The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy)

The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy) | Rick Atkinson | Deserves Another Pulitzer Prize!

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The Day of Battle:...

	The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy) Rick Atkinson Henry Holt and Co., 2007 - 791 pages average customer review:based on 83 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

An Historical Tour de Force

This detailed, superbly written, meticulously documented account of the aftermath of the victory in North Africa is invaluable. We can clearly see the shift from a British effort to an Allied effort dominated by the Americans, with all the consequences..intended and unintended... spelled out. A magnificent contribution to the literature.

Deserves Another Pulitzer Prize!

This is an exceptinally written and researched book. It is even more deserving of a Pulitzer than his "An Army at Dawn". His rich and detailed descriptions of the battle scenes in Sicily and in Italy constitute masterful writing at its best. The depicted realism and inherent saddness of the Italian campaign is both haunting and overpowering. He has set an extraordinarily high standard for the third part of his trilogy dealing with the war in Western Europe.
Thomas.E. Davis

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A Masterpiece

This is a fabulous work of military history about a battle that most, including myself, know little about. One of the earlier reviewers suggests that Atkinson stopped after the Allies took Rome because he was eager to write about the Normandy campaign in the "trimphalist" vein of Stephen Ambrose. Without getting into the question of whether Ambrose himself was a unduly triumphalist (which I dispute), I find it hard to believe after reading The Day of Battle that Atkinson intends to simply celebrate the Allied triumph. Throughout the book, Atkinson pulls no punches harshly criticizing the Allied commanders for what, in many cases, was basic incompetence in continuing to make direct frontal assaults against heavily entrenched positions. It's pretty clear that the Allies won the Italian campaign (and, by extension, the entire war in Western Europe) largely by outproducing and outgunning the Germans and certainly not through any strategic or tactical mastery. Granted that the Germans were an extremely difficult foe fighting in perfect defensive terrain, it is simply infuriating to read about the waste of lives caused by lack of strategic or tactical sublety, with a few exceptions, on the part of the various Allied generals, from Mark Clark on down. In this regard, this book follows the work of Max Hastings in making the case that Germany was far superior to the Allies as a fighting force. As a corrollary, one might also suggest that it is time to rethink the canard that the Soviets won the war in the East simply by throwing human waves at the Germans while the Allies won through superior tactics. That is clearly not true.

This book is not triumphalist except in the sense that Atkinson is clearly glad that the Allies defeated a bestial enemy. There is no glory in war; there is only suffering and tragedy both for the soldiers and for the civilians caught in the middle. Many people like to speak of World War II elegiacally as a time when America was unified and so forth, conveniently forgetting the utter horror of the war (although not so much in the United States itself). People that are eager to extol the virtues in war and send our soldiers off to fight and die need to read books like this and take a second look.

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In the Crucible of War...

Rick Atkinson's "The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944" is excellent narrative history in the outstanding tradition of Bruce Catton and Shelby Foote. Atkinson, like his predecessors, brings his fine writing skills, honed by 20 years as a journalist, to this, the second volume of his Liberation Trilogy.

"The Day of Battle" picks up roughly where "An Army at Dawn" left off, with Allied forces triumphant in North Africa and looking for their next military objective. As Atkinson recounts, American leader were talked out of an immediate try at an invasion of Northwest Europe by their more seasoned British colleagues. With a cross-channel attack pushed back to the summer of 1944, Sicily became the next logical objective.

The seaborne and airborne invasion of Sicily showed how much experience the Allies still lacked. The invasion was chaotic and the number of deaths from friendly fire was scandalous. Rivalries between the British Eighth Army under Montgomery and the US Seventh Army under Patton threatened at times to undermine the campaign. The Germans themselves staged a tough and costly defense of Sicily, a feat they would replicate when the Allies extended their campaign to the Italian mainland.

The record of the Allied campaign in Italy would be written in blood and frustration. The theater was progressively bled of troops to support OVERLORD in Northern France and DRAGOON in Southern France in 1944. The 15th Army Group of General Alexander slugged their way up the Italian Peninsula over difficult terrain through horrendous weather, usually with insufficient forces to decisively defeat their stubborn German opponents. What should have been 15th Army Group's moment of triumph, the seizure of Rome in June 1944, was overshadowed by D-Day in Normandy.

Atkinson has done a superb job blending accounts from the foxhole level to the battles of the generals to achieve a largely seamless narrative that captures the essentials of the campaigns in Sicily and Italy. Much of the narrative inevitably revolves around divisional, corps, and army commanders who made, or failed to make, critical decisions on the conduct of the war. Some failed the test of combat; many who succeeded were less than attractive as human beings.

Atkinson devotes some space to the argument, still ongoing half a century on, over the value of the Mediterranean theater in the Second World War, perhaps most precisely put by Douglas Porch in "The Path to Victory". Atkinson seems to agree that the campaigns in Sicily and Italy played a vital role in pinning down and attriting Axis forces while hardening the mass conscript armies of the Allies.

This book is very highly recommended as a superb example of a narrative history of the Second World War.

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The Human Price of War

I originally purchased this book to give to my fourteen-year-old grandson who is an excellent reader and is very interested in wars. (Unfortunately, he is into reading "alternate history" books.) Also, I planned to read it myself first to determine if would be appropriate for him. Another interest I had in the book was to learn more about the "drive to Rome." My late brother was wounded in that campaign.

I found the book very thorough and, at times, rather confusing because of the many, many details. I feel the book could have been better organized. The human interest stories were good. Some seemed out of context. Rick Atkinson did a superb job of depicting the horror of war and the terrible toll taken on all who fought and died in the Italian campaign. Some of the reading came close to bringing me to tears when I think of what my brother, Sgt. Virlyn Martin, and all the men and women went through.

I recommend the book for those who are willing to invest the time and emotions involved in reading it. If you are interested in the human price of war, this is the book for you.

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