The Guns at Last Light - Book Three of The Liberation Trilogy by Rick Atkinson (book review)

In 2002, Rick Atkinson, a former staff writer and senior editor at the Washington Post, published the best-selling An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943, Volume One of the Liberation Trilogy. Critically acclaimed as “the best World War II battle narrative since Cornelius Ryan’s classics, The Longest Day and A Bridge Too Far,”* An Army at Dawn won the Pulitzer Prize in history the following year. In An Army at Dawn, the author covers the trials and tribulations of the inexperienced U.S. Army and its allies in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia as they sought to eject German and Italian forces from North Africa. 

Five years later, Atkinson continued the saga of the Anglo-American campaigns against Nazi Germany inThe Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944.  Again, Atkinson’s account of the long and almost forgotten Mediterranean ventures against what Winston Churchill called “the soft underbelly of the Axis” earned critical and commercial success. The New York Times’ reviewer hailed The Day of Battle as "a triumph of narrative history, elegantly written, thick with unforgettable description and rooted in the sights and sounds of battle." 

In both books, Atkinson explores every aspect of the Western Allies’ military and political campaigns to defeat Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Italy. The campaigns in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy are revealed to have been a result of compromises and disagreement between the American and British high commands rather than, as the mythology of the time had it, a unified grand plan devised in unanimous accord. 

Now, at long last, Atkinson raises the curtain on the final act of World War II in Europe with The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945. 
  
The Guns at Last Light begins where The Day of Battle left off. As Allied forces continue their slow and painful advance up the Italian peninsula, most of the Anglo-American armies are gathering in Great Britain for the D-Day invasion of France. Many of the generals who commanded forces in the Mediterranean (Eisenhower, Bradley, Patton, and Montgomery) have been transferred to London to plan and carry out Operation OVERLORD, the cross-Channel assault to open the long-awaited Second Front that Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin has been demanding since 1942. 

As Atkinson reminds us, Stalin has grown suspicious of Allied intentions in regard to fighting Hitler’s legions. For nearly three years, the Soviet Union has borne the brunt of the war against the Third Reich. Most of Germany’s army is fighting on the Eastern Front, and the Anglo-American efforts in the Mediterranean have only drawn off a handful of Nazi divisions. From his perspective, Stalin believes that the staunchly anticommunist Churchill has convinced President Franklin Roosevelt to carry out a peripheral (and minimal) effort in a non-critical theater while the Red Army is bled dry by German forces. 

The Americans, too, are eager to mount Operation OVERLORD, especially since they, too, believe Britain’s Mediterranean strategy is intended solely to protect her imperial interests in the Middle East and India. Since 1942, U.S. generals have clamored for a cross-Channel assault against German forces in Western Europe. For two years, Churchill and the British high command  have resisted such a venture, pointing out the disparities between Allied military prowess and that of the enemy. 

But by June 1944, the massive buildup of American, British and other Allied forces has tilted the scales of military power in the West to favor the U.S. strategic point of view. With millions of American soldiers, airmen, and sailors stationed in the British Isles under the command of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, a reluctant Churchill finally admits that he’s “hardening toward this enterprise.”    

The Guns at Last Light begins, naturally, with the invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944 and covers the last 11 months of World War II in Western Europe. In its 896 pages, Atkinson covers the famous – and infamous – battles which marked the campaign to liberate Europe from Hitler’s tyrannical rule: Normandy, the race to the Rhine, Operation MARKET-GARDEN, the Huertgen Forest, and the Battle of the Bulge. 

As in the other volumes of the Liberation Trilogy, Atkinson’s prose paints a dramatic portrait of war in all its aspects. The author not only covers the Big Picture of politics and grand strategy; he also delves into poignant details about day-to-day life in wartime Europe: 


Privation lay on the land like another odor. British men could buy a new shirt every twenty months. Housewives twisted pipe cleaners into hair clips. Iron railings and grillwork had long been scrapped for the war effort; even cemeteries stood unfenced. Few shoppers could find a fountain pen or a wedding ring, or bedsheets, vegetable peelers, shoelaces. Posters discouraged profligacy with depictions of the “Squander Bug,” a cartoon rodent with swastika pockmarks. Classified advertisements included pleas in the Times of London for “unwanted artificial teeth” and cash donations to help wounded Russian war horses. An ad for Chez-Vous household services promised “bombed upholstery and carpets cleaned.” 
  
Other government placards advised, “Food is a munition. Don’t waste it.” Rationing had begun in June 1940 and would not end completely until 1954. The monthly cheese allowance now stood at two ounces per citizen. Many children had never seen a lemon; vitamin C came from “turnip water.” The Ministry of Food promoted “austerity bread,” with a whisper of sawdust, and “victory coffee,” brewed from acorns. “Woolton pie,” a concoction of carrots, potatoes, onions, and flour, was said to lie “like cement upon the chest.” For those with strong palates, no ration limits applied to sheep’s head, or to eels caught in local reservoirs, or to roast cormorant, a stringy substitute for poultry. 

Atkinson is adept at sketching vivid personality profiles of the commanders and the men they led to battle. Gen. Lucian Truscott, a corps commander in Operation DRAGOON, was a former schoolteacher and a voracious bibliophile “who renounced strong drink, tobacco, and profanity, he eventually was promoted to principal. Yet not until he joined the Army and won a cavalry officer’s commission in 1917, at age twenty-two, did he find his true calling. Slowly ascending through the ranks between the wars, Truscott won admirers for both his professional competence and his skills as a polo player. Army life also put rough edges on the former teacher, who soon drank, smoked, and swore profusely.” 

The Guns at Last Light is not only painstakingly researched and informative, it’s also a highly enjoyable read. Atkinson knows how to organize a strong narrative and not bog it down with dry facts and monotonous generalities. His style is lively, full of wry irony and even a poetic lyricism that rivals the works of Stephen E. Ambrose, Antony Beevor, and Max Hastings. The scale of his narrative is monumental, yet Atkinson never loses sight of the war-weary ordinary soldiers or the terrified civilians caught in World War II’s tragic maelstrom. 

* The Wall Street Journal

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