Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #299144 in Books
• Published on: 2005-03
• Formats: Abridged, Audiobook
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 8
• Binding: Audio CD

Customer Reviews

If not Italy, where?
"Soldiers walking through a killing field sometimes stomped on the distended bellies of dead Germans to hