Features

Feature articles by our authors, including supplementary material for our books. As time allows, I intend to archive all of my weekly articles for Colonel Joe Robinson's excellent WW1 German history group in this section. There will also be occasional miscellaneous exclusive pieces here.

It will certainly take a while to convert the epic six-part series on my great-grandfather's war service into webpages, so for now you can read it at the following PUBLIC Facebook links (you DO NOT need a Facebook account to view these):

Here's the rest of the (growing) backlog:

Saxon Landsturm infantry battalions (complete series):

This is a snapshot of the final peacetime dispositions of the Kgl. Sächs. Armee which I drew up for Fighting the Kaiser's War.

A review of the latest German-language publication from the Arbeitskreis Sächsische Militärgeschichte e.V. Dresden. This is the vivid and frank diary of a staff officer serving with 53.RD / XXVII.RK at the 1st and 2nd Battles of Ypres.

My father Michael Lucas was the first published military historian in the family. His first book The Journey's End Battalion: The 9th East Surrey in the Great War - a through history of the 9th Battalion / East Surrey Regiment in WW1 - came out in 2012. Its title alludes to the most famous member of this unit, the playwright and screenwriter R.C. Sherriff - best-known as the author of Journey's End, widely acclaimed as the greatest theatrical work to emerge from the Great War. The play has been adapted for cinema several times, including in a German version (Die Andere Seite) prior to WW2, and an outstanding English remake earlier this year.

In this article my father revisits the book and supplies amendments and additions based on the additional information that has come to light since it was published.

These lectures were written by Andrew Lucas to accompany the launch of Fighting the Kaiser's War at the Memorial Museum Passchendaele 1917 on 25th-26th April 2015. Each lecture was intended to be delivered on the appropriate day as part of the living history display. Unfortunately due to scheduling problems they had to be shelved.

In Fighting the Kaiser’s War we only had limited space to outline the events of the 1914 Christmas Truce on the front of XIX. Armeekorps, the only Saxon corps to be facing the British at the time. In this article I attempt to pin down the locations all of the known accounts from this front, showing which British units faced which German ones and how the sources match up. I will continue to update it as fresh information comes to light!