Rick Atkinson, The Day of the Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy 1943-1944 (2007) and The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 (2013) — a Combined Book Review

24 November 2015

Superb as to the human costs of war and the command characters who wage it — but arguably a miss in conventional military history respects

The Day of the Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy 1943-1944 and The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 complete Rick Atkinson’s Liberation Trilogy.

These two books surpass their predecessor volume, An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943 in quality, but without eliminating its arguable shortcomings as military history.

I reviewed An Army at Dawn (here) and concluded that:

An Army at Dawn is an epic historical sweep burdened by disconnected detail, incomplete and poorly referenced footnotes, and a lack of substantive theme.

An Army at Dawn skillfully cobbles together staccato glimpses of commanders’ thinking and combat’s life and death — but without giving readers a coherent view of either or of the overall thrust of military actions. Even his focus on individually named troops becomes tedious because the author almost never follows through with more than a few seconds of their lives.

His historical account jumps frenetically and erratically — pretty much like demented frog might around a pond that has too many insect offerings.

If one is after admirably competent journalism about times past, An Army at Dawn rates 5 stars. But if one values thoughtfully considered and written History, as well as confidence-inspiring fact sourcing, this book gets only 2 or 3 stars.

Magnificent and irritating at the same time.

These subsequent two books improve upon the already admirable first

Footnotes more consistently document sources. They are also distributed into shorter blocks of still page-labeled text, a quality which makes them both easier to read and easier to place with regard to the portions of narrative they reference. These improvements are very noticeable.

The latter two books also improve upon the noticeable disconnectedness of the first. The author seems to have achieved a sharper eye for where to insert combatants’ personal accounts into the operational side of his narratives. And he makes a more noticeable effort to (admittedly barely) inform readers what is occurring on the Eastern Front.

Last, Atkinson seems to have settled on a “war is hell” theme, without explicitly saying so. And that answers the question that I (maybe obtusely) had been asking about the core point to An Army at Dawn.

To my mind, the “war is hell” theme excuses the Trilogy’s weaknesses as operational military history. Yes, the maps are still lousy. The text is still poorly coordinated to the maps. And the narrative still too frequently leaves readers lost as to which geographic portion of which planned maneuver Atkinson is discussing. But all of that is arguably irrelevant to the Trilogy’s main journalistic style purpose.

Samples — illustrating Atkinson’s apparent “war is hell” theme

Regarding German vengeance after the Italians surrendered to the Allies

Naples itself . . . had been mutilated. German vengeance at Italy’s betrayal foreshadowed the spasmodic violence that European towns large and small could expect as the price of liberation.

Half of the city’s one million residents had remained through the German occupation, but none now had running water: Wehrmacht sappers had blown up the main aqueduct in seven places and drained municipal reservoirs. Dynamite dropped down manholes wrecked at least forty sewer lines.

Explosives also demolished the long-distance telephone exchange, three-quarters of the city’s bridges, and electrical generators and substations. [The long list goes on.]

The Germans had extorted ransom from Italian fishermen for their boats . . . and then burned the fleet anyway.

A German battalion burst into the library of the Italian Royal Society, soaked the shelves with kerosene, and fired the place with grenades, shooting guards who resisted and keeping firemen at bay.

The city archives and fifty thousand volumes at the University of Naples, where Thomas Aquinas once taught, got the same treatment . . . .

Violations of the rules of war

Brave souls . . . faced barbaric reprisals. On the rocky Greek island of Cephalonia . . . the 12,000-man Italian army garrison fought for five days at a cost of 1,250 combat deaths before surrendering on September 22 [1943]. On orders from Berlin, more than 6,000 prisoners were promptly shot, including orderlies with Red Cross brassards, wounded men dragged to the wall from their hospital beds, and officers, executed in batches of eight and twelve.

And Italian commander ripped off the Iron Cross given him by Hitler personally and flung it at his firing squad.

The dead were ballasted on rafts and sunk at sea or burned in huge pyres that blackened the Ionian sky for a week; decades later, when the air grew heavy and clouds darkened before a storm, islanders would say, “The Italians are burning.”

