"Weidenfeld & Nicolson   552pp   £20
ISBN 978 0 29784 652 9
Hart is one of the now-dominant school of Great War British military historians who feel that the real story of 1918 has been largely lost – muffled by the weight of the attention given to the disasters of 1915, the Somme and Passchendaele that first drowned the flower of Britain's pre-war army and then the volunteers of Kitchener's New Armies in glutinous, stinking mud.
He attempts here to give the much-reviled Field-Marshal Douglas Haig his due (some may think more than his due) with his insistence – backed by the words of the men who were there – that 1918 was an undisputed victory: a series of daring triumphs that smashed the seemingly eternal deadlock of the trenches, and shattered the apparently impregnable shield of the German defences. The breakthrough that Haig had sought in vain from Loos to Cambrai, via the Somme, Arras, Messines and Third Ypres, was at last achieved.
All this is fair enough, if hardly original. (The late John Terraine was making the same point back in the 1960s.) But in Hart's worm's-eye view there is a danger that the real grand strategic significance of the year is lost. Broadly, the troops that Ludendorff rushed to the Western Front for his offensives after Russia's collapse could not compensate for the great inexhaustible drafts of fresh blood pouring across the Atlantic into France, as the United States rode to the rescue of the exhausted Anglo-French. The psychological impact of America's arrival in the war on allies and enemies alike can hardly be over-emphasized.
Nevertheless Hart is a clear, down-to-mud writer who refuses – as some of his revisionist colleagues do not – to pretend that war is anything other than unmitigated Hell. He has chosen his sources well – from both sides of the lines – and his book is a magnificent tribute above all to 'the man who won the war': the British Tommy."

Not the leaders, not these mythical military geniuses who had learned from their earlier mistakes and lack of concen for hman life!........ the Tommies!

And sending in the subs from across the pond played a not insignificant part in those "sweeping 1918 victories" over a thoroughly worn out and disheartened enemy.