ABSTRACT
In 1915, within months of the largest land force Britain had ever mobilised finding itself rooted on continental soil, work began on an historical venture which in its scale and complexity was as unprecedented as the army whose actions it sought to document and describe. The process of compiling and producing the Official Military Histories of the Great War was to take 33 years to complete. Another great war had come and gone before the final official volume was published in 1948. The entire undertaking, which resulted in 29 volumes of Official Military History, was vast. It involved the collection, sorting, recording and analysing of over 25 million documents. Every order, communication, unit diary and a number of personal diaries were studied by the official historians in preparing their works. This mass of information was supplemented by enemy and Allied accounts and the written evidence of several thousand participants, from Earl Haig to battalion commanders. There can be few academic works which have been based upon such a volume of research.
