Product Description

The First World War was a conflict of unprecedented ferocity. After the last shot was fired and the troops marched home, approximately three million soldiers remained unaccounted for. An unassuming English chaplain first proposed a symbolic burial in memory of all the missing dead; subsequently the idea was picked up by almost every combatant country.

Acclaimed author Neil Hanson focuses on the lives of three soldiers — an Englishman, a German, and an American — using their diaries and letters to offer an unflinching yet compassionate account of the front lines. He describes how each man endured nearly unbearable conditions, skillfully showing how the Western world arrived at the now time-honored way of mourning and paying tribute to all those who die in war.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #681515 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-08
• Released on: 2007-05-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 512 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In this powerful, painful, unforgettable story of the madness and futility of war, British author Hanson (The Confident Hope of a Miracle) follows three ordinary warriors—British, German and American—through the logic-defying charnel house that was WWI. All died at the second Battle of the Somme in 1916 and end up among the war's nearly three million whose bodies remained unidentified. Making brilliant use of poignant, literary letters of these men and others, Hanson conjures a world that's hard for the modern reader to fathom. The casualty rate during the Great War was appalling: "Dead bodies were used to build the support walls for the fortified ditches; yellowing skulls, arms, legs could be seen packed tight into the dank, black soil...," writes Alec Reader, the British soldier. Hanson takes the reader directly into the horror of trench warfare. "Dead and wounded soldiers, dead and dying animals, horse cadavers, burnt-out houses, shell-cratered fields, devastated vehicles, weapons, fragments of uniforms—all this is scattered around me, in total confusion," writes German Paul Hub. "I didn't think war would be like this." Vivid, sobering and without macho swagger or sentimentality, Hanson lets the voices of the unknowns speak across a bloody century with lessons for the new one. 16 pages of b&w photos, map. (May 19)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
This haunting and heartbreaking account drives home the oft-repeated adage that the death of millions is a statistic but the death of a single individual is a tragedy. To honor the approximately three million fallen soldiers who were never identified in World War I, Hanson relates the individual stories of three young men--a German, an Englishman, and an American. Each of them was lost in the general area of the Somme River, certainly one of the most blood-soaked areas on the western front. Utilizing their diaries and letters to sweethearts and families, Hanson relates their individual experiences and provides a moving testament to the futility of the war. Each man came from an "ordinary" background and seemed to share an innocent faith in the justice of the struggle. Inevitably, as the war grinds to a stalemate and the meatgrinder of trench warfare progresses, one senses their feelings of slow disillusionment and even despair. This emotionally wrenching tribute brings home the fury and horror of the war as experienced by common soldiers who fell victim to it. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
“An unforgettable picture of life in the hottest sectors of the Western Front.”
—The New York Times

As good as anything I have read about World War I – hard to stomach but impossible to forget.”
—Paul Laskin, The Seattle Times

“Stunning. . . . Unknown Soldiers tells you vividly how it felt when the world, then believed to be on a firm foundation, began to stagger and crash.”
—The Los Angeles Times

“Hanson has rescued a rich store of letters from the attics of three nations, using them to remind readers both of the horrors of war and the obligations of memory.”
—The Christian Science Monitor

Customer Reviews

Worthy of Pulitzer.
Perhaps I am the last to know why, but for some reason, of late, there have been a half score of new tomes introduced regarding the Somme or some other closely related aspect of the Great War. UNKNOWN SOLDIERS: THE STORY OF THE MISSING OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR by Neil Hanson is the second of said recent releases that I have enjoyed. As with the other recent book I have read on the subject, simply titled The Somme: Heroism and Horror in the First World War, by Martin Gilbert, Hanson seems to have taken a unique new approach to the chronicles of the Great War by providing the reader with a detailed, constricted first person account, not of the politics, leadership, logistics and statistics of the war, but rather from the viewpoint of those who actually fought in the trenches. Hanson does leave himself a narrow margin for editorializing, but it is minimal and in no way detracts from this extraordinary book.

This book chronicles the lives of three soldiers, one British, one German, and an American airman. Remembering that the early 20th century was a time of enlightenment when, for the first time in history, even the common soldier possessed not only the desire, but the ability to record his experiences in written word, Hanson takes much of his content directly from the letters of these men to their families and friends back home. These first hand accounts of war are largely void of politics and strategies. Such intricacies are omitted to lay way for accounts of struggle for basic survival in what was arguably the most horrific measure of battle humanity has ever endured.

This is a rather difficult book to read, not because it is poorly written; quite the reverse is true. This book is difficult because, of all the books I have read on war, and there have been many, this book is without equal as the most graphically descriptive. I spent much of my adult life as a soldier and have seen first hand, the horrors of war, but my own accounts seem almost trivial compared to what the men of the Somme endured. I stress this here because I want readers to understand, this book holds nothing back. This is not intended for the faint of heart or for young readers.

The German soldier chronicled here, Paul Hub, survived the Somme and we then follow him briefly to his promotion to 2nd Lt., and on to the second battle of Verdun. This is about the time the American Airman, George Seibold, is introduced. Seibold was about as close to American nobility as one could get. He wed his wife only hours before going off to battle the Hun.

Hanson dedicated the final one third of the book to the enduring effects of the war. He painstakingly details the efforts to recognize the many thousands of unidentified soldiers strewn about the hillsides of Flanders and northern France. Descriptive detail is given to the final memorials for the unknown soldiers at the Cenotaph, the Arc de Triomphe, and America's own Tomb of the Unknowns, as well as scores of other memorials recognizing those "unknown but to God". Hanson also closely follows the heart wrenching efforts of Grace Seibold, George Seibold's mother and the Gold Star Mothers who took their anguish to their own graves of not knowing where their sons' bodies lay interred.

Hanson concludes his work with an exhaustive 100 pages of notes and bibliography. I can say with unwavering certainty that this book is, in my humble opinion, Pulitzer material. I have read many books of Pulitzer notariety that pale in comparison to this magnificent work. This is an extraordinary and exhaustive account that will forever change your understanding of the Great War.

Monty Rainey
www.juntosociety.com

REMEMBER
I have tried over the years, with varying rates of success, to read a history of WWI. Finally I have found a readable book on the subject. Mr. Hanson's use of diaries and letters from American, British and German soldiers paints the most vivid picture of life in the trenches. War is hell, but WWI took it to another level entirely. For the men on the lines on the Western Front life was a nightmare to the 100th power. This is the poignant story of the 3,000,000 missing of the Great War. It is almost 100 years on since the guns fell silent, but I hope the their sounds continue to echo across time to remind people that war isn't always about surgical strikes with bombs and remote controlled drones. There are real people fighting and dying. Flesh and blood. Unknown Soldiers reminds us of that and forces us to remember.

Powerful and compelling book on the 'Missing Men'
Mr Hanson has done a superb job of reseach and writting in this powerful book on the hundreds of thousands of men with 'no known grave'. A haunting and grim tour of the trenches told in the words of three men, one a Briton, a German and an American flier - all victims of the war and none found a known grave. The letters that were incorporated into the text and the writer's gripping style makes this a hard book to put down as it features many little known facts of the 'missing', their families and their personal connections.
A must read for any and all World War One buffs and for anyone interested in this aspect of major conflicts. Excellent.