The Italian campaign was the battlefront that most resembled the battles of World War I, armies flinging themselves at each other again and again over the same ground.Ītkinson juxtaposes the fighting for inches with the grave realities of Allied war-making politics and how much blood was spilled because of clashing egos. Atkinson paints Clark as so obsessed with capturing Rome himself that he pondered turning his own guns on the British if he thought they would enter the city ahead of him.Īt the heart of The Day of Battle, though, is the foot soldier, the men pinned down at Anzio, the troops sent relentlessly into fortified German lines.
Mark Clark, commander of the American Fifth Army in Italy. George Patton retreated nightly to a castle in Palermo while needlessly risking his troops to beat the British to Messina.īut Patton’s ego seems tame compared to that of Gen. The contradictions, of course, are clear.
He also paints it in all its dimensions, from the individual courage and carnage of the front line to the blundering commanders miles to the rear. Relying on military histories and documents, the private letters and diaries of generals and front-line soldiers, news accounts and interviews, Atkinson creates a seamless, stunning narrative that is the equal of An Army at Dawn and keeps him apace, upon publication of the trilogy’s third volume, to have written the seminal account of the Allied land war against the Third Reich.Ītkinson’s success lies in his ability to render bare war’s wretched realities in astounding prose. I, An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943, won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for history.) In The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1994, Rick Atkinson offers the second volume of his Liberation Trilogy, and traces those inches in agonizing, brilliant detail. For the rest of the war, well past D-Day, they climbed the boot, inch by torturous inch. In July 1943, American and British armies landed on Sicily and began pushing the Germans north and east and were shortly in Italy proper. Having swept the Axis out of Northern Africa in May 1943, the Allies found themselves more than a year away from the expected invasion of Western Europe.Īs fighting raged in the east, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin pleaded and demanded that the United States and Britain open an immediate second front, lest all the Nazi blood being spilled was matched only by that of the Red Army. Italy, where 23,501 Americans and an estimated 48,000 Germans died in battle, is the forgotten theater of World War II.
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