The Greatest Day in History: How, on the Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month, the First World War Finally Came to an End - Hardcover

Best, Nicholas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1586486403 ISBN 13: 9781586486402

Publisher: PublicAffairs, 2008

Synopsis

World War I did not end neatly with the Germans' surrender. After a dramatic week of negotiations, military offensives, and the beginning of a Communist revolution, the German Imperial regime collapsed. The Allies eventually granted an armistice to a new German government, and at 11:00 on November 11, the guns officially ceased fire but only after 11,000 more casualties had been sustained. The London Daily Express proclaimed it the greatest day in history.”

Nicholas Best tells the story in sweeping, cinematic style, following a set of key participants through the twists and turns of these climactic events, and sharing the impressions of eyewitnesses including Adolf Hitler, Charles de Gaulle, Harry S. Truman, Anthony Eden, and future famous generals MacArthur, Patton, and Montgomery.

About this title

About the Author:

Nicholas Best grew up in Kenya and was educated there, in England, and at Trinity College, Dublin. He served in the Grenadier Guards and worked in London as a journalist before becoming a fulltime author. His many other books include Happy Valley: The Story of the English in Kenya, Tennis and the Masai, and the widely praised Trafalgar. Best was the Financial Times's fiction critic for ten years. He lives in Cambridge, England.

From Publishers Weekly:

Historian and novelist Best, former fiction critic for the Financial Times, offers a sophisticated presentation of the effects of the Great War's final week on its military and civilian participants. Day by day, he presents firsthand accounts from a spectrum of familiar and unfamiliar sources. On November 5, 1918, Scots Guards Pvt. Stephen Graham took part in an attack with an elite British division, while American artillery Capt. Harry Truman picked flowers to send his fiancée and contemplated running for Congress when—and if—he got home. On November 8, Evelyn Blücher, an Englishwoman married to a German prince, feared an outbreak of riots or revolution in Germany. And on November 11, Armistice Day, a crowd of Australians celebrated by storming Boulogne's red light district to the battle cry of let's fuck 'em free! What might have been merely a kaleidoscopic series of vignettes is given shape and focus by Best's skill at paraphrasing the narratives and synergizing the experiences of those who lived through the greatest day in history, knowing they had survived the deadliest war up to then—and suddenly asking, What happens now? 16 pages of b&w photos. (Nov.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: PublicAffairs
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1586486403
• ISBN 13: 9781586486402
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320