Cassette, Abridged.
A landmark book using unique Imperial War Museum archive material, in which the story of WWI during 1914-15 is told in the words of the men who were there.
In 1960, the Imperial War Museum began a momentous and important task. A team of academics, archivists and volunteers set about tracing WWI veterans and interviewing them at length in order to record the experiences of ordinary individuals in war.
The IWM aural archive has become the most important archive of its kind in the world. Authors have occasionally been granted access to the vaults, but digesting the thousands of hours of footage is a monumental task. (There are over 2,500 interviews, some as long as 20 hours long). As a result, those seeking first person quotations for their works have only used a tiny fraction of the available pre-transcribed material.
Now, forty years on, the Imperial War Museum has at last given author Max Arthur and his team of researchers unlimited access to the complete WWI tapes. These are the forgotten voices of an entire generation of survivors of the Great War. Their stories have rested unheard for almost half a century, and nearly all of those interviewed have since passed away.
The resulting book, 1914-1915, includes the compelling stories of women and men reactions as the war broke out and young men signed up and the battles to follow including the Battle of Mons, Marne, first Battle of Ypres and the remarkable Christmas Truce. In 1915 the remarkable tales from the Battle of Neuve Chappell, the Second Battle of Ypres, the landings and Battle of Sulva Bay in Gallipoli and the first gas attack at the battle of Loos.
