History of the Great War

History of the Great War Based on Official Documents by Direction of the Committee of Imperial Defence

Title page of Military Operations, France and Belgium, 1914: Mons, the Retreat to the Seine, the Marne and the Aisne August–October 1914 (3rd revised edition, 1937) Volumes Principal Events, 1914–1918 Military Operations The Occupation of Constantinople 1918–1923 The Occupation of the Rhineland 1918–1929 Order of Battle of Divisions Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire During the Great War, 1914–1920 Transportation on the Western Front, 1914–1918 The War in the Air Naval Operations Seaborne Trade The Merchant Navy History of the Ministry of Munitions Medical and veterinary Additional volumes Authors James Edmonds Walter Raleigh Henry Jones Julian Corbett Henry Newbolt Archibald Hurd Charles Fayle Archbald Bell William Macpherson Thomas Mitchell G. M. Smith William Leishman Stevenson Cummins W. P. Herringham T. R. Elliott A. Balfour Anthony Bowlby Cuthbert Wallace Crisp English Layton Blenkinsop John Rainey
Illustrator	Archibald Frank Becke (maps)
Country	Britain
Language	English
Discipline	Military history Publishers HMSO Macmillan Longmans John Murray Heinemann Naval and Military Press Ray Westlake Books Clarendon Press
Published	1922–1949 1990s 2000s
Media type	Print (some online scans later)
No. of books	c. 108

The History of the Great War Based on Official Documents by Direction of the Committee of Imperial Defence (abbreviated to History of the Great War or British Official History) is a series of 109 volumes, concerning the war effort of the British state during the First World War. It was produced by the Historical Section of the Committee of Imperial Defence from 1915 to 1949; after 1919 Brigadier-General Sir James Edmonds was Director. Edmonds wrote many of the army volumes and influenced the choice of historians for the navy, air force, medical and veterinary volumes. Work had begun on the series in 1915 and in 1920, the first volumes of Naval Operations and Seaborne Trade, were published. The first "army" publication, Military Operations: France and Belgium 1914 Part I and a separate map case were published in 1922 and the final volume, The Occupation of Constantinople was published in 2010.

The History of the Great War Military Operations volumes were originally intended as a technical history for military staff. Single-volume popular histories of military operations and naval operations written by civilian writers were to be produced for the general public but Sir John Fortescue was dismissed for slow work on the military volume and his draft was not published. Edmonds preferred to appoint half-pay and retired officers, who were cheaper than civilian writers and wrote that occasionally "the 'War House' foisted elderly officers on him, because they were not going to be promoted or offered employment but was afraid to tell them so".

In the 1987 introduction to Operations in Persia 1914–1919, G. M. Bayliss wrote that the guides issued by Her Majesty's Stationery Office (HMSO) were incomplete. "Sectional List number 60" of 1976 omitted the Gallipoli volumes but contained The Blockade of the Central Empires (1937), that had been Confidential and retained "For Official Use Only" until 1961. The twelve volume History of the Ministry of Munitions, the Occupation of the Rhineland (1929) and Operations in Persia 1914–1919 (1929) were included. The Imperial War Museum Department of Printed Books and the Battery Press republished the official history in the 1990s with black and white maps. The Imperial War Museum Department of Printed Books and the Naval and Military Press republished the set in paperback with colour maps in the 2000s and on DVD-ROM in the 2010s.