Fighting the Great War: A Global History (review)

This is a general history of World War I by Michael Neiberg, a professor of history at the University of Southern Mississippi. Although there is no foreword to explain the book's objectives or identify its target audience, it is clearly intended to be an overview by a nonspecialist for a nonspecialist audience. To cover this material in less than 400 pages is a daunting task, but the author largely succeeds. However, despite its subtitle ("A Global History"), the book is largely Eurocentric, focusing mainly on the fronts in France and Belgium, and adequately delineating the war in Eastern Europe, but providing only glancing coverage of the war in the Middle East, Africa, and on the seas. References are adequate, but mainly from English language secondary sources. Less adequate are the maps, which are too few and not detailed enough to provide much insight into the accompanying text. Reproduction of the illustrations is generally poor—most are dark and grainy, and only a few really illuminate the text. Similarly, a "Timeline of Major Events" is too brief and a list of "Important People" too rudimentary (e.g., Plumer, Herbert: British general) to be of much help to the casual reader.

Neiberg's text, however, is much stronger than the supporting materials, and he provides a well-rounded overview of the war in its larger compass. It is clearly not intended to extend beyond a succinct retelling of major events, and the author does not provide much of a wider or in-depth interpretation of the military events; he also does not enter into the many historical controversies that form the focus of much other recent work on World War I. He presents the facts and lets the reader draw his own conclusions (Haig was an uninspired general, but very few generals on either side rose much above a level of mediocrity). There are only a few factual inaccuracies (e.g., on page 175: "Baron von Richthofen [16 kills]"). The author does have a gift for telling anecdotes, which both provide insight and enliven the text. But overall he tells a familiar tale of monotonously regular tactical and strategic failure.

This is a useful general history for the general reader. Professor Neiberg's lively text would have been better served by more attention by his publisher to the supplementary materials.