David Stevenson: With Our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918

After years of bloody stalemate, what gave the Allies the upper hand in World War I? And why, after a clear victory for the Allies, would the defeated Germans rise again to threaten Europe within a matter of years?

In With Our Backs to the Wall, David Stevenson examines the military, naval, political, and economic threads that form the full complexity of World War I, as well as the impact of concurrent events such as the Russian Revolution.

In Stevenson's view, victory would come down to a decisive counteroffensive and key technological advancements, particularly with regard to mobilizing soldiers and supplies...but victory would also lay incomplete long past the end of the Great War.

David Stevenson joined the London School of Economics as a Lecturer in 1982 and became a Professor in 1998. His publications include Cataclysm: the First World War as Political Tragedy; Armaments and the Coming of War: Europe, 1904-1914; and The First World War and International Politics, among others.