928 pages, Holt
Paperbacks, ISBN-13: 978-1250037817
This
is the third volume Rick Atkinson’s “Liberation Trilogy”, which is essentially
the story of the U.S. Army in the African and European Theater from 1942 to
1945. As should be obvious by now, Atkinson is a superlative writer who can
take a wealth of otherwise meaningless statistics and weave those numbers into
meaningful prose. What he has also done is written, essentially, an emotional
history of the American ground war in Europe; the reader is carried though
chapters written to help them feel a literary equivalent to what soldier
experienced, as impossible as that ultimately is. The mood of the lead in to D-Day
is expectant: there is something at once grand and foreboding about the
business of loading into ships, handling the pages of plans and tonnage of
materials. The landing and breakout from the beach is something of a shock and is
given to us in flashes or recollection and reconstruction; the reader sees
pieces of the larger events much as a soldier will have moments of clarity
between moment of keeping his head down and hanging on. And so onwards as
Atkinson describes the final years of this war with its blood its muck and its
suffering, with the everyday experiences of the average soldier being placed
side-by-side with the larger strategic discussions of generals and politicians.
The
details are extraordinary without ever being overwhelming. For instance, we
have a lengthy discussion of losses due to trench foot (caused by the prolonged
exposure of feet to damp, unsanitary and cold conditions which caused them to
become numb, turn red or blue as a result of poor blood supply, and even the
early stages of tissue death) and a shorter one about desertion (reaching as
high as 6.3 percent of the armed forces in 1944, and during the American reverses
at the Battle of the Bulge the army executed one American soldier, Private
Ernie Slovik, for desertion in the face of the enemy as an example to other
troops, the last American soldier to be so executed). Some units always seemed
to be take the point, the result of which that entire Divisions would suffer
200% casualties – you read that correctly: 200%
casualties, in that for every soldier in their per-invasion count, they would
need two replacements before the end of the war. Ironically, one of the more
moving vignettes in this book involves a German soldier arriving home, so incensed
that he grenades a piano before pouring paint over the remains; both this
soldier and the reader know that there is more war to come.
There
is no white-washing of the angst the allied or the axis leaders felt during the
war, while there is candid exploration of the decision-making on both sides. Eisenhower
is the hero of the book, if somewhat remote, while Patton is, I think, clearly
the authors favorite (that’s not to say that Patton gets a free pass on all his
doings). I would have liked to know more about Bradley, but somehow Atkinson
does not see him as a big enough personality. Prime Minister Churchill is
alternately a drunken figure of fun and a clever statesman, while Roosevelt is
the iron-willed leader the Allies needed (a not entirely accurate assessment, I
might add, especially to anyone who has read Churchill: Walking with Destiny by Andrew Roberts, reviewed by me
on February 8, 2019). After completing this trilogy, I came away with an overwhelming
sense of sadness about the Second World War, and indeed all wars in general;
leaders are human and imperfect, and they make atrocious mistakes – sometimes
due to their own personal arrogance, often due to incompetence, but even more
often due to ignorance about war and how to fight effectively – all of which
results in death and destruction on a large scale. Mr. Atkinson captures all
this so very effectively. For me this was an insightful journey into the
behind-the-scenes face of WWII.
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