The Day of Battle

I am about 350 pages into Rick Atkinson's The Day of Battle. It is the second volume of his Liberation Trilogy. The first volume, An Army at Dawn, which won the 2003 Pulitzer for History, covered the 1942-43 Allied invasion of North Africa. This second volume deals with the 1943-44 invasion of Sicily and Italy. The final volume will cover Normandy and the march into Germany. When I read An Army at Dawn upon its release, I thought it the finest book about war I'd ever read. Reading The Day of Battle, I may have to revise that opinion. It is equally good, if not better.

I don't intend this post to be a comprehensive review of the book. One of my failures as a blogger so far is that I attempt too much in a single post - I go on and on, adding and revising, trying to fit everything in. Before you know it the morning is shot and I've got a large unpublishable mess on my hands. Instead I will simply mention a few interesting points.

First, it appears that Atkinson believes the campaign in Italy was strategically unnecessary. Many believed it at the time; many still do. The Americans were against Operation HUSKY (as the Sicilian/Italian Campaign was dubbed) from the start. Roosevelt, Marshall, and the Joint Chiefs all favored maintaining "a mighty host in Britain. The subsequent [cross-Channel] invasion, a knockout punch aimed at the German homeland, 'should be decided upon definitely as an operation for the spring of 1944.'" Invading Italy, George Marshall thought, "'would establish a vacuum in the Mediterranean' that would suck troops and materiel away from a cross-Channel attack." Churchill and the Brits thought otherwise. Already facing a man-power shortage (by early 1943, more than 12 percent of the British population was serving in the armed forces), and already with over 100,000 battle deaths, the Brits feared the carnage of a cross-Channel invasion. Instead, they favored hitting 'the soft underbelly of Europe', Sicily first, then the Italian mainland. They believed this would knock Italy out of the war and force Hitler to divert troops from the eastern front in Russia. The subsequent compromise, an agreement to invade Sicily in return for a British commitment to the cross-Channel invasion in the spring of 1944, was a bit of a muddle. No Italian mainland campaign was specified in the agreement. However, events took on a life of their own; once Sicily was secured, the invasion of Italy became a given. The carnage which resulted from fighting an enemy entrenched on higher ground up the boot of Italy was predictable and probably unnecessary. Atkinson documents it all in his compulsively readable style. This is a book that never stops being interesting. You push forward page by page.

Again, I'm not finished with the book, but the Italian campaign, while perhaps not strategically necessary, was important in other ways. One, it gave the troops battle experience. Many of the troops deployed in Italy had not been involved in the North Africa invasion (Operation TORCH). Two, it provided a host of lessons learned to Allied commanders in preparation for the Normandy landings. The landings at Sicily, Salerno, and Anzio helped Allied leaders prepare the tactics and the material necessary for the cross-Channel invasion. Whether these benefits were worth the dear price the Italian campaign exacted on the Allies remains a subject of debate.

One of the things that separates Atkinson from most war historians is his ability to make complex battle tactics understandable to the reader. I read a lot of books about war. In many of them, the battle sections become incomprehensible to the lay reader. You read it, perhaps re-read it, and still come out confused. You learn to skip ahead to the author's final summary of the battle. But not so with Atkinson. He shines at this aspect of war writing. Always, the battle scenes are not only comprehensible, but fascinating. One feels involved in the battle, like an observer watching from higher-ground. The tactical successes and (more often) failures are clearly explained as they happen. The summaries of why a battle succeeded or failed get right to the heart of the matter.

Atkinson also has a talent for the short biographical sketches I love so much, the kind that nail a person down and give context to the rest of the story. There are dozens to choose from but I'll simply excerpt this passage about one of my favorite Americans:

A tall, austere man with sandy hair gone gray carried forth the American argument. General George C. Marshall, the Army chief of staff, knew his mind on this issue even as he fretted over the president's susceptibility to British blandishments. Marshall was a clean-desk man, famously convinced that "no one ever had an original idea after three o'clock in the afternoon," and he disdained orthodoxy, sycophants, and the telephone. To Churchill he was "the greatest Roman of them all"; a British general described him as "a little aloof, dignified, above the battle, unbuyable....I never saw him show his feelings in any way." In fact, Marshall possessed a molten temper. He demanded that subordinates "expunge the bunk, complications, and ponderosities" from the nation's war effort, and his signature query, accompanied by the unblinking gaze of those icy-blue eyes, could terrify lieutenants and lieutenant generals alike: "Are you confident that you've thought this through?" Aside from horseback riding, gardening was his sole civil diversion; "the pride of his heart," according to his wife, remained the compost pile outside his Virginia home.

Finally, another of Atkisons's talent as a war writer, perhaps his most effective, is his ability to document the life of the ordinary soldier at war. He never lets the reader forget that war means death to young men; you're always aware of their sacrifice, and he tells their stories in vivid, moving prose. In a section that made me have to pause and gather myself, Atkinson tells the story of twenty-five year old Captain Henry Waskow:

Raised in the cotton country south of Temple [Texas], one of eight children in a family of German Baptists strapped enough to sew their clothes from flour sacking, Waskow was fair, blue-eyed, short, and sober - "a sweet little oddball," in the estimate of one school chum. "He was never young," another classmate recalled, "not in a crazy high school-kid sort of way." A teenage lay minister, Waskow took second prize in a statewide oratory contest, won the class presidency of Belton High School, and graduated with the highest grade-point average in twenty years. At Trinity College he joined the Texas Guard, in part for the dollar earned at each drill session, rising through the ranks on merit and zeal. At Salerno, Company B had fought with Darby at Chiunzi Pass.

"I guess I have always appeared as pretty much a queer cuss to all of you," Waskow had written in a "just-in-case" letter to his family as he shipped overseas. "If I seemed strange at times, it was because I had weighty responsibilities that preyed on my mind and wouldn't let me slack up to be human like I so wanted to be."

Now, after almost a week on Sammucro, the entire 1st Battalion was hardly bigger than a company, and Waskow's company was no bigger than a platoon. Ammo stocks had dwindled again; the men threw grenade-sized rocks to keep the Germans dancing. At nightfall on Tuesday, December 14, the battalion crept forward beneath a bright moon and angled northwest along the massif toward Hill 730, a scabrous knoll almost directly behind San Pietro. The trail skirted a ravine with shadows so dense they seemed to swallow the moonbeams. "Wouldn't this be an awful spot to get killed and freeze on the mountain?" Waskow asked his company runner, Private Riley Tidwell. The captain had a sudden craving for toast. "When we get back to the States," Waskow added, "I'm going to get me one of those smart-aleck toasters where you put the bread in and it pops up."

Those were among his last mortal thoughts. German sentries had spotted the column moving across the scree slope. Machine guns cackled, mortars crumped, and Henry Waskow pitched over without a sound, mortally wounded by a shell fragment that tore open his chest. He had never been young, and he would never be old.