World War I Collection Spotlight - The Fight on Water and in the Air

"During World War I, British and American ships were painted with bold colors and crazy patterns from bow to stern. Why would anyone put such eye-catching designs on ships? Desperate to protect ships from German torpedo attacks, British lieutenant-commander Norman Wilkinson proposed what became known as dazzle. These stunning patterns and colors were meant to confuse the enemy about a ship's speed and direction. By the end of the war, more than four...

Tells the story of the daredevil Americans of the Lafayette Escadrille, who flew in French planes, wore French uniforms, and showed the world an American brand of heroism before the United States entered the Great War.

After steaming out of New York City on December 1, 1917, laden with a staggering three thousand tons of TNT and other explosives, the munitions ship Mont-Blanc fought its way up the Atlantic coast, through waters prowled by enemy U-boats. As it approached the lively port city of Halifax, Mont-Blanc's deadly cargo erupted with the force of 2.9 kilotons of TNT - the most powerful explosion ever visited on a human population, save for Hiroshima and Nagasaki....

"In six weeks during April and May 1915, as World War I escalated, Germany forever altered the way war would be fought with poison gas, torpedoes killing civilians, and aerial bombardment. Each of these actions violated rules of war carefully agreed at the Hague Conventions of 1898 and 1907. The era of weapons of mass destruction had dawned. While each of these momentous events has been chronicled in histories of the war, historian Diana Preston...

In an alternate 1914 Europe, fifteen-year-old Austrian Prince Alek, on the run from the Clanker Powers who are attempting to take over the globe using mechanical machinery, forms an uneasy alliance with Deryn who, disguised as a boy to join the British Air Service, is learning to fly genetically engineered beasts. It is the cusp of World War I. The Austro-Hungarians and Germans have their Clankers, steam-driven iron machines loaded with guns and...

Little more than ten years after the first powered flight, aircraft were pressed into service in World War I. The romance of aviation had a remarkable grip on the public imagination, propaganda focusing on gallant air 'aces' who become national heroes. The reality was horribly different. Some 50,000 aircrew died in World War I. Marked for Death explored the brutal truths of wartime aviation: of flimsy planes and unprotected pilots; of burning nineteen-year-olds...

From the young airmen who took their frail machines high above the trenches of World War I and fought their foes in single combat there emerged a renowned company of brilliant aces - among them Ball, Bishop, McCudden, Collishaw and Mannock - whose legendary feats have echoed down half a century. But behind the elite there were, in the Royal Flying Corps, many hundreds of other airmen who flew their hazardous daily sorties in outdated planes without...

Europe, 1916: Baron Manfred von Richthofen is a crack pilot of the German aerial combat forces, a legend in his own time, a hero at home, and a man both feared and respected by the enemy. Von Richthofen and his fellow officers see their duels in the sky as tactical, almost sportsmanlike, challenges. But, when he falls in love with Kate, she opens his eyes to the fact that there is more to war than dogfights and he becomes aware of his role in the...