Reddit reviews Storm of Steel (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

Erwin Rommel (of WWII fame) served from the start. He has a memoir of his experience that, even while probably self-inflated, shows just how skilled he was as a tactician.

Edit: Crap, I forgot the even crazier one, Storm of Steel. This guy served almost the entire war on the western front, finally getting wounded (not for the first time) in August, 1918, 1.5 months before the war's end. No idea how he made it out, if his stories are even half true.

And then read Storm of Steel by Jünger.

From the top-rated review at amazon:

"Storm" has been continually denounced for the last 80-odd years as rightist propaganda precisely because it does NOT come to the conclusion of Remarque, Hemingway, P.J. Caputo or any of the other combat literati who escaped their own slaughterous wartime experiences to write antiwar novels. It says -- if I may presume to paraphrase Juenger -- that war destroys civilian hypocrisy and, if it makes a man's boot come down grimly and harshly, at least makes it come down clean. Juenger's unforgivable sin was, apparently, to conclude that it "was a good and strenuous life, and that war, for all its destructiveness, was an incomparable schooling of the heart."

Michael Shaara wrote historical fiction, yes? Well there are a ton of great books and documentaries with a more "narrative" perspective to help you get started with WWI.

• The Great War from the BBC, filmed and broadcast in the 1960s. It's very old school but still, in my opinion, unsurpassed in its breadth and detail (though it is, of course, somewhat more focused on the British experience). If you google it you should be able to find some options for purchase.
  
  
• They Shall Not Grow Old is a brilliant little documentary just put out by Peter Jackson (of Lord of the Rings fame). You can find the trailer here and I believe there are some streaming options if you live in the US.
  
  
• The Great War youtube series is also great and geared more towards digesting the war in small bites. Very well produced and sourced videos. The best part is, they have a very global perspective. Go to their Youtube homepage and just click around until you find a video you like. You can also try and watch them in release order (they covered the war "as it happened" a hundred years later).
  
  
• Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger is, I think, the best book for getting the soldier's perspective on life during the war, and on combat. He was a highly decorated German infantry officer who, to be frank, really enjoyed his experience of war, or at least considered it to be a positive, life-changing experience. If you can read German I'd suggest the original, but you can also grab the Penguin Classics edition or see if they have it at your library. Henri Barbusse wrote a similar book, Le Feu, that was written from the French perspective and much more critical of war/combat than Jünger.
  
  
• I really want to recommend Egon Erwin Kisch's Schreib das auf, Kisch! which is the published (and lightly edited) version of his war diary from 1914 to 1915. Unfortunately, I've only ever been able to find it in German (or Czech), but I figured I'd post it here in case OP reads German or in case anyone reading this thread later does. It's a beautiful portrayal of the war from the Austrian perspective, and takes the reader to the Serbian and Galician fronts, which some readers may not be familiar with. Someone desperately needs to translate this to English.
  
  
• Oh yeah, getting back to documentaries for a second, I forgot about The First World War (2003). It's a ten-parter from the BBC and it's based on the companion book by esteemed historian Hew Strachan. I'd recommend both.
  
  Ok these next two are a bit out there, but I'm trying to answer within OP's question, so mods, don't send me over the top!
  
  
• Since you mentioned Shaara, I can recommend Fall of Giants by Ken Follett, which is a historical novel set just before and during World War I. It follows several families from Germany, Wales, Russia and America, and their intertwined stories during the Great War. There are two sequels, which follow the same families and characters through 1) the interwar period and WWII and 2) the Cold War. They are fiction but they do a serviceable job at communicating the texture of the era and they may introduce you to some interesting people/places/things that you haven't heard about before.
  
  
• Finally, if you like video games, I think Battlefield 1 is a good way to passively learn some WWI history as you play. You won't learn much just playing online, but the Operations game mode does an interesting job of having players play along some famous WWI campaigns, all while explaining in broad terms the operational and strategic implications of the battles. I don't suggest that people learn their history, per se, playing BF1, but the game very much succeeds at highlighting theaters and battles that are not first in the public's imagination regarding WWI. So at the very least, you may have your interest piqued, say, regarding Monte Grappa and the Piave Front.
  
