A higher form of killing Six weeks in World War I that forever changed the nature of warfare

Diana Preston, 1952-

Book - 2015

"In six weeks during April and May 1915, as World War I escalated, Germany forever altered the way war would be fought with poison gas, torpedoes killing civilians, and aerial bombardment. Each of these actions violated rules of war carefully agreed at the Hague Conventions of 1898 and 1907. The era of weapons of mass destruction had dawned. While each of these momentous events has been chronicled in histories of the war, historian Diana Preston links them for the first time, revealing the dramatic stories behind each through the eyes of those who were there, whether making the decisions or experiencing their effect." --

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Subjects
Published
New York, NY : Bloomsbury Press 2015.
Language
English
Main Author
Diana Preston, 1952- (-)
Physical Description
340 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, maps, portraits ; 25 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 291-324) and index.
ISBN
9781620402122
9781620402146
  • Spring 1915 : the legacy
  • "A flash of lightning from the north"
  • "Humanising war"
  • "The law of facts"
  • "A scrap of paper"
  • "The worst of contrabands"
  • "England will burn"
  • "A most effective weapon"
  • "Something that makes people permanently incapable of fighting"
  • "Operation Disinfection"
  • "This filthy loathsome pestilence"
  • "Solomon's Temple"
  • "They got us this time, all right"
  • "Wilful and wholesale murder"
  • "Too proud to fight"
  • "The very earth shook"
  • "Order, counter-order, disorder!"
  • "A gift of love"
  • "Do you know anything about gas?"
  • "Zepp and a portion of clouds"
  • "Remember the Lusitania"
  • "Each one must fight on to the end"
  • "Weapons of mass destruction"
  • Appendix. The Lusitania controversies.
Review by New York Times Review

ORSON WELLES'S LAST MOVIE: The Making of "The Other Side of the Wind," by Josh Karp. (St. Martin's Griffin, $16.99.) After years of self-imposed exile, Welles returned to the United States hoping to complete his grandest film yet: a tale of an aging movie director who kills himself on the anniversary of Ernest Hemingway's suicide. (Welles maintained it was not autobiographical.) The unfinished film remains largely unseen, and Karp delves into the various factors that blocked the project's completion, including the Iranian revolution and Liechtenstein-based companies. THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN, by Paula Hawkins. (Riverhead, $16.) Rachel, the divorced, unemployed, alcoholic and unstable heroine of this novel, has developed a fixation on a couple whose house she passes every day during her train ride into town. But when the woman goes missing, Rachel involves herself in the investigation, and turns out to have surprising connections to the crime. GOD AND JETFIRE: Confessions of a Birth Mother, by Amy Seek. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $15.) After an unplanned pregnancy, Seek chose to give her baby up for adoption. As part of her arrangement, Seek and the adoptive parents maintained a relationship throughout the child's life. The author reflects in this memoir on the excruciating grief of parting with a child and surrendering her role as a mother. THE ILLUMINATIONS, by Andrew O'Hagan. (Picador, $17.) The stories of Anne, an aging and once-renowned photographer, and her grandson, Luke, who traveled on an Afghan humanitarian mission, make up this novel. After Luke returns home to the United Kingdom, struggling to recover from his time overseas, spending time with his grandmother and uncovering a cache of her memories gives him comfort. "The Illuminations" is "both a howl against the war in Afghanistan and the societies that have blindly abetted it," Dani Shapiro said here. THE MAKING OF ASIAN AMERICA: A History, by Erika Lee. (Simon & Schuster, $18.) An impressive survey of life in the United States for Asians who sought to make their homes here. Lee's account spans some of the most ignominious episodes in the country's past, including legislation that barred Asian immigrants from entry, and shows how Asian-Americans, now the fastest-growing group in the United States, have shaped America. EILEEN, by Ottessa Moshfegh. (Penguin, $16.) In 1960s New England, Eileen plots an escape from a world largely dictated by men around her. Moshfegh skillfully explores "a woman's relationship to her body: the disconnection, the cultural claims, the male prerogative," our reviewer, Lily King, said. A HIGHER FORM OF KILLING: Six Weeks in World War I That Forever Changed the Nature of Warfare, by Diana Preston. (Bloomsbury, $18.) Preston traces the rise of a new class of weapons to this period in 1915, when the Germans launched a merciless assault on the Allies, gassing the Canadians and French, sinking the Lusitania, and bombing London.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 11, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review

