Atkinson's Liberation Trilogy: An Army at Dawn in North Africa

Rick Atkinson’s
The Liberation Trilogy

(2002-2013)
Patrick J. Garrity
Miller Center of Public Affairs
University of Virginia
April 2015
Atkinson’s “The Liberation Trilogy”

By Patrick J. Garrity
An Army at Dawn: The War In North Africa, 1942-1943 (2002)
If we based our understanding of history purely on popular culture — specifically, Hollywood — we might
think of World War II along the following lines. The war started when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor
(interrupting a number of love lives and little league games). Then, after some time getting organized, Tom
Hanks invaded Normandy and saved Private Ryan. We dropped the Big One on Japan, and that was that.
The full story of the American victory, of course, is a good deal more complicated. Rick Atkinson, a Pulitzer-
prize winning journalist, has set out to tell an important part of that story through a planned series of books
that he calls the Liberation Trilogy. They will cover the role of the United States (largely the U.S. Army) in
defeating Germany and its allies in the European theater of operations.
The first installment of the trilogy, An Army at Dawn, describes the U.S. and British campaign in North
Africa that began with Operation TORCH, the amphibious invasion of French Morocco and Algeria on
November 8, 1942. The initial invasion in the east took place just after the victory of the British Eighth Army,
to the west at El Alamein. The two allied forces gradually converged on the Axis armies, first compressing
the Germans and Italians into a beachhead in Tunisia and finally forcing their surrender on May 13, 1943. The
Allies, having cleared North Africa of hostile forces and capturing or killing roughly 250,000 of the enemy,
were now in a position to strike at Sicily and the Italian mainland.
Atkinson spends over 500 pages to tell this story. He covers the campaign in painstaking detail, from the
great political dialogue of Churchill and FDR at Casablanca in January 1943 to the ordinary details of the
American home front. But he spends most of his time with the troops in the field. Atkinson refers to the
American force as “An Army at Dawn” because it is just beginning to make an extraordinary transition from
a small, poorly funded, peacetime cadre into a world-class fighting force. (Tom Hanks’ character in Saving
Private Ryan, you may recall, was said to have received his first combat experience in the Mediterranean
campaigns.) To survive this uncertain dawn, the United States paid a considerable price: 2,715 killed in
action, nearly 9,000 wounded and more than 6,500 missing. War is a miserable business, as Atkinson makes
abundantly clear. Why should we, sixty years later, care? We want to honor those who made such sacrifices,
of course, but don’t we have our own problems to worry about?
Atkinson argues that the North African campaign was a pivot point in American history, the place where the
United States began to act like a great power — militarily, diplomatically, strategically, and tactically. This
may be going a bit too far, but Operation TORCH and the subsequent operations are a good source for
reflections on our own troubled times. It is of course dangerous to draw direct analogies — FDR or Patton
did this and such, and therefore we should
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do thus and such. But history (with a small h) is the laboratory of great minds; and it explains
much of how we came to be where we are today.
Grand strategy, Churchill tells us, is the summit where true politics and strategy meet. Atkinson
makes clear that North Africa was a political war as much as a military campaign. FDR needed
to have Americans fighting somewhere in the European theater to sustain support on the home
front, and particularly to relieve the domestic pressure to emphasize the fight in the Pacific. We
had been attacked by Japan, after all. But Roosevelt had decided, correctly, that the greatest
threat was posed by Germany and that the greatest strategic opportunities came in the European
theater, broadly defined. North Africa offered the quickest means to engage in that war, and it
was favored by the British. One has to begin somewhere.
But many high-ranking American officers disagreed with the specific location — they argued
that by fighting in North Africa, we were actually fighting for British imperial interests. They
favored a more direct approach to Berlin, by preparing for an immediate invasion of France in
late 1942 or at least 1943. The North African campaign, they said, was a distraction that would
delay the cross-channel invasion until 1944. An earlier American attack on the continent might
have led to a quicker defeat of Germany and (as it turned out) to less territory being conceded to
Stalin and the Red Army.
Atkinson comes down firmly on the side that the British, in this instance, were right. The real
bottleneck was limited Allied shipping and airpower, such that D-day at Normandy could not
have been mounted successfully much earlier than June 1944; certainly not in 1943. Amateurs
talk strategy, professionals talk logistics — and the Americans had a long ways to go in
developing the infrastructure for war, despite the incredible productivity of American industry.
But beyond material limitations, the Americans simply were not yet ready for the big leagues.
Operation TORCH saved Washington and London form a disastrously premature landing in
northern Europe. Given the dozens of Wehrmacht divisions waiting behind the Atlantic Wall,
Atkinson writes, France would have been a poor place to be lousy in.
And the Americans proved lousy, in many respects, in North Africa. Atkinson is particularly
hard on the American commanders, the legendary George Patton included. Patton displayed the
conspicuous command attributes for which he was famous: energy, will, a capacity to see the
enemy’s perspective, and bloodlust. But, Atkinson argues, he had a wonton disregard for
logistics, a childish propensity to feud with other services, a willingness to disregard the spirit if
not the letter of orders from his superiors, and an archaic tendency to assess his own generalship
on the basis of personal courage under fire. (Although, as Atkinson describes quite critically
elsewhere, other American commanders had a disconcerting tendency to avoid coming anywhere
near the front). And then there is Eisenhower — implausibly elevated from an obscure
Lieutenant Colonel to allied commander in a space of thirty months. Atkinson at first finds him
shallow, indecisive, out of his element. But as the campaign continued, Eisenhower began to find
his stride.
Eventually, such men of real leadership stepped forward, and those incapable fell by the
wayside. At the end of the day, four U.S. divisions had combat experience in five variants of
Euro-Mediterranean warfare: expeditionary, amphibious, mountain, desert and urban. The troops
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had learned the importance of terrain, combined arms, aggressive patrolling, stealth, massed
armor. They had been toughened by the difficult Tunisian terrain and harsh winter climate: “a
cold country with a hot sun.” They now knew what it was like to be bombed, shelled and
machine-gunned and to fight on. More importantly, Atkinson writes, the Yanks had arrived in
North Africa with the sense that they were still fighting somebody else’s war. By the end of the
campaign they were fully vested, with a stake of their own, because they had seen their friends
killed and maimed by the SOBs on the other side. War had become personal. North Africa is
where American soldiers became killing mad, where the hard truth about war was first revealed
to many.