  These books/docs do not by any means stand in for sitting down with a good book on WWI (which we can also recommend), but they should hopefully present reliable information in a more narrative and gripping fashion. These are the works I recommend to people when they say "I know nothing about World War I, where should I start?" These are interest-piquers, so whenever you're confused by something write it down and start your research.
  
  Again, I wasn't sure how to answer this question within AH's guidelines, since this isn't exactly a history question per se. Let me know if I need to edit anything.

Their tactics were better than decent. The Germans, Brits and French all developed effective tactics for seizing enemy trenches pretty quickly. That wasn't the problem. The problem is, how do you seize the first enemy line of trenches and hold it while you're under artillery fire and enemy infantry counter attack? You don't have effective radios and artillery is constantly cutting the phone lines you are able to lay. Signaling is difficult because of terrain, weather conditions, smoke created by fires and the fact that if you're visible enough to be seen by your support then you're also probably visible enough to be seen by the enemy. Even if the enemy doesn't counterattack immediately (which they would), how do you get to the second line of trenches under said conditions? How do you coordinate supporting fires and reinforcements when there is quite literally a wall of flying steel (barrage means wall/barricade in French, which is where the term comes from) between you and your start point?

The main issue was that the offensive technologies (communications, motorized vehicles, light supporting weapons, aerial weapons) hadn't caught up to the defense technologies (barbed wire, concrete pillboxes, heavy machine guns, massed artillery, rail-borne reinforcements). Even if you successfully seized line after line of trench, the enemy could always dig in behind their last line and pour in reinforcements via rail faster than you could break through. With all that said, strategically the allies were idiotic. Continuing to attack fortified German positions again and again and again with very little to show for it is just bad strategic judgement.

I've posted these links before, but if you'd like to educate yourself on WW1 infantry tactics/battle:

Stormtrooper Tactics

Infantry in Battle

To Conquer Hell

Infantry Attacks

Storm of Steel

PS. I know you can find the second one for free on the internet.

Storm Of Steel by Ernst Junger is a memoir of a German Officer during WW1. It is overwhelming in it's bleakness and death.

All lives lost are irreplaceable.

As for whether WWI was the most dysgenic of modern wars, the answer is probably yes, all told.

When you look at the death toll adjusted for then-current world population, WWI doesn't look that devastating; even Mao's Great Leap Forward was worse, and that wasn't even a war (well, maybe a war against nature). But sometimes it's not about who dies, and still less often about how many die, it's about what dies.

Even if it is about who dies, the fact is that the cream of European society died during that war, and more so than most subsequent wars. By the cream of society, I don't necessarily mean the aristocracy which, as the war went on, revealed itself to be pretty degenerate (see Tsar Nicholas, Kaiser Wilhelm, etc). No, by the cream of society, I mean young men who had the physical fortitude that characterizes eugenia, as well as the virtuous character to stand up for their country. After WWI the type of people who would volunteer for wars were of an entirely different order--people were more likely to avoid service if they could after seeing the ghoulish levels of violence in WWI, and so it was a "take what you can get" scenario, often the dregs of society was all you could get, and it's gotten worse since then. It's unlikely that you'd find a soldier outside of WWI who was classically educated. Also, since WWI was the first war involving heavy, automated artillery, gas, and a number of other technological achievements, it was the most brave who couldn't wait to jump in, who died in the human meat grinder at the beginning of the war. After that time, generals became a lot more wary.

But it's not primarily about who died, it's about what died. And what died--seemingly forever--was the European culture of honour; this is WWI's most dysgenic effect, the worst of any conflict in human history. By the end of 1914, and probably even by the end of the first battle of the Marne, gone were the days of standing up in a doomed and heroic charge. Definitely by the end of 1915, gone were the days of dying for country, crushed by the tragicomedy of senseless horror, and giving way to the mere (though understandable) wish that the conflict would somehow come to an end, even if it meant the likewise end of one's civilization. Gone were those like Ernst Junger--or at least gone they were within a generation--who believed that war had an invigorating and healthy effect on mankind, and was thereby justified.

