A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Pros: Strong narrative, a fine tribute to a theater overshadowed by the Normandy invasion Cons: A bit mawkish at times The Bottom Line: The second entry of The Liberation Trilogy has its literary flaws at times, but it really gives readers a good look at the war in Sicily and Italy. When most people who aren't into military history much or have learned just the basics about World War II in high school history classes think about the war, more likely than not they'll recall the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the D-Day landings on northern France, or the Battle of the Bulge. If they are serious war movie buffs, they might even mention the Battle of the Atlantic (via such films as  The Enemy Below, Das Boot,  or  U-571 ), the Battle of Britain, or the strategic bombing offensive against Germany. If the air war over Gernany, the Battle of the Atlantic and the campaign to liberate Northwest Europe have overshadowed the long, bloody, and often frus

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 in The 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 succe

The Second World War was the largest, bloodiest conflict in history. It was fought on three of the seven continents and involved every major power of the time. Some of the combatant nations (most notably France and Italy) changed sides at least once between 1939 and 1945, and by the time Japan surrendered on Sept. 2, 1945 over 50 million men, women, and children were dead, millions more were wounded and/or uprooted, homeless, and bewildered by the war's effects. Indeed, those of us now living in the early 21st century are still living with the aftermath of World War II; many of the crises we now face can be traced to decisions made during or shortly after the war. John Keegan's The Second World War is a one-volume general history of the 1939-45 conflict, and it should be read more as an introductory text rather than a comprehensive "this-is-the-book-that-explains-the-whole-darned-thing" opus. It's too short (595 pages, not counting the bibliography or i

Although I like to read different types of books about the Second World War, I don’t usually read memoirs written by the participants because (a) most of them are written by generals or politicians, (b) they can be tedious to read and/or (c) the authors have axes to grind or are trying to twist history in order to enhance their reputation at the expense of the truth.  (In other words, they can often be self-serving and even misleading.)  There are other reasons why memoirs don’t attract my attention as a reader in the same fashion as books like Cornelius Ryan’s  A Bridge Too Far  or Stephen E. Ambrose’s  Band of Brothers  do; as historian Ronald H. Spector ( Eagle Against the Sun )  puts it, “Memoirs of wars and politics usually become less interesting with the passage of time.”  Readers who were born a generation after V-E or V-J Day find such works as Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Crusade in Europe  (1948) or Winston Churchill’s six-volume opus  The Second World War  (1948-1953) outdate

Pros: Gripping and well-written account of the U.S. Army's greatest battle   Cons: None. The Bottom Line: Although it covers the same battle as "The Bitter Woods," A Time for Trumpets is more focused and benefits from the declassification of the "Ultra" secret. Great read! On December 16, 1944, elements of three German armies -- 14 infantry and five panzer divisions in all -- attacked part of the American First Army along an 80-mile front along Germany's border with Belgium and Luxembourg. The sudden and unexpected counteroffensive hit the Americans in an area the Allies thought would be a nice, quiet sector for combat-weary divisions to rest and refit while green divisions fresh from the States could be acclimated to life on the line: the dark and deep forests of the Ardennes. Planned and ordered by Adolf Hitler himself, this massive onslaught was launched with one objective in mind: penetrate the American lines, pass through the "impassable&