[E-book ENG - epub-mobi-pdf] - John Mosier - Verdun

Verdun. The Lost History of the Most Important Battle of World War I, 1914-1918 - John Mosier

Publication Year: 2013

Language: English



Alongside Waterloo and Gettysburg, the Battle of Verdun during the First World War stands as one of history's greatest clashes. Yet it is also one of the most complex and misunderstood, in a war only imperfectly grasped.
Conventional wisdom holds that the battle began in February 1916 and lasted until December, when the victorious French wrested all the territory they had lost back from the Germans. In fact, says historian John Mosier, from the very beginning of the war until the armistice in 1918, no fewer than eight distinct battles were waged for the possession of Verdun. These conflicts are largely unknown, even in France, owing to the obsessive secrecy of the French high command and its energetic propaganda campaign to fool the world into thinking that the war on the Western Front was a steady series of German checks and defeats.
Although British historians have always seen Verdun as a one-year battle designed by the German chief of staff to bleed France...

The author

John Mosier is an American academic known for his work in English, film, and history. Mosier is currently a professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans.
Mosier is probably best known for his revisionist military history books. These books The Myth of the Great War: A New Military History of World War I and The Blitzkrieg Myth: How Hitler and the Allies Misread the Strategic Realities of World War II. In each of these books, Mosier challenges the current views held in regard to these conflicts. In The Myth of the Great War, Mosier argues that Germany was winning World War I, and only the arrival of the United States spared the Allies from military defeat and a negotiated peace with the Germans. The book was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. In The Blitzkrieg Myth, Mosier argues that the supposedly revolutionary concept of blitzkrieg has been overrated and that most of the victories on both sides were the result of conventional military tactics. Both of these books and their theses remain controversial. In his 2010 book 'Deathride: Hitler vs. Stalin - The Eastern Front, 1941-1945, he posits that the Germans would surely have defeated the Soviets if not for the Allies, and that one of the Russians' problems is that they were "pathological liars".
He also published a military biography of Ulysses S. Grant. The book was revisionist in method; however, his thesis focused on the more traditional view that Grant was a genius. This deviates from Mosier's previous revisionist tendencies.
In addition to his books on military history, Mosier is a former film critic and serves on Cannes Film Festival committees. He also works as writer and editor for publications such as the journal of the Organization of American States.