But at the same time, North Africa is where irony and skepticism began refracting the
experiences of countless ordinary soldiers. Atkinson largely follows those who argue that combat
effectiveness depends largely on small unit cohesion — the desire to gain the esteem of one’s
buddies, to be thought a cool head in a fire-fight — and not on a sense of high moral purpose.
Atkinson’s Army at Dawn marches to a ribald tune about Tunisian whores and not to the Battle
Hymn of the Republic.
That was undoubtedly true, but not comprehensive (again to paraphrase Churchill). Here we
come once more to Eisenhower, who entitled his war memoirs, Crusade in Europe. As Atkinson
makes clear, Eisenhower meant it: he was a true believer in the righteousness of the Allied cause.
“If [the Axis] should win,” he wrote, “we would really learn something about slavery, forced
labor, and the loss of individual freedom.” The great Civil War general, William Tecumseh
Sherman said it well: “There is a soul to any army as well as to the individual man, and no
general can accomplish the full work of his army unless he commands the soul of his men, as
well as their bodies and legs.” This reflective quality — of commanding the souls of men — is
true not only for military excellence, but the higher purpose and honor that transcends the
battlefield.
Atkinson highlights the other key aspect of Eisenhower’s leadership — his genius in
commanding a coalition and especially in managing the subtle shift in the balance of power
within the Anglo-American alliance, as the United States became the stronger partner. British
commanders initially had nothing but contempt for American martial skills — “our Italians,”
they called the Yanks, not meaning this a compliment. American commanders naturally resented
British condescension: “The British cope, we fix.” These frictions were never totally worked out,
but Eisenhower made sure that the military coalition worked. And it still does.
And then there were the French. Much of North Africa prior to the invasion was under the
nominal control of Vichy France, the German satellite state in unoccupied mainland France.
Eisenhower had to deal with the French and bring them to the Allied side, forcibly if necessary,
in order to secure the landings and protect his rear area. Many of them were brave and happy to
be free of the Germans, but some were unsavory, pathetic and clownish, such as General Giraud
Admiral Darlan. Eisenhower also had to deal with the prickly Free French, above all Charles de
Gaulle. This part of the coalition never worked well, although it served its immediate purpose. In
examining the complicated psychology of the French in North Africa, we can get some insight as
to why the “alliance with Lafayette” never approximated the special Anglo-American
relationship during and after the war. And it still doesn’t.
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None of it was inevitable, Atkinson writes. Not the individual deaths, nor the ultimate Allied
victory, nor eventual American hegemony. History, like particular fates, hung in the balance,
waiting to be tipped. History hung heavy over North Africa. The jaded locals and their ancestors
had seen countless battles before; they treated this latest war something like a spectator sport.
They could point to the battlefield at Zama, where Hannibal had been smashed by Scipio
Africanus to end the Second Punic War in 202 B.C. They probably thought that this would not
be the last battle the Arab world would see. And they were right.
The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (2007)
Rick Atkinson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the Washington Post, has published the
second volume of his Liberation Trilogy, a history of the Allied defeat of Germany in the
European theater of operations during World War II. The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and
Italy, 1943-1944, like its predecessor volume, covers the war comprehensively, from grand
strategy and the generals in command, to the details of daily life and small-unit combat.
Atkinson’s perspective on war writ large, colored strongly by the experience of ordinary soldiers,
is decidedly unsentimental and un-heroic, although he gives full due to the actions of heroic men
(and women). In Italy, as in all campaigns, soldiers and civilians died badly and often
unnecessarily. Atkinson writes that it is constant lesson, among those of camaraderie and duty
and inscrutable fate, and of honor and courage, “that war is corrupting, that it corrodes the soul
and tarnishes the spirit, that even the excellent and the superior can be defiled, and that no heart
would remain unstained.”
And yet, when books like Atkinson’s are published, we rush to buy them. And when new wars
begin, writers like Atkinson rush off to cover them (as he did in the case of Iraq). “It is well that
war is so terrible—otherwise we would grow too fond of it,” as Robert E. Lee reminds us.
Because other Ashbrook-affiliated scholars, particularly Mackubin Owens, are far more
competent to consider the tactical and operational issues, I confine myself to certain larger
strategic questions raised by Atkinson.
The first volume in this series, The Army at Dawn, provides the essential backdrop for the latest
installment. There, Atkinson described the U.S. and British operation in North Africa from
November 1942 to March 1943, which cleared Axis forces from that continent. Most high-
ranking American officials, save President Roosevelt, had originally opposed this campaign as
an unnecessary diversion from what they regarded as the decisive campaign of the war: the drive
to Berlin across northern Europe, beginning with a cross-Channel invasion of France. American
planners hoped to undertake that invasion in 1942 or 1943. Winston Churchill and the British
commanders, by contrast, urged large-scale operations in the Mediterranean in order to occupy
and destroy German combat forces, in preparation for what would later become Operation
OVERLORD; as well as to offer some indirect near-term relief to Soviet forces fighting in the
East. The Americans tended to regard this plan as a cover for London’s real objective: to
preserve the British Empire and interests in the Mediterranean and the greater Middle East. The
British doubted that the Americans were ready to fight the Germans.
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Atkinson essentially came down on the British side of the last argument. The American
military—his Army at Dawn—was still in the process of making the transition from a small,
poorly funded, peacetime cadre into a world-class fighting force. Sports teams need pre-season
games to work out their problems. Armies do not have that luxury. They must be blooded as the
British would say (which is scant consolation to the families at home who have lost loved ones
while the military learns the necessarily painful lessons of how to fight and who can lead). In
1942-1943, the Americans also had far to go in developing the material and logistical
infrastructure which would be necessary to pull off the cross-Channel invasion. In Atkinson’s
view, the North African campaign saved Washington and London from a disastrously premature
landing in northern Europe. France, as Atkinson notes, would have been a poor place to be lousy
in.