It seems doubtful that, having died, this classically influenced honour culture will ever return. Not without some serious pain, at any rate.

> So, the very fact that America became the dominant western country was a dysgenic thing.

I'm not sure America becoming the dominant culture was itself dysgenic. Europe at the time was more effete than America, and realistically still is. If we want to define eugenic solely in terms of intelligence, then perhaps yes this was dysgenic, but if you take the top 10 European scientists from 1914 and put them on an island with just enough to survive, they would undoubtedly perish in a month. Put pretty much any family of 10 from West Virginia on that same island, and I know who I'll put my money on. Eugenia is determined solely in terms of survival, and it's not clear that technocracy is very survivable.

Ernst Juenger's "Storm of Steel". It is his experience as a German soldier in combat for most of the war, very different from "All Quiet on the Western Front".

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

1. Storm of Steel - Ernst Junger
   
2. 9/10
   
3. Memoir, German, World War One
   
4. A terse, brutal account of trench warfare as told from a German soldier, but could have been written about any war from any side.
   
5. Amazon

Great book
https://www.amazon.com/Storm-Steel-Penguin-Classics-Deluxe/dp/0142437905

Check out Storm of Steel if you wanna read the memoir of a WWI German soldier who's not exactly apologetic for fighting in the war, just very straightforward about what happened. It's pretty insane to realize just how much bombardment the average front-liner went though for such extended periods of time.

Storm of Steel my Ernst Junger. This freakin' guy LOVED war. You could consider this the antithesis of All Quiet on the Western Front. It glorifies war. "According to Jünger, war elevates the soldier's life, isolated from normal humanity, into a mystical experience"

Graves gives a good account of a personal experience of the the war from a British subaltern's point of view. Others giving the bottom up look are from the French soldier's perspective in the trenches 1915-1916 Under Fire: The Story of a Squad by Henri Barbusse free here, another from a German perspective Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger. More graphically violent than All Quiet, but more a memoir than a novel. And unlike Remarque, Jünger was a combat soldier wounded 14 times, Iron Cross 1st Class, youngest recipient of Pour le Mérite (The Blue Max) and when he died in 1998, he was last living Blue Max recipient. From the American Doughboy's perspective, there's Toward the Flame a memoir by Hervey Allen who served in the "bucket of blood" the 28th Keystone Div in the Aisne - Marne offensive and leaves you contemplating being on the receiving end of a flamethrower attack. A harrowing compilation of vignettes running chronologically through each month of the war on the Western Front is The Hazy Red Hell Tom Donovan ed. It has been described as terrifying. I'll not dispute that. A more balanced view of the experiences of the fighting men is Forgotten Voices of the Great War: A New History of WWI in the Words of the Men and Women Who Were There I'm reading that right now.

I would recommend Storm of steel for anyone who is interested in a German take on the experience. Remarque is not a bad writer and i do thoroughly enjoy All quiet. But he was on the western front for around a month before being wounded. Most of the things that occur in all quiet were collected from soldiers that Remarque met. Ernst Juenger's Storm of steel is, while perhaps not as linguistically beautiful, a true tour d'force of WWI. Juenger signed up in 1914 and fought on the front line until being wounded in the Kaiserschlacht in the middle of 1918. Unlike Remarque, Juenger does not try to make some emotional stance on whether war is good or not. He simply tells the story that he endured. If you want a good fictional novel then by all means read All quiet on the western front. But if you want a gritty factual story read Storm of steel.

If i could make make a comment on the Ernst Juenger in Storm of steel and Paul Bauemer in All quiet. I would say that Juenger was a warrior and Bauemer was a victim.

Storm of Steel
https://www.amazon.com/Storm-Steel-Penguin-Classics-Deluxe/dp/0142437905/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1499912314&sr=8-1&keywords=storm+of+steel

I highly recommend Storm of Steel by Ernst Junger. It’s a very non-political look at WWI from a German soldier’s perspective. It gave me a whole new appreciation for the war.

