An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa 1942-1943 (Book One of The Liberation Trilogy) - Book review

www.liberationtrilogy.com

For as long as I can remember, I've been interested in almost every aspect of the Second World War, partly because movies such as The Sands of Iwo Jima made the war seem like an exciting adventure with "good guys" and "bad guys,' but more importantly because as I grew older I realized that even though wars aren't something to be longed for, the conflict between the Allies and the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Axis was one of the few justified clashes of arms of modern history, even if some of its causes were the result of bad decisions made by the victors of World War I.

As I've grown older, I've noticed that non-fiction books about World War II have evolved from the almost propaganda-like the Anglo-American Allies fought a brilliant campaign of liberation from 1942 to 1945 with an unprecedented spirit of cooperation and strategic savvy to the more realistic view of while the western alliance was one of the most successful coalitions in history, the wartime picture of "cordial coordination" belies deep divisions between the American and British, not only at the strategic level but also on a personal one.

In An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943, former Washington Post staff writer and senior editor Rick Atkinson explores how Anglo-American arguments over how to best defeat Adolf Hitler's Third Reich resulted in a compromise: the Americans would defer on insisting on an early cross-Channel attack into France in 1942 or 1943 and use U.S. forces in North Africa instead, while the British - reluctantly, agreed to commit to an invasion of Europe later on. The result: Operation TORCH, the first Anglo-American landings on hostile shores, designed to bring Vichy France into the Allied camp and squeeze German and Italian forces in a great pincers movement between Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower's seaborne invaders on the Morocco-Algeria coast and Gen. Bernard L. Montgomery's British Eighth Army advancing across Libya after his decisive victory over Erwin Rommel at El Alamein.

Just as he did in Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War, Atkinson delves into every aspect of the North African campaign, ranging from the lofty heights of Eisenhower's strategic level to the bloody, rock-and-sand, fire-and-maneuver, duck-and-cover existence of the GIs and Tommies who endured the six-month campaign to drive the Germans and Italians from the shores of North Africa.

In the Pulitzer Prize-winning first installment of The Liberation Trilogy, we see just how much the U.S. Army and its commanders had to grow between the daring landings on the beaches of French Morocco and Algeria and the climactic D-Day landings on June 6, 1944.

For instance, readers who are more familiar with Ike as the cool, decisive Supreme Allied Commander in Northwest Europe will be surprised by how unprepared he was for the political aspects of waging a coalition campaign. It's in North Africa where he is first frustrated by the Byzantine squabbles between Charles De Gaulle and his erstwhile opponents of the Vichy French regime, and it is during the march to Axis-occupied Tunisia that the sometimes bitter rivalry between British and American generals comes to the fore.

It's also in this campaign that American troops have to undergo their baptism by fire at the hands of "the Desert Fox," Field Marshal Rommel. Although physically ill and exhausted after a 1,000 mile retreat across the Sahara, Rommel nevertheless gives the green infantrymen and tankers of the U.S. II Corps a bloody nose at the infamous Battle of Kasserine Pass in February 1943.

To be sure, Kasserine only gave the Axis a brief respite, and the GIs began to fight like true soldiers in the months that followed, in part because leaders like George Patton and Omar Bradley took the reins of command, but mostly because "they had learned to hate" the Germans.

Although this book is not light and breezy reading - no book about war ever is - it is well-written in a very descriptive and reader-friendly style. Atkinson uses his reporter's skills to provide concrete details - such as how many people died each minute during World War II and part of the lyrics to Dirty Gertie From Bizerte - weaving a literary tapestry that includes political intrigue, high-level strategy, vivid personality profiles that reveal the virtues and flaws of American and British commanders, plus humorous and not-so-humorous anecdotes depicting America's army as it transformed itself from an inexperienced and sometimes inefficient fighting force into the battle-hardened backbone of the force that liberated Western Europe from Nazi domination.