History of the Great War
The History of the Great War is a series of 109 volumes, covering the war effort of the British state during the First World War. The full title is the History of the Great War Based on Official Documents by Direction of the Committee of Imperial Defence but the series is usually referred to as the British Official History. It was produced by the Historical Section of the Committee of Imperial Defence under the control of the Official Historian Brigadier-General Sir James Edmonds for the army volumes and other historians for the navy, air force, medical and veterinary volumes.Work began on the series in 1915 and in 1920, the first volumes of Naval Operations and Seaborne Trade were published. The first ""army"" publication, Military Operations: France and Belgium 1914 volume I and a separate map volume were published in 1922 and the final volume, The Occupation of Constantinople was published in 2010. In the 1987 introduction to Operations in Persia 1914–1919, G. M. Bayliss wrote that the guides issued by Her Majesty's Stationery Office (HMSO) were incomplete. ""Sectional List number 60"" of 1976 omitted the Gallipoli volumes but contained The Blockade of the Central Empires (1937), which had been retained ""for official use only"" until 1961. The twelve volume History of the Ministry of Munitions and neither the Occupation of the Rhineland (1929) or Operations in Persia 1914–1919 (1929) were listed.The History of the Great War Military Operations volumes, were written as a technical history for military staff, rather than as a popular history for consumption by the general public. John Keegan, criticised the prose for being dry and featureless, ""the compilers... have achieved the remarkable feat of writing an exhaustive account of one of the world's greatest tragedies without the display of any emotion at all."". In 1996, Paddy Griffith called it an encyclopaedic work, transparently individualistic in tone, lucidly organised, wide in scope and by far the best book on the Western Front.