Great War Commanders

Great War Commanders brings together Gordon Corrigan’s studies of three soldiers whose First World War experiences shaped very different military reputations. Douglas Haig commanded the British Expeditionary Force through the battles of attrition and the final campaigns of 1918; John J. Pershing built and led the American Expeditionary Forces; and the young Erwin Rommel fought as a junior German officer in France, Romania and Italy.

Corrigan separates later legend from wartime record, looking at training, personality, doctrine and the institutional problems each man faced. The result is less a conventional collective biography than a study of leadership at three levels of command, showing how the war tested senior strategy, the creation of a mass army and tactical initiative on battlefields that changed rapidly between 1914 and 1918.