49.8°N 3.3°E Western Front Hundred Days Offensive & Armistice
Briefing
From 8 August 1918 — Germany's 'black day' — the Allied armies, stiffened by fresh American divisions and massed tanks, broke the Hindenburg Line and drove the German army into open retreat. With his front collapsing and revolution at home, the Kaiser abdicated and Germany signed the Armistice that silenced the guns at the eleventh hour of 11 November 1918.
Books Covering This Event (3)
Popular History
A single-volume military history of the entire war by the most influential military historian of the 20th century.
An intimate history of the war told through the diaries and letters of twenty ordinary people on every front.
A history of the war in Britain told through both those who fought it and those who refused to.
The War in Books: The Hundred Days
The war’s most decisive campaign, and among the least remembered.
There is a strange gap in the memory of the First World War. The disasters of 1916 and 1917 are known to everyone, while the months in which the Allies actually won are known to few. From Amiens in August 1918, combined attacks by infantry, tanks, artillery and aircraft pushed the German army back along the Western Front in a sustained advance that would have been unimaginable a year earlier. It ended not with a final battle but with the Armistice, and that ending, which left the German army outside its own borders, fed the lie that it had never truly been beaten.
John Keegan’s The First World War gives the military story in clear outline. Peter Englund’s The Beauty and the Sorrow stays with ordinary people to the very end, as the fighting ground on towards a close that many could already see. Adam Hochschild’s To End All Wars takes a different view, following those in Britain who opposed the war as well as those who ran it, and it reads as a story of loss rather than triumph. Together these books show how a victory this complete could feel so little like one to the people who lived through it.