But that left the question of what the Allies should do beginning in the spring of 1943, after the
defeat of the Axis in North Africa. Was the American Army ready to take on the German army
in a home game, in northern Europe? Not yet, at least in the British view. At the TRIDENT
conference in Washington in May 1943, with which Atkinson opens the book, Churchill and the
British again pressed for further operations in the Mediterranean. They advocated a campaign to
knock Italy out of the war, beginning with the already agreed-upon invasion of Sicily. The Allies
could then exploit opportunities in the “soft underbelly” of Germany’s European empire and
perhaps end the war altogether without a dangerous and bloody cross-Channel invasion (or at
least greatly improve the prospects of that invasion, which might be delayed until 1945 or 1946).
American officials, now including FDR, once more favored the more direct approach. They
argued that the Allies should avoid becoming caught in the cul-de-sac of the Italian peninsula
and instead concentrate their resources in England for a spring 1944 invasion into France.
The result of the TRIDENT conference, Atkinson writes, was a compromise. Italy would be
eliminated from the war—whether by invasion or politics—and its captured airfields would
support the bomber offensive against Germany and its allies. Allied forces could presumably
exploit strategic opportunities in the Mediterranean theater if they opened up as a result of
success in Italy. The commitment of resources to the Italian campaign would be limited,
however, and Allied forces would be transferred from the Mediterranean to prepare for
OVERLORD on a strict schedule. “In an effort to square the circle, a slightly cockeyed strategic
scheme emerged that would guide the Anglo-Americans until the end of the war,” Atkinson
writes, “a relentless pounding on Festung Europe from the air and from the southern flank,
setting the stage for a cross-Channel invasion aimed at Berlin. Whether a meaningful
Mediterranean campaign could be waged without endless entanglement, and whether the enemy
reacted as Allied strategists hoped he would react also remained to be seen.”
The answer to that question, as it played out beginning with the invasion of Sicily (Operation
HUSKY, July-August 1943), proved disappointing to all concerned. According to Atkinson, the
conduct of the Sicilian campaign inflamed British and American antagonisms, already strongly
felt in North Africa, in a way that high-level commanders on both sides could not forgive or
forget. The Allies, especially the British, failed to prevent the bulk of German forces from
evacuating Sicily. Those troops would kill thousands of Americans in the coming months.
Churchill, meanwhile, pressed for invasion of Italy proper, as far up the peninsula as possible.
“Why should we crawl up the leg like a harvest-bug from the ankle upwards? Let us rather strike
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at the knee.… Tell the planners to throw their hat over the fence.” The Americans agreed to an
invasion and to throw their hats over the fence with a major amphibious operation at Salerno
(AVALANCHE); but in the meantime, General Bernard Montgomery took his sweet time
moving northward from the toe of Italy in an operation no one really favored.
Throughout the campaign, Allied commanders consistently underestimated German resolve.

Most critically, the Germans did not withdraw from the peninsula, as many planners expected
when Mussolini was ousted and the new Italian government surrendered to the Allies in
September 1943. Instead the capable German commander, Field Marshall Albert Kesselring,
created a series of formidable fortified lines that took full advantage of hilly and mountainous
terrain admirably suited to the defense. “The Germans are high up, with good cover,” was the
order of the day in the hills and mountains. “A Gefreiter [private] with Zeiss binoculars and a
field telephone could rain artillery on every living creature in sight,” Atkinson notes. The Salerno
operation was also under-planned and undermanned. According to Atkinson, the American
Commander, General Mark Clark, came close to panic and withdrawal before the situation
stabilized. (Atkinson paints a mixed portrait of Clark, one of the most controversial senior
commanders of the war.) The fighting around Salerno settled into a stalemate reminiscent of the
trench warfare of World War I.
The Allies might then have halted in place in Italy when seven divisions, as scheduled, were
shifted from the Mediterranean to support OVERLORD, but Eisenhower (and Churchill) thought
it essential to retain the strategic initiative. Nevertheless, looking at the big picture, the
Americans—who now provided the bulk of combat forces in Europe—finally imposed their
preference that the cross-channel invasion should have the highest priority. Italy officially
became a secondary theater. The Allies did have the option of outflanking the German defenses
with further amphibious operations further up the coast, but the attempt to do so at Anzio
(SHINGLE) was nearly pushed back into the sea. (“We were hurling a wild cat on the shore, but
all we got was a beached whale,” Churchill memorably complained.) It took four major
offensives between January and May 1944 by combined American, British French, Polish, and
Canadian Corps to push out of Salerno. Allied firepower—artillery and airpower—finally began
to dominate the operations. In Atkinson’s view, as the struggle played out, it was a war between
productive systems capable of generating sustained offensive combat power, rather than a war
between ideologies or tacticians. That was a war the Americans were sure to win, if they were
determined to do so. When the Allies finally broke out of the Anzio beachhead, Clark turned
them to the capture of Rome rather than attempt to cut off a large part of the retreating Germany
Army. American forces took possession of the Eternal City on June 4. But the news was
overshadowed by D-Day.
After the successful occupation of Rome, initial Allied optimism gave way to the reality that
Italy would become a bloody backwater, as resources were drawn off elsewhere, even within the
Mediterranean. Eisenhower remained intent on a later-summer invasion of southern France to
reinforce the Normandy landings. But even if these forces had not been drawn off, in Atkinson’s
opinion, the Germans still would have held the advantage of fortified high ground. By August
1944, even Churchill realized that the Italian theater could no longer produce decisive results. It
became a vast holding operation. The final German defenses, the Gothic Line, did not collapse
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until April 1945. The American butcher’s bill was 120,000 total casualties, including 23,501
killed.
Atkinson’s account raises two fundamental questions. Was the invasion of Italy a strategic
mistake? Could it have been fought better, in a way that would have made it a strategic success?
Churchill later argued that the Italian campaign, and other Allied threats in the Mediterranean,
tied down 55 Axis divisions and mauled some of the best maneuver units in the German army.
“The principal task of our armies had been to draw off and contain the greatest possible number
of Germans,” Churchill observed. “This had been admirably fulfilled.”
Distinguished military historians, including John Keegan, Michael Howard, Corelli Barnett,
J.F.C Fuller, and B.H. Liddell Hart have disagreed with that assessment, to a greater or lesser
extent. According to the critics, the Italian campaign lacked purpose and it the cost the Allies
greater resources than it did Germany. By one account there were 22 German divisions in Italy
on D-Day, as compared to 157 divisions on the eastern front and almost 60 more in Western
Europe.
