The Century of Warfare: Worldwide Conflict from 1900 to the Present Day - Hardcover

Messenger, Charles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0002555468 ISBN 13: 9780002555463

Publisher: Harpercollins, 1995

Synopsis

Looks at the history of twentieth-century warfare from the Boer War to the civil war in Bosnia

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

Based on a 26-part BBC-TV series, Messenger's book is a broad overview of history's bloodiest century, from the Boer War to the 1994 massacres in Rwanda. Lavishly illustrated, the book covers world wars, wars of national liberation, civil wars, guerrilla wars and the rise of terrorism. Messenger describes the emergence of the submarine, the tank and the military airplane and observes ironically that many of today's conflicts are being fought with weapons technology not very different from that of 1900. The view is by no means restricted to battlefield confrontations. For instance, he discusses the effect on French army morale of the collapse of the medical system and shows how the Second Balkan War of 1913 foreshadowed ethnic rivalries that plague the region to this day. This satisfying account blends perceptive analysis with dramatic narrative. Messenger is a professional military historian and defense analyst and a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Britain. Illustrations.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist:

Messenger, another of those ubiquitous and invaluable British army officers who retire to distinction as military historians, proffers this companion to a BBC TV series that stands well enough on its own. Its facts are mostly familiar (its photographs break rather more new ground), World War I is scanted a trifle, and the World War II coverage is definitely a bit Anglocentric. Having the whole, gruesome picture of twentieth-century war laid out in one volume, however, makes it much easier to see, for example, how the ethnic broils in the Balkans that led directly to World War I proceeded in behavior during World War II that reinforced their intensity and eventuated in the present Four-Horsemen-of-the-Apocalypse-like trampling of the corpse of what was once Yugoslavia. Roland Green

About this edition

• Publisher: Harpercollins
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0002555468
• ISBN 13: 9780002555463
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 429