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  • The Glorious Art of War
  • George Core
Rick Atkinson, The Liberation Trilogy—Volume 1: An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942–1943. Picador/Holt, 2002. 682pages. Illustrated. $18 pb; Volume 2: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943–1944. Picador/Holt, 2007. 792pages. Illustrated. $18 pb; Volume 3: The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944–1945. Holt, 2013. 878pages. Illustrated. $40.
Gordon Corrigan, The Second World War: A Military History. St. Martin’s Press, 2011. xxviii + 620 pages. Illustrated. $35.

In the epilogue to his superb one-volume history of World War ii, Gordon Corrigan declares that “conflict, and hence war, is an inescapable part of the human condition,” and he speculates that World War ii will turn out to be “the last European War.” Certainly he and Rick Atkinson, the author of the Liberation Trilogy, three substantial books running to nearly 2,400 pages and covering the war in North Africa through the fall of Berlin (1942–45), would agree on this generalization, so far as the foreseeable future is concerned. One can make the same inference after reading the late John Keegan’s conclusion to his history, The Second World War (1989): “No statesman of the Second World War was foolish enough to claim . . . ‘it was a war to end all wars.’ That, nevertheless, may have been its abiding effect.”

I

“Everything is very simple in war, but the simplest thing is difficult,” observes von Clausewitz, the great strategist quoted by all three authors. “These difficulties accumulate and produce a friction which no man can imagine exactly who has not seen war.” So Atkinson is thinking as he catalogues the contents of the American ships being dispatched to North Africa from Hampton Roads:

Tanks and cannons, rubber boats and outboard motors, ammunition and machine guns, magnifying glasses and stepladders, alarm clocks and bicycles . . . tractors, cement, asphalt, and more than a million gallons of gasoline, most in five-gallon tins . . . thousands of miles in wire, well-digging machinery, railroad cars, 750,000 bottles of insect repellent, and 7,000 tons of coal in burlap bags . . . black basketball shoes, 3,000 vehicles, loudspeakers, 16,000 feet [End Page 331] of cotton rope, and $100,000 in gold coins . . . a platoon of carrier pigeons, six flyswatters and sixty rolls of flypaper for each 1000 soldiers . . . and a thousand Purple Hearts.

The list continues at some length to include maps, Baedekers, National Geographics, directions for rocket launchers (a new weapon), and so on. The material was to be “combat loaded,” with the items stowed in reverse order, as the author explains. “Instead,” he adds, “the only principle in effect was chaos.” This kind of acute wit and insight appears regularly throughout Atkinson’s trilogy. But he by no means strains to be comical: there is a profound seriousness that underlies his accounts of battle and the men engaged in it. The prevailing tone is irony, and the irony, especially in the first two volumes of the trilogy, results from the ignorance and arrogance of the soldiers involved, particularly their commanders. The Allied commanders fought nearly as hard among themselves—British against American and vice versa—as they fought against the Vichy French, Italians, and Germans in North Africa. Often the reader must wonder how the Allies, with their backbiting at the command level and their continuing blunders, could possibly have won the battle for the Mediterranean.

The invasion of North Africa began without the British and Americans knowing whether the Vichy French would oppose their landings or not. In general, especially at the beginning, the French resisted fiercely, killing many of the Allied troops and doing considerable damage, especially to their ships. Gradually the Allies, especially the Americans, became what the author calls “killing mad”; but it took a long time for that attitude to emerge into what Ernie Pyle observed was a “new professional outlook, where killing became a craft.” The Germans had long since perfected that craft, of course; and they used everything from precise tactics with machine guns, mortars, and artillery, to fake surrenders and booby traps to kill the Allies, who soon included the French and various contingents from the...

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