The contrary view, to which Atkinson largely subscribes, is that obtaining control of the middle
sea—which meant controlling at least southern Italy—proved vital to the liberation of Europe. It
was in the Mediterranean that the Allies forced the Axis on the strategic defensive. The sea lines
of communication through the Mediterranean offered the best means of maintaining the lend-
lease route to Russia via Persia (Iran). Air bases in Italy supported the bomber offensive that
crept ever closer to the Reich. Even admitting all the controversy about the overall efficacy of
strategic bombing, the sustained campaign against German oil production facilities in Romania
clearly did have a major impact on the Wehrmacht. Moreover, as Atkinson notes, the criticism of
the Italian strategy butts against an inconvenient riposte: If not Italy, where? The Allies lacked
sufficient shipping and infrastructure with which to stage OVERLORD any sooner. With limited
resources, calculations of grand strategy trumps mere strategy—in this case, by the need to
maintain the anti-German coalition and to sustain American public support for the conduct of the
war. Stalin would not have tolerated an idling of Allied armies during the ten months between
the conquest of Sicily and the Normandy invasion. Nor would public opinion in the United States
have accepted the European ground theater remaining quiet while thousands of U.S. soldiers died
in the Pacific. Italy offered the only feasible place to kill Germans in large numbers in 1943 and
early 1944.
Italy also offered a place to further refine the skills and tactics that would eventually carry over
successfully into OVERLORD and the subsequent campaign in northern Europe. Actually, as
Atkinson demonstrates, the American military often had to re-learn lessons that it supposedly
had been taught in North Africa, such as the penchant of the Germans to mount an immediate
counterattack after losing a position. Unfortunately, this meant that Italy was a place where
Germans could kill Americans in large numbers. (The military historian Max Hastings likes to
quote a British commander: “The Germans punished mistakes—always.”) Atkinson provides
considerable details about the planning difficulties that plagued the Italian campaign. A cruel
inflexibility gripped plans and orders. Some SOB always didn’t get the word, as in the case of a
horrendous friendly-fire incident in which American ground and naval forces shot down
numerous aircraft carrying U.S. paratroopers, even firing on the paratroopers themselves. The
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lessons learned in Sicily and southern Italy paid dividends later in the war, notably the expertise
gained in complex amphibious operations and in fighting with a large multinational coalition.
Kesselring went so far as to posit that without the Mediterranean experience, the Allied invasion
of France “would have undoubtedly become a failure.” For the U.S. Army, there was the
priceless conviction that American soldiers could slug it out with the best German troops,
division by division, in the toughest conditions, and ultimately prevail.
Could the Italian campaign been fought better, perhaps turning a necessary evil into a strategic
success, or at least minimize casualties? As to the unnecessary loss of life, Atkinson is highly
critical of the performance of a number of prominent Allied commanders. He also points to the
ambiguous strategic direction of the campaign, which masqueraded as strategic flexibility. But
he believes that the tyranny of limited resources, terrain that strongly favored the defense, and a
highly competent adversary determined to fight it out, meant that Italy was bound to become an
operational cul-de-sac, albeit a worthwhile strategic diversion—assuming that OVERLORD and
the northern European theater held decisive priority for 1944. Atkinson believes that on this
fundamental point the Americans were right. With that in mind, there was no easy or clever or
brave way to change fundamentally the conditions on the ground in Italy. Atkinson believes that
Anzio, for instance, was a good idea, or at least not a bad one. The plan demonstrated audacity
and surprise, something generally lacking in the Italian campaign. But, according to Atkinson,
the amphibious force was (necessarily) too small and Allied planners underestimated and mis-
estimated the German response. Clark was perhaps wrong in focusing on Rome rather than
trying to bag the German army in May-June 1944, but Atkinson thinks it unlikely that the
Germans could have been bagged.
Atkinson discusses but does not consider fully the British argument for an alternative,
Mediterranean-based strategy. He waves away Churchill’s “soft underbelly” approach, pointing
out that Italy proved to be anything but soft. But there were other things going on in the Balkans
in 1943-1944 that Atkinson does not discuss, such as British support for Tito in Yugoslavia.
Grand strategy is concerned not only with victory over the immediate adversary but also with
establishing the conditions for security after the war. The British were looking after this larger
game, as well as minding their own imperial store. By the same token, the Americans were not
wrong in trying to get to Germany as directly and as rapidly as possible, even if it would take
them a while to appreciate the post-war importance of a having a substantial U.S. military
presence as far east as possible. Whether Churchill’s peripheral alternative would have
succeeded better is a matter of debate, but the Americans soon found themselves deeply engaged
in Mediterranean affairs after the war as the strategic heirs of imperial Britain.
In a perfect world, one with unlimited resources, the Allies could have waged big wars both in
the Mediterranean and northern Europe—and in the Pacific, which turned into a big war despite
the Americans’ Europe-first strategic priority. Some of those constraints were self-chosen, such
as the belated American military preparations during the 1930s. The limited number of landing
craft was a constant bottleneck that hampered amphibious operations throughout the war. Size
and quality of force does create the sort of comprehensive strategic flexibility that the Western
Allies lacked in World War II (assuming many other things, such as popular will and leadership).
But in the real world, campaigns like Italy, however unsatisfying and bloody, will be required by
the remorseless logic of war.
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The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 (2013)
[Reprinted by permission of the Claremont Review of Books]
With the publication of The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945,
journalist and historian Rick Atkinson brings to a close his Liberation Trilogy, an account of the
Allied victory in the Mediterranean and Western Europe in World War II. (His primary focus is
on the U.S. Army and its British counterpart.) The first volume, An Army at Dawn: The War In
North Africa, 1942-1943, published in 2002, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for history.
Atkinson interrupted his writing in order to cover the conflict in Iraq – a reminder that war, for
whatever reasons, never quite goes out of style. The second volume, The Day of Battle: The War
in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944, was published in 2007.
Atkinson faced a major challenge as he wrapped up his story. The North African and Italian
campaigns are not particularly well known to the general public but the war in Europe is etched
deeply into popular culture through movies, mini-series, and popular books. We are all more or
less familiar with the horror and grandeur of D-Day; the heady times of Patton’s Third Army
driving across France; the insufferable Montgomery and the disaster of Operation MARKET-
GARDEN (“A Bridge Too Far”); the Battle of the Bulge and siege of Bastogne –“Nuts” to the
Germans; the derring-do at the Bridge at Ramagen; the Nazi Gotterdammerung and the
discovery of the death camps. Throughout it all, we celebrate accomplishments of the modern-
day bands of brothers who represented the greatest generation.
