Books published by publisher Uniform Press

Originally published in 1958, In Flanders Fields is a classic of World War I literature. Leon Wolff offers a brilliantly compact fictional narrative of the Third Battle of Ypres, also known as Passchendaele. The battle, which lasted from July to November of 1917, had a staggering cost: it is estimated that 475,000 troops were killed, wounded, or went missing. Through Wolff’s carefully accurate novelization of the strategy, tactics, and events of the battle, we begin to get glimmers of insight into how slaughter on such a scale was possible—how the battle was allowed to continue, month after month, at such a terrible cost. No other book takes readers so close to the mud and danger of the Ypres battlefield; on the centennial of World War I, a new generation of readers now has a chance to discover it.

Amid the stalemate of World War I, one area in which the German military could claim almost complete supremacy was beneath the ocean. In the four years of the war, the U-boats of U-Flottille Flanders alone would sink more than 2,500 Allied ships, sending more than 2.5 million tons of shipping to the bottom. But their victories came at a high cost: as the Royal Navy made taking out U-boats a priority, using mines, nets, aircraft, espionage, and more, and by the end of the war they had sunk eighty percent of the U-boats that operated out of Flemish ports. ​This book brings the secret of those sunken subs back to the surface. Underwater archaeologist and naval historian Tomas Termote draws on his countless visits to the wrecks of U-boats to explore topics ranging from their role in the war to the everyday lives of the men on board. Termote illustrates his account with copious underwater photography of the wrecks, and he uses that and new identifications to present the first ever complete account of the fate of every U-boat in the fleet, including boats sunk off the coasts of Great Britain, Belgium, Holland, France, Ireland, Spain, and the United States. The result is a book sure to grip any WWI buff, helping us understand with new clarity one of the crucial theaters of the war.

In 1914, the city of Bradford was the world’s leading manufacturer of fine woolen goods. Upon the outbreak of war, and at the urging of the city’s wealthy industrialists, thousands of young men rushed to enlist. Within a matter of months, two volunteer “pals battalions” were formed—battalions comprised of men who enlisted together as long as they could serve together. John Broadhead, the son of a Bradford Pal, tells the story of the battalions and the part played by his father, George William Broadhead, a town hall clerk from Batley. The author’s research was inspired by his father’s diary of 1916, which he handed to the author shortly before his death in 1980, saying, “Here lad, you might be interested in this.” Like many soldiers, he rarely spoke about the war, but the diary, alongside the author’s use of official records, newspaper reports, and memoirs, reveal the stark horror of what faced the nation’s youth. Few of the original Pals survived the war, but George Broadhead’s luck held. In 1918, he married a French girl and stayed in France for eighteen years working with the Imperial War Graves Commission—the British institution tasked with burying and commemorating First World War dead and missing soldiers—before returning to his home town to resume his earlier career. He was an ordinary soldier but a quite remarkable person, and this is his story.

Set in a rural town in South West France from 1940 to 1944, Can You Keep a Secret? examines the effect of the German occupation on the community, as seen through the eyes of a nine-year-old child. Living with a teenage brother and parents who own a café in the market square, the child regularly escapes to a secret world in the forests to play with friends. Meanwhile, the atmosphere in the town progressively darkens, and the café becomes central to the operation of the local black market and the growing resistance movement. The child’s curiosity is later aroused by the arrival of a mysterious female guest who takes a room above the café, and soon the adult world of a secret agent and the child’s world of secret hideouts become inextricably entangled. Intended for young readers, the good vs. evil tale in this book illustrates the importance of honesty, reliability, and trustworthiness against the backdrop of wartime resistance in occupied France.

In the early days of World War I, patriotic feeling ran high—as did confidence in what was largely a newly created British fighting force. In autumn of 1914, Britain’s most popular writer, Rudyard Kipling, wrote six articles for the Daily Telegraph about the training of the newly mobilized British troops, all of whom had signed up as volunteers almost the moment Britain declared war. The articles described the men in their full glow of youth and enthusiasm, and waxed poetic about their strength, courage, and dashing appearance. The patriotic tone of the articles hides a painful reality: they were written just months after Kipling’s own eighteen-year-old-old son had been killed at the Battle of Loos.Early in 1915, the articles were collected in a small booklet, published for sixpence as The New Army in Training. By that time, it had already become apparent that the war was not going to be won quickly, or easily—and that in fact it was going to exact a horrifying toll of blood and treasure. Reproduced here, on the 150th anniversary of Kipling’s birth and the centennial of the book's original publication, The New Army in Training calls up the almost unfathomable confidence and enthusiasm of the early days of the war, helping us get beyond our historical perspective and see the past as it was actually lived.