Preston (Lusitania: An Epic Tragedy, 2002) here returns to 1915 to examine more broadly three key moments occurring within a six-week period in which new technologies and a new willingness to flaunt laws on the conduct of warfare dramatically added to the Great War's many horrors. The torpedoing of the Lusitania luxury liner by a German diesel-powered submarine was one such moment, marking the beginning of a new era of unrestricted attacks on civilian vessels. Another was the firebombing of London by German zeppelins, which caused fewer casualties than the war's other, muddier battles but which, Preston reminds us, brought new carnage and terror to civilians as well as combatants. But the most gruesome change to the conduct of war, also introduced in the spring of 1915, was the use of poison gas, at first by the Germans but eventually by both sides of the conflict. Vividly narrating the deployment of each of these new technologies, Preston emphasizes the horrors they delivered and the ethical deliberations (or absence thereof) of key decision makers. Viewed together, Preston suggests, these three new ways of killing demonstrated the shortcomings of the laws of war and set the trajectory for even more powerful weapons of mass destruction.--Driscoll, Brendan Copyright 2015 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Historian Preston (Before the Fallout) places the creation of poison gas, the torpedo, and the zeppelin into the context of warfare and the human toll exacted in a well-detailed, shattering survey timed to mark the 100th anniversary of the weapons' use in WWI. She explains the scorched-earth policy of Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm II, which mandated a complete triumph for the Fatherland at all cost during the infamous six-week period in 1915 where this trio of deadly weapons was introduced to untold suffering for soldiers and civilians alike. Conventional war, as Preston writes, entered a new phase of killing when poison gas was dropped on unsuspecting French and Canadian soldiers in the trenches at Ypres, Belgium, on April 22; when a German submarine torpedoed the Lusitania on May 20; and when a German zeppelin bombed London on May 31. Confidential talks, last-minute compromises, and bogus assurances comprise the dark heart of this dramatic account as the merchants of conflict seek to heighten mass panic, terror, and death regardless of traditional military rules. This is Preston at the top of her analytical form, offering fascinating modern parables on war, mortality and civilization. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.


Review by Library Journal Review

Historian Preston (Before the Fallout: From Marie Curie to Hiroshima) presents a fascinating and chilling chronicle of weapons of mass destruction. The author begins with a brief summary of three groundbreaking events, including the torpedoing of the passenger liner Lusitania by a German submarine and the aerial bombing of London by German Zeppelins, both in 1914, the initial year of the World War I. These events violated peacetime rules established at the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 and drastically changed the nature of warfare. The author then provides a concise yet comprehensive overview of rivalry that frames the context for these events. The bulk of the narrative consists of detailed, often firsthand accounts of each of these brutal attacks. This work will appeal to history buffs of all backgrounds who are intrigued by the physical and psychological damage inflicted by weapons of mass destruction. VERDICT Readers on the edge of their seats throughout Jared M. Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies will find Preston's eloquent and objective history of war immensely exciting.-Marian Mays, Butte-Silver Bow P.L., MT (c) Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A British historian of considerable breadth and accomplishment, Preston (The Dark Defile: Britain's Catastrophic Invasion of Afghanistan, 1838-1842, 2012, etc.) focuses on three wartime innovations that elevated to new heights mankind's ability to slaughter itself: submarines, zeppelins and poison gas.All were advanced to marvelous efficacy during the first weeks of World War I, thanks largely to the technologically savvy Germans, who shook off the world's condemnation of their first use of asphyxiating gas to spur the trench stalemate in Belgium, with the justification that the other side would promptly use it, tooand they were right. The first Geneva Convention in 1864 drew up agreed-upon protocols for treating the sick and wounded in war and created the Red Cross. The Hague Peace Conference of 1899, in the cause of "humanizing war," considered banning certain weapons, such as asphyxiating gases and projectiles and explosives launched from the air. To little avail: Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin had secured German financing for his dirigible prototype by 1900; the first U-boat had arrived at the Krupp's plant in 1906 and was pushed into production because of British advances in submarines; and chemist Fritz Haber, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, arrived at the solution to blow chlorine gas over enemy trenches. (Not to be forgotten is Alfred Nobel's development of dynamite and smokeless powder.) All available methods would be enlisted to help Germany embark on a swift and lethal thrust in the spring of 1915, dropping bombs by zeppelin over London, torpedoing the Lusitania and killing 1,198 people, and gassing troops of young men who had no idea how to manage a chemical attack. In what is often difficult but necessary reading, Preston provides haunting descriptions of the effects of poison gas. A harrowingand, in this era of drones, absolutely pertinentlook at the rapacious reaches of man's murderous imagination. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.