Mastering the Industrial Battlefield : Military Transformation on the Western Front, 1914-18

Historians - if not the wider public - have long recognised that warfare on the western front underwent constant evolution and transformation between 1914 and 1918.

Historians studying the British army christened this process the 'learning curve', using it as shorthand to describe how the disastrous tactics of 1916 morphed into the successful campaigns of late 1918.

Yet, as this collection of essays makes clear, the learning curve thesis is too amorphous a concept, and too Anglo-centric a debate, to do full justice to the fundamental rethinking of warfare which occurred between 1914 and 1918.

In order to broaden and deepen our understanding of the nature and processes of military change on the Western Front, this collection of essays engages with the latest research on the three principal belligerent armies.

Taking an international approach allows the volume to demonstrate that learning was not a purely British phenomenon; that the German army were not the only innovators; and - arguably - it was French generals who brought about the real transformation of warfare in these years.

Instead, a more complex picture is presented to explain the dynamic of the Western Front, the cycle of innovation and counter-innovation, and the relative input of British, French and German armies to the profound changes in warfare between 1914 and 1918.

Only through such an international approach can earlier interpretations be challenged, and new explanations be put forward, arguing that the apparently static Western Front was actually one of the most innovatory military environments in history.