No new book on the Somme can be ignored. Especially Bloody Victory by William Philpott (Little, Brown, £25), which looks beyond the tragedy to claim the campaign as an Allied victory rather than a terrible failure.

Philpott argues that the young lives that were sacrificed in 1916 broke the deadlock of this bloodiest of wars.

With powerful persuasion, he places the battle within the context of the whole of the four-year conflict that robbed Europe of the flower of its youth.

The best remembered and lamented battlefield is always the Somme with Churchill leading the way on its futility and voices emphasising this across the military spectrum.

Philpott insists that the battle of attrition actually opened the way to eventual British, French and Commonwealth supremacy. His book gives us the mud and blood, the great bravery of the Somme, the high command, the soldiers’ stories, but further invites a more positive study of the conflict that has challenged the public over the past 90 years.

Gallipoli goes down in the annals of history as a tragic landmark in the First World War. It was preceded by a British naval blunder that was even more costly — for had its ships secured a sea route to Russia and Constantinople been captured, it is highly possible that the war would have been shortened by two years. This is the theory put forward in The Dardenelles Disaster (Duckworth, £18.99), by Dan Van der Vat, who has built a powerful reputation as a naval historian.

The result is a thundering assessment of a long-forgotten campaign that was a minefield of diplomacy and a failure of deep consequence that paved the way for the Russian revolution. As it turned out, British and Commonwealth soldiers gave their lives needlessly on the barren rock of the Gallipoli peninsular and both Churchill and Lord Fisher became political casualties.