One you should definitely consider is Irene Némirovsky's Suite Francaise, about the German invasion of France, and told from the viewpoint of several displaced French citizens. Némirovsky herself died in Auschwitz in 1942 (little more than a year after the events portrayed in her master work!) and the book lay undiscovered until her daughter found it in the late 1990s. It's only been available in English for a little over three years, but it's already been hailed as a classic of the 20th century. It's also bound to be somewhat distinct from the other books likely to be chosen for a class like this because a) it's very much about the disruption of "normal" life rather than the immersion into war, and b) it's one of the few books that I can think of that deal with way not so much from the viewpoint of a woman (several of the main characters are men), but rather from the pen of a woman.

I'd also recommend Ernst Junger's Storm of Steel, a classic autobiographical depiction of WWI from the German side by a brilliant author who has tended to get short shrift in favor of (also brilliant) figures like Remarque. Steel is notable in part because Junger's use of language emulates the uncertainty of war -- it's percussive, assaulting, and unpredictable. Even in translation that comes through. It is, in effect, a view into the German side of the literary revolution that took place when soldiers in the war returned home and began writing about their experiences, and changing the accepted literary tropes in order to encompass the chasm that stood between their perceptions and those of the news-reading public.

If your friend can find enough copies of it, I'd also recommend Junger's On the Marble Cliffs, a kind of grim fantasia that seems to have predicted the Nazi rise to power and the fascistic impulse of the late 30s and 40s. It's eerie, beautiful and startling, but unfortunately it seems to have been out of print for some times now.

A lot of people have suggested science fiction books, and I think a lot of students would see a quick sci-fi read a nice reprieve from all of the historical material, but I'm surprised that no one has yet suggested Ender's Game, which better than just about any book I've seen makes a parable of the blindness war induces with respect to the consequences of our actions.

Also read Storm of Steel by Ernst Junger.

http://www.amazon.com/Storm-Steel-Penguin-Classics-Deluxe/dp/0142437905

Check out 'Storm of Steel' by Junger:

http://www.amazon.com/Storm-Steel-Penguin-Classics-J%C3%BCnger/dp/0142437905/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1312171499&sr=8-1

Required reading, Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger.

The churned-up field was gruesome. In among the living defenders lay the dead. When we dug foxholes,we realized that they were stacked in layers. One company after another, pressed together in the drumfire, had been mown down, then the bodies had been buried under showers of dirt sent up by the shells, and then the relief company had taken their predecessor’s place. And now it was our turn.

It's normally translated as 'Storm of Steel' in English:

http://www.amazon.com/Storm-Steel-Penguin-Classics-J%C3%BCnger/dp/0142437905/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1382866437&sr=8-1&keywords=storm+of+steel

Here's an amazon links for everything I can think of:

[The Burning of the World by Bela Zombory-Moldovan] (https://www.amazon.com/Burning-World-Memoir-Review-Classics/dp/1590178092)

[Poilu by Louis Barthas] (https://www.amazon.com/Poilu-Notebooks-Corporal-Barrelmaker-1914-1918/dp/0300191596/ref=pd_sim_b_22?ie=UTF8&refRID=08182FWK7NN6N9QSEAF7)

[Infantry Attacks by Erwin Rommel] (https://www.amazon.com/Infantry-Attacks-Marshall-Erwin-Rommel/dp/1607963353)

[Outside Verdun by Arnold Zweig] (https://www.amazon.com/Outside-Verdun-Arnold-Zweig/dp/1908754524)

[Storm of Steel by Ernst Juenger] (https://www.amazon.com/Storm-Steel-Penguin-Classics-Deluxe/dp/0142437905)

[Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves] (https://www.amazon.com/Good-Bye-That-Autobiography-Robert-Graves/dp/0385093306)

Please read [Storms of steel] (http://www.amazon.com/Storm-Steel-Penguin-Classics-Deluxe/dp/0142437905) I think you will have a second opinion regarding the pace of fighting.