Lack of winter preparedness and associated levels of command stupidity

As the frozen corpses on Camino could attest, the Allies were utterly unprepared for winter. Much of the cold-weather gear under development in the States would not reach Italy for another year.

“Cold ground trauma” injuries soared in November [1943], including the first thousand cases of trench foot among American troops. [General Mark] Clark was aghast to learn that the British had begun breaking up a division every two months to field replacements. “I wish so many things were not done on a shoestring,” [General John P.] Lucas wrote. “This campaign was poorly planned in many respects. We should have at least twice as many troops.”

Winter always seemed to catch the U.S. Army by surprise. The Americans had been unprepared for winter campaigning in the Atlas Mountains of Tunisia in 1942 and in the Apennines of Italy in 1943, and they were just as unready in 1944.

The alarming German resilience of late October had inspired [General Robert] Littlejohn to urge [General Omar] Bradley to expedite shipments of cold-weather kit to the battle front. . . . Bradley waved off the warning, saying, in Littlejohn’s recollection, “The mean are tough and can take it.”

Typical Atkinson’s gift for focusing on individuals

“Everybody shares the same universals—hope, love, humor, faith,” Private First Class Richard E. Cowan of the 2^nd Infantry Division had written his family in Kansas on December 5, his twenty-second birthday.

Two weeks later he was dead, killed near Krinkelt after holding off German attackers with a machine gun long enough to cover his comrades’ escape. “It is such a bitter dose to have to take,” his mother confessed after hearing the news, “and I am not a bit brave about it.”

Cowan would be awarded the Medal of Honor, one of thirty-two recognizing heroics in the Bulge.

Atkinson's glimpses linger in memory

Demonstrating the warrior mentality

[O]f twenty engineers in one minesweeping detail, eighteen would be killed or wounded. “You don’t know how dreadful death can be,” a dying Pole told his comrades. “Now I shall have to miss the rest of the battle.”

At dawn, the rising sun fired the hilltops as if they had been dipped in copper. All morning and past the meridian the killing continued.

“I was working on my knees. I was smeared all over with blood,” a Polish surgeon reported.

“A corporal came and stood among the wounded . . . Through his torn tunic I saw a wound the size of two hands, the shoulder bone bared.” The corporal told him, “I shan’t let you evacuate me until I’ve thrown all my grenades.”

Philosophically and provocatively on the nature of Reality

One chaplain was reduced to suggesting that “sound mental health requires a satisfactory life-purpose and faith in a friendly universe.”

On the battlefields of Europe in 1944, no such cosmology seemed likely.

On sheer evil, a rabbi speaks

Ohrdruf had been the first concentration camp liberated by Western armies in the Fatherland, and it was hardly the most heinous. Others followed in short order, and new discoveries revealed the Reich’s full depravity.

“If the heavens were paper and all the water in the world were ink and all the trees turned into pens,” a rabbi told a war correspondent, “you could not even then record the sufferings and horrors.”

Demonstrating authorial integrity — giving the Soviets their due

Some 14 percent of the Soviet population of 190 million perished during the war; the Red Army suffered more combat deaths at Stalingrad alone than the U.S. armed forces did in the entire war.

Soviet forces also had killed roughly nine times more Germans than the United States and Britain combined.

The moral? — Highly recommended, this time without reservation

Rick Atkinson’s Liberation Trilogy is a work of monumental effort and journalistically conveyed genius.

Critiquing the trio of books — as being less than completely competent military operational histories — arguably misses Atkinson’s intended point about the paradoxical horror and addiction of war, as well as his characterological focus on the human beings who wage it.

I suspect that the Trilogy has the virtue of motivating many readers to learn more. The books' notes and bibliography make for an outstanding start.

Overall, The Liberation Trilogy is a tour de force that is well suited to those seeking something other than conventionally presented military history.

PeteFree.com

Rick Atkinson, The Day of the Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy 1943-1944 (2007) and The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 (2013) — a Combined Book Review