Atkinson aims to claim his niche in the literature through a strong narrative and a mastery of
details accumulated through exhaustive archival research and interviews (many veterans, upon
reading the earlier volumes of the series, offered him their papers, letters, and unpublished
memoirs). From such accounts he describes, for instance, the distinct odors of liberation –
“cosmoline gun-metal preservative, oil used to clean weapons, chlorine in the drinking water,
flea powder, pine pitch from freshly severed branches, fresh-dug earth . . . GI yellow soap and
the flour-grease fumes” from the field kitchens, as well as German smells left by the Germans –
“cabbage and sour rye,” “stale-sweat wool” and “harsh tobacco.” Frenchmen and women often
approached their liberators with what the Americans called the “French national salute” – two
fingers pressed to the mouth, do you have a cigarette?
Atkinson inundates the reader with detail. If you didn’t know how much and what kind of liquor
was sent by the American and British delegations to Yalta, you will. You will learn how Graves
Registration went about identifying, processing, and reconstructing the dead (and the fact that the
number of dead who needed such processing was considerably underestimated by planners).
Atkinson is relentless in his search for just the right quote, often from an obscure or unattributed
source, to set the scene. As a result, his narrative often sounds as if it were a script for a Ken
Burns documentary.
He does not offer any startling new revelations or offer grand new theses about the war. The
high-level argument throughout the Liberation Trilogy is that this was an absolutely necessary
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war, a war over the future of civilization (or, better put, between civilization and barbarism of the
worst sort). The liberation from tyranny was real. At the same time, this war – any war – is a
terrible thing. It is Janus-faced: “War is never linear but rather a chaotic, desultory enterprise of
reversal and advance, blunder and élan, despair and elation.” Out of chaos one can at least
quantify the butcher’s bill. Battle casualties among armies of the Western Allies from D-Day to
VE-Day exceeded three-quarters of a million, of whom at least 165,000 were dead. There were
10,000 naval losses, half of them dead, and 62,000 air casualties— half of them dead, too, in the
12,000 Allied planes lost over Europe. There was virtually no respite for the soldiers during the
campaign – almost as many Americans were killed or wounded in April 1945, when German
defenses had supposedly collapsed, as in June 1944.
Atkinson describes but does not try to settle the major political-military controversies that have
been hotly debated since by the participants and scholars. Once the breakout from the Normandy
lodgment have been accomplished, should the Allies have focused on a single thrust into
Germany from the northwest instead of Eisenhower’s broad-front approach? (Atkinson’s
narrative suggests that the single-thrust approach would not have led to a better outcome,
primarily because the Montgomery was not the man to pull it off, but also because of
unfavorable terrain and logistical challenges.) Was Churchill right in trying to stop the second
Allied invasion in the south of France in August 1944 – Operation ANVIL/DRAGOON – in
favor of diverting those forces to exploit favorable opportunities elsewhere? (No, at least
according to Atkinson – Marseilles and other ports in the south were invaluable to supply the
main effort in France; and there were no good opportunities elsewhere.)
Could the war have been won in the fall of 1944, when German defenses seemed on the verge of
collapse? (Probably not – Allied logistics were simply not up to the task.) Should Eisenhower
have tried to beat the Soviets to Berlin and other points to the east, in order to strengthen the
American-British post-war position? (Atkinson dismisses this argument in passing –
Eisenhower, he says, was merely following the policies of his civilian leadership, which based
post-war security on close cooperation with the Soviets. A race to Berlin would have
undermined the confidence necessary for that arrangement to work, at a cost of untold and
unnecessary American casualties.)
The student of strategy might usefully approach the detail provided in The Guns at Last Light to
draw different conclusions on these matters. Perhaps more importantly, he or she might reflect
on what World War II teaches us about how, and how well, democratic peoples – specifically,
the democratic American people – fight their wars. Atkinson’s narrative takes us away from
fuzzy nostalgia about the Good War to recall that victory over the Axis was not only very messy,
but it was far from a certain thing. It was certainly a great test, one in a line of tests, “whether
that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.”
During the 1930s, free societies and free markets reeled under the twin pressures of economic
failure and the claims of collectivist, militant, anti-liberal ideologies that theirs was the way of
the future. The matter would be decided, as so often throughout history, by war, and here the
democracies (broadly defined) seemed to many to be at a fatal disadvantage. The anti-
democratic regimes seemed to be more passionate about their cause, more united, and certainly
better organized, able to bring to bear more fully the resources of the industrial age – especially
12
in the conduct of war, which they were patently preparing to wage. The carnage of 1914-1918,
by contrast, had led many liberals to conclude that democratic societies could not survive another
round of modern warfare. Appeasement or isolation seemed the best foreign policy; together
with some sort of benign socialism at home. The first dismal years of Second World War
(including Japan’s aggression against China) gave no solace to the champions of free men and
free markets.
Atkinson’s focus on military operations in Europe, and especially on the ground war there, does
not offer a comprehensive explanation for why the democracies unexpectedly, if belatedly,
passed the test. There is after all, the Pacific theater, as well as the sea and the skies, to consider.
Yet the fact that the United States (and Britain) met and defeated the best army in the world, in
its own element and on its own soil, seems somehow peculiarly decisive and therefore worth
close study. (Atkinson quotes a British military maxim, “he who has not fought the Germans
does not know war.”) The United States might have adopted a more distant strategy, supplying
those who resisted the Germans (and Japanese) and enforcing an air and naval blockade of the
Eurasian continent, while avoiding the costs and risks of introducing an expeditionary force into
Europe. The United States, following this strategy, could have sat back and waited, perhaps for
decades, for Germany to succumb to internal fissures and to unending war against the Soviets or
their successors. It did not do so because that it seemed imperative to defeat Germany directly
and as quickly as possible, to limit the long-term damage to civilization and to demonstrate that
courage and competence of the democracies.
The United States, to be sure, could not have beaten the Germans on land (or the fanatical
Japanese on innumerable islands in the Pacific) at acceptable cost without first controlling the
sea and the skies. Further, the task would have been much more difficult or even impossible if
the Soviets had not destroyed much of the cream of the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. Soviet
forces killed roughly nine times more Germans than the United States and Britain combined.
