This is the middle of Atkinson's trilogy on the U.S. military offensive in the European theater of operations in World War II. The trilogy began with An Army at Dawn (which won a Pulitzer) about the November 1942 invasion of North Africa, and after this book proceeds to the Normandy landings. Justice Bailey Moseley lent me the audiobook for this one, and I just finished it.
As I was promised, Atkinson can flat write - his language is outstanding and a pleasure to read. My only quibble would be that the adjective "sanguinary" should only be used once to refer to how much bloodshed a unit suffered - but the author uses it repeatedly. Once is clever, more than once - even in the same book - is too cute with a serious subject. You can reuse "bloody" but not "sanguinary," in my opinion.
That point aside, the chief problem with the book is the campaign it documents. I knew very little about the Italian campaign prior to listening to it. While I now know the facts of the campaign - the who, where, when and what - I still don't know the why. Nor, really does Atkinson. The American high command never wanted to go into Italy, as the British did, and were eventually dragged into the campaign largely by the inertia of having an army finishing up the North African campaign with nothing to do for the next year until the invasion of France could begin. The ostensible reason for the campaign was to knock Italy out of the war (which the invasion of Sicily accomplished in a nice corner pocket shot) although why that was a war aim given the ineptitude (and exhaustion) of the Italian war effort at that stage, I am not certain. The secondary reason for the campaign was to tie up German resources so they could not be used in France when the invasion came in 1944, but in a damning admission (at least I think it was) Atkinson's epilogue nowhere noted whether the resources the Germans devoted to Italy justified the forces the Allies invested, and lost (although he makes a great point that effect in aiding Russia probably justified the operation - American and British forces simply could not just sit idle for a year waiting for Andrew Higgins to build boats while Russia was suffering casualties in the millions). Italy was a terrible place for offensive operations, Atkinson narrates, and a miserable one was well, which I already knew from many years' familiarity with Bill Mauldin's Wille and Joe. The sheer size of the misery and bloodshed was new to me, though, as were the fairly negative details of the U.S. commander Gen. Mark Clark that Atkinson provides. (Atkinson's character details are magnificent - even Patton apparently had some redeeming personal characteristics, although Montgomery still awaits a complimentary observation - probably deservedly so).
One thing I would have been interested in, and Atkinson only deals with it obliquely was towards the end of the book, where he does credit the campaign with seasoning and training the American military in modern military operations. The North African campaign can in many particulars (I look forward to reading his book, but I know a bit about it already) be portrayed as on-the-job training for the U.S. military, especially the Army, and it was replete with fiascos in both operations, leadership, logistics, planning - you name it, at some point it went wrong (something of a European version of Tarawa but far larger and lengthier). The best part of the book for me is where Atkinson provides a thorough explanation of the many variations of the acronymn SNAFU that were in common use at this stage to describe the indescribable acts of incompetence that were commonplace at the beginning of the campaign, from the individual soldier all the way up to the way Roosevelt and Churchill managed the war effort. I'm not saying everything was bad, by any means - just that the U.S. simply had no experience in managing a military operation of this size and it took time and a lot of mistakes to work things out. In the Pacific carrier operations, new admirals sometimes got to watch their predecessors for a few weeks in what was called "makee learn" and that to some extent is what was going on here except there weren't predecessors - the initial commanders were learning on the job. But as bad as things were at time, what is indisputable was that America was learning - as competent NCOs and officers were identified and gained experience, and gradually learned better ways of doing things, the SNAFUs grew fewer and smaller in scale, and most importantly, claimed fewer lives, as the American war machine gradually learned to do things better. A good example is airborne operations. The airborne portion of the invasion of Sicily was a phenomenal SNAFU - but when the airborne parachuted into Salerno to support the initial landings only a matter of weeks later, it did so without a glitch. Similarly, amphibious operations - poorly done in North Africa, better but still bad in Sicily, were improved at Salerno and (I think) even more so at Anzio. To what extent this expertise paid off in the Normandy campaign Atkinson does not say clearly, but certainly it must have to some extent.
But Anzio raises the real point - why was the landing made there, and in fact, why was Italy invaded at all? What was the overall strategic goal, and if there was one, was it met? Atkinson makes this crucial question the thesis in his epilogue and to me, did not answer it definitively, giving us essentially Ernie Pyle's take on the invasion, which was that he had to believe that the campaign paid for itself in lives saved in the next great offensive in France - because the thought that it did not meant that all the suffering and the loss was for no reason at all. Again, this misses the larger geopolitical significance of having forces engaged in continental Europe to keep Germany from being able to concentrate against Russia. And I wonder if it doesn't also miss something Atkinson notes FDR said one time to the effect that the goal was as simple as attrition - that Clark was simply following in Grant's footsteps by being willing to sacrifice whatever was available in the name of killing German troops wherever they were found simply to weaken the German war effort.
Again, a very good piece of work, and I recommend it highly. I'm looking forward to reading the prequel and seeing Atkinson's take on the subsequent campaigns.
