&sr=1-9&keywords=Zabecki

Peter Hart - The Great War

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0190227354

Peter Hart has a lot of books discussing WWI from big overviews to much more detailed coverage of different theaters of the war.

https://www.amazon.com/kindle-dbs/author/ref=mw_dp_a_ap?_encoding=UTF8&author=Peter%20Hart&searchAlias=books&asin=B001H9PVQ6

Martin Gilbert - The First World War

https://www.amazon.com/First-World-War-Complete-History/dp/0805076174

This is one of my favorite books on the subject of the war as a whole.

These two authors are two of the most referenced in The Great War YouTube channel, but there is so much more information in the books.