The Red Army suffered more combat deaths at Stalingrad alone than the U.S. armed forces did
in the entire war. As a result, the Soviets claimed as a matter of right and power the ability to
control the post-war fates of lands and peoples they had conquered, even against their will.
But the United States too had its claims, staked out by the U.S. Army. From 1942-1945, and
particularly 1944-1945, America had demonstrated the ability to fight and to hold and acquire
territory, something that its navy and air force (and later its atomic arsenal) could not alone
achieve. The United States paid the price, not only in terms of its treasure but also through its
blood, military competence, and tenacity, to become a power in Europe (and Asia) and to
organize the democracies against new security threats. The United States, at the invitation of its
allies, soon stationed large contingents of ground forces in Western Europe to support this claim.
It deployed its army and marines to fight in Korea and Vietnam (however unfortunate the latter
turned out to be) and later in the Middle East and Central Asia. There are those who think this
was a major mistake; that an army in being, deployed forward, is much more dangerous to the
soul of a democracy than a distant army at dawn. Atkinson certainly nods in that direction. “If
the war had dispelled American isolationism, it also encouraged American exceptionalism, as
well as a penchant for military solutions and a self-regard that led some to label their epoch ‘the
American century.’
13
In any case, the possibility of a new American grand strategy that included the deployment and
use of ground forces in Eurasia, was made possible by a successful wartime grand strategy
founded on an effective political-military alliance. Atkinson writes:
The cohesion and internal coherence of the Allied coalition had assured victory: the
better alliance had won. Certainly it was possible to look at Allied war-making on any
given day and feel heartsick at the missed opportunities and purblind personalities and
wretched wastage, to wonder why the ranks could not be braver or at least cleverer,
smarter or at least shrewder, prescient or at least intuitive. Yet despite its foibles, the
Allied way of war won through, with systems that were, as the historian Richard Overy
would write, “centralized, unified, and coordinated,” quite unlike Axis systems. In
contrast to the Axis autocracy, Allied leadership included checks and balances to temper
arbitrary willfulness and personal misjudgment.
The Anglo-American confederation was the core of the democratic anti-Axis coalition. It
amounted, Atkinson notes, to “a strategic symbiosis: British prudence in 1942 and 1943,
eventually yielding to American audacity in 1944 and 1945.” The British were right in their
assessment that the United States need time to learn the intricacies of ground warfare; the
Americans were right that the Germans would have to be defeated where they lived, as soon as
feasible..
This symbiosis was hardly a natural one. Atkinson documents fully the genuine strategic
disagreements between the British and Americans commanders but also the pettiness, egotism,
and outright acts of sabotage that threatened the alliance. Yet, as Churchill said, “There is only
one thing worse than fighting with allies, and that is fighting without them.” (De Gaulle and the
Free French, whose commitment to democracy was uncertain, put that aphorism to the test; they
believed it their duty to be dissatisfied.) The alliance worked, however, not simply because of
logic and necessity but primarily because both nations had visionary Great Captains who
understood its importance and who worked tireless to see that it succeeded. Atkinson, with his
nose close to the war on the ground, does not much discuss this point. Churchill is portrayed as a
fairly ridiculous figure, although a source for good quotes; Roosevelt is even more distant,
except for a relatively brief appearance at Yalta.
Churchill, in fact, made the alliance something more than happy words on paper. He had long
appreciated the need for close Anglo-American cooperation, going back to the final stages of
World War I. He cultivated Roosevelt in 1939-1940, while the latter maintained a stand-offish
position. He accepted the fact that growing American power increasingly gave Washington the
dominant say in the relationship and, in contrast with the French, he sought to advise and temper
that power rather than to threaten to break with it. Churchill did so in the belief that Western
civilization and democracy depended on that special relationship, forged in blood on the
battlefield, to win the war and beyond, (For this, Churchill would be excoriated by the left and
right in his home land for sacrificing Britain to the upstart, money-grubbing Yanks.)
Roosevelt’s story is more complicated. At times he seemed as determined to destroy the British
Empire as he was those of Germany and Japan – yet he took for granted that British power would
be available to support his plan for a post-war security system. He was arguably naïve about the
14
long-term threat posed by Stalin. He was determined to use the war as a means to move the
country further to the left, to support the implementation of an economic bill of rights. Yet like
Churchill, he provided unquestioned leadership and inspiration that allowed his nation to endure
the strain and heartache of war and to make sense of the sacrifices it was asked to make. His
geopolitical vision was of the first order, even if it had later to be modified significantly to
account for events. It is impossible to think of anyone on the American political spectrum who
could have approached his standing with the public or with an international audience. \
To be sure, democracies cannot count on enlightened statesmen always being at the helm. Yet it
is reassuring to know that democracies can and do produce such men, and can and do identify
and empower them. So far there seems to have been an almost providential coincidence of great
men with great political-military crises, such that constitutional governments have survived and
advanced. At the same time, we know that enlightened statesmen are neither infallible nor
immortal. Rightly constituted democracies, like rightly constructed alliances, have the sort of
internal checks and balances that prevent executive excesses (to which FDR was prone) and to
help steer the ship of state, in ordinary times, more or less on the proper course.
The pattern of an American-led democratic alliance persisted successfully after the war, even if
things did not always go smoothly. The United States typically got what it really thought it
needed out of the relationship; but it usually went to the limit to make concessions to its partners,
especially when national pride was at stake. Democratic alliances – at least under strong
leadership – seem to demonstrate the resilience and flexibility that failed the Axis, and
subsequent arrangements among tyrannical governments. Whether those traits can persist if a
democratic alliance follows a more equitable model, without strong leadership by one nation;
and whether democratic alliances can be sustained in the face of post-industrial war, are open
questions.
One might renew the objection that there was another, more successful partner in World War II
that made no pretense of liberalism – Stalin and Soviet communism – and that therefore we
cannot simply award the palm of victory to an alliance of democracies. If democracy passed the
test of modern industrial war, one might argue, it did so only by cribbing off the sheet of a more
capable student.
Even granting the point about the Soviet contribution to the war effort, it should be noted that
Atkinson and other scholars have demonstrated that Stalin hardly won the war by himself and
thus proved the military and strategic superiority of the leftist version of totalitarianism.
American logistical aid to the USSR, maintained over vast distances despite enemy opposition
(and in some cases, Soviet obstinacy), was critical to the Red Army. The American and British
strategic bombing campaigns had a major effect on German industrial production and
transportation network, which aided the Eastern and well as the Western front. They also
destroyed the Luftwaffe as an effective fighting force, such that the Soviets enjoyed air
superiority for their ground campaigns. This was done at tremendous cost: a British Tommy in
the trenches in World War I stood a better chance of survival than an RAF bomber crewmember.
The British-American ground offensives in North Africa, Italy, and France distracted the
Germans and drew off significant forces that otherwise could have been deployed in the East.
15
Hitler’s last great gamble on the Western front – the Ardennes offensive – consumed most of
Germany’s remaining reserves and opened the door to the great Soviet winter offensive, which
took the Red Army to the gates of Berlin. It is certainly fair to conclude that if the British had
gone down in 1940 and the Americans had stayed out, the Soviets would have lost the war when
Hitler turned on them. That worst case scenario aside, if the British and Americans had not
fought as well as they did, Stalin would probably have faced a stalemate in the east – and Hitler
was unlikely to have given him a diplomatic way out.
The British-American alliance with Stalin demonstrates that democracies can use military
alliances, or cooperative arrangements, with less-than-savory regimes to accomplish morally
defensible objectives as well as strategic ends. They can also successfully discard or modify
those connections when circumstances change, although the transition can be difficult if the
virtues of “Uncle Joe” (or Chairman Mao) are excessively touted in order to bring democratic
public opinion along.
In addition to the virtues of far-sighted and inspiring leadership and well-crafted alliances, we
might explore another commonly-cited factor in America’s victory in World War II: its role as
the “arsenal of democracy.” The great American industrial base, which had been substantially
idled by the Great Depression, was partially converted to military use. Cranked into full gear, it
produced staggering amounts of hardware and supplies. Atkinson’s narrative offers a chronicle
of the dominance of America’s material contribution. “I’m letting the American taxpayer take
this hill,” he quotes one prodigal gunner.
The armed forces had grown 3,500 percent while building 3,000 overseas bases and
depots, and shipping 4.5 tons of matériel abroad for each soldier deployed, plus another
ton each month to sustain him. . . . What Churchill called the American “prodigy of
organization” had shipped 18 million tons of war stuff to Europe, equivalent to the cargo
in 3,600 Liberty ships or 181,000 rail cars: the kit ranged from 800,000 military vehicles
to footwear in sizes 2A to 22EEE. U.S. munitions plants had turned out 40 billion rounds
of small arms ammunition and 56 million grenades. From D-Day to V-E Day, GIs fired
500 million machine-gun bullets and 23 million artillery rounds. By 1945, the United
States had built two-thirds of all ships afloat and was making half of all manufactured
goods in the world, including nearly half of all armaments. The enemy was crushed by
logistical brilliance, firepower, mobility, mechanical aptitude, and an economic
juggernaut that produced much, much more of nearly everything than Germany could –
bombers, bombs, fighters, transport planes, mortars, machine guns, trucks – yet the war
absorbed barely one-third of the American gross domestic product, a smaller proportion
than that of any major belligerent.
It is an interesting question whether this prodigy of production can be attributed to the strengths
of capitalism (whether of a free-market or corporatist variety) or to the fortunate geographic
circumstance that the American industrial base was outside of the war zone. The Soviets, by
shifting factories deeper into the interior, managed to maintain a significant industrial base of
their own. Paul Kennedy suggests in his recent book, Engineers of Victory¸ that it was the
British-American ability to adapt and modify existing products and to use these creatively –
rather than the creation of new wonder weapons or the sheer volume of production – which made
16
the critical difference. It surely goes too far simply to do a total up the GNP of the Allies and the
Axis and conclude that the victory of the former was inevitable.
In any case, the sheer volume of American production should not obscure the fact that there were
shortfalls in some critical areas. These included gasoline, heavy ammunition and, of all things,
winter gear, including properly-sized boots (trench foot probably disabled as many soldiers as
German bullets). Allied commanders overlooked the means necessary to secure vital port
facilities (particularly Antwerp) against determined German resistance. Logistics often
succeeded through brute force rather than brilliance – pounding a round peg into a square hole
enough times to make it work just well enough.
Nor should we look to the military brilliance of the Allied high command as a principal
explanation for battlefield success, at least according to Atkinson’s account. There were
certainly a number of outstanding combat commanders up to and including the division level, but
many duds – too many – as well. High-level generalship was, in Atkinson’s opinion, dull and
uninspired – and remarkably vain and eccentric, and not in a good way. This deeply flawed
roster includes Eisenhower, for all his virtues as an alliance leader and, to put it bluntly, as a
politician. Those virtues were necessary, to be sure, along with a cool head and a determination
not to act rashly. It is hard to argue that there was anyone better suited than Eisenhower to the
job of keeping his remarkably factious subordinates in line and pointed in the same direction.
This juggling act required compromises, however, for both national and personal reasons, and
compromises seldom lead to optimum results on the battlefield.
Atkinson finds no such excuses for the vaunted commanders at the next step down, particularly
Montgomery and Bradley, or for those in special lines such as logistics and intelligence.
(Atkinson can’t quite decide about Patton – he thinks he was probably the best of the Army-level
commanders but his overall reputation is much too high.) Among other failings, senior
commanders seemed to lack the ability to think and plan one move beyond the current situation,
if things did not evolve as expected (whether for the better or the worse). Even those whom
Atkinson praises, such as Lieutenant Generals Jacob Devers and William Simpson, made their
share of seemingly obvious mistakes.
For those of us who are armchair generals, this should serve as a reminder that being a real
general, especially dealing with the pressures and uncertainties of high command, must be a hard
task, indeed. But in light of Thomas Ricks’ book on The Generals, which takes the story through
current times, it does not seem that democracies can rely upon a natural succession of superior
commanders. Nor have we yet developed a sure means of identifying, training, and promoting
those who do show promise.
That leaves us with the Bands of Brothers, the ordinary American G.I. and his immediate
leaders. Atkinson chronicles in considerable detail the hard slog, with precious few moments of
glory and sunshine, which marked the often-short life and times of the infantrymen. He offers
little direct reflection on how and why they did as well (or as poorly) as they did. One can draw
the conclusion that they were, or became, tough and competent enough to deal effectively with a
combination of still-formidable Germans, fortifications, difficult terrain, awful weather, supply
difficulties, and the tactical vagaries of combat. They undoubtedly excelled on those relatively
17
rare occasions when mechanized, mobile operations were possible – war fit for soldiers with
“machinery in their souls,” as John Steinbeck wrote. But in the Battle of the Bulge, as at Anzio
and Salerno, they also proved they could fight outnumbered and on the defensive. American
soldiers were the master of firepower (as he had been since the Revolution) and they developed
considerable combined arms competence. Some institutional memory and learning in the ranks
must have developed. The Hollywood-idealized grizzled sergeant who took his men from
Morocco to Berlin was very rare indeed;. The real item would have been killed, wounded, or
rotated out of combat.
So: the American soldier, collectively, was tough and competent, enough to get the job done.
He would have had no apologies to make to his Russian counterpart. But why did he fight – for
the liberation of oppressed peoples, for democracy, for hearth and home, for self-respect?
Because of peer pressure or because he had no choice? Are democratic armies more motivated
to fight than those of other types of regimes? Here the evidence is sketchy and open to different
interpretations. The American government and the armed forces tried to offer a coherent
explanation to the troops, through vehicles such as the documentary series “Why We Fight”
(directed by Frank Capra) and through various publications and seminars. Atkinson cites a study
of American soldiers in Britain, taken just before D-Day; more than one-third of the troops
doubted whether the war was worth fighting, a figure that had doubled since July 1943 (but
which would rise no higher).
Near the end of the war, Eisenhower and other senior commanders examined the just-liberated
Ohrdruf concentration camp, a satellite of Buchenwald. Patton vomited at the sight of its
horrors. Ike remarked to the troops: “We are told that the American soldier does not know what
he is fighting for. Now at least he will know what he is fighting against.” The fact that the
Senior Allied Commander still had to frame the matter in such a way suggests that “the cause”
was still unclear to many.
Yet it is fair to say that the majority of American soldiers – whether in France and Germany,
Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan – typically become vested in their cause, even if they have
become cynical about military life and are well past celebrating the glories of war. They
typically believe their war is winnable and that good is being done for the locals. This may not
exactly be the cause for which the political leadership went to war. But it is hard to think that the
typical solider in the Wehrmacht or the Red Army thought like this or that it is merely
imperialism in another guise..
Atkinson raises the question of whether war, even a necessary war like this one, inherently
debases the men and women who fight in it, thereby debasing democratic society as a whole.
His typically offers a mixed judgment. He notes that incidents of combat fatigue – shell-shock to
an earlier generation, post-traumatic stress to a later one – were widespread and often poorly
treated or even understood. American troops deserted in not insignificant numbers, raped
civilians, shot Germans presumably trying to surrender, and occasionally went berserk or
attempted to impose their own sense of justice on concentration camp guards. Plundering MPs
became known as the “Lootwaffe.” A soldier in the 45th Infantry Division judged that a “typical
infantry squad involved two shooting and twelve looting.” These incidents were often covered
up by the brass, despite pious edicts from on-high. “Honor and dishonor often traveled in trace
18
across the battlefield . . . even a liberator could come home stained if not befouled,” Atkinson
writes. (Some recent scholars have attempted to equate this with the systematic campaign of
violence against noncombatants in the east, as a way of excusing the Soviets, without quite
explaining why German civilians invariably tried to flee west.)
Yet Atkinson notes that many participants regarded the experience of war, awful as it was, as the
high point of their lives. J. Glenn Gray, an Army officer and writer, called it “the one great lyric
passage in their lives.” Atkinson quotes an Army Air Forces crewman who completed fifty
bomber missions: “Never did I feel so much alive. Never did the earth and all of the
surroundings look so bright and sharp.” A combat engineer reflected: “What we had together
was something awfully damned good, something I don’t think we’ll ever have again as long as
we live.” War correspondent Alan Moorehead believed that “here and there a man found
greatness in himself.”
The anti-aircraft gunner in a raid and the boy in a landing barge really did feel at
moments that the thing they were doing was a clear and definite good, the best they could
do. And at those moments there was a surpassing satisfaction, a sense of exactly and
entirely fulfilling one’s life. . . . This thing, the brief ennoblement, kept recurring again
and again up to the end, and it refreshed and lighted the whole heroic and sordid story.
Those of us who were not in this nor any other war should refrain from highlighting excessively
such sentiments. We can, however, reflect on the larger political and social effects of this
particular conflict. These effects, intentional or not, do not seem to indicate that democracies are
necessarily debased by war, even if democracies should not seek out war for its own sake, or for
any sake other than the strategic and moral matter at hand.
The war was a potent catalyst for social change across the republic. New technologies –
jets, computers, ballistic missiles, penicillin – soon spurred vibrant new industries, which
in turn encouraged the migration of black workers from south to north, and of all peoples
to the emerging west. The GI Bill put millions of soldiers into college classrooms,
spurring unprecedented social mobility. Nineteen million American women had entered
the workplace by war’s end; although they quickly reverted to traditional antebellum
roles – the percentage working in 1947 was hardly higher than it had been in 1940 – that
genie would not remain back in the bottle forever. The modest experiment in racially
integrating infantry battalions ended when the war did, despite nearly universal
agreement that black riflemen had performed ably and in harmony with their white
comrades. A presidential order in 1948 would be required to desegregate the military,
and much more than that would be needed to reverse three centuries of racial oppression
in America. But tectonic plates had begun to shift.
“Glad to be home,” Atkinson quotes an African-American soldier from Chicago, as his troopship
sailed into New York harbor. “Proud of my country, as irregular as it is. Determined it could be
better.”
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Atkinson's Liberation Trilogy: An Army at Dawn in North Africa

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Atkinson's Liberation Trilogy: An Army at Dawn in North Africa

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Rick Atkinson’s

The Liberation Trilogy

Atkinson’s “The Liberation Trilogy”

An Army at Dawn: The War In North Africa, 1942-1943 (2002)

Throughout the campaign, Allied commanders consistently underestimated German resolve.

[Reprinted by permission of the Claremont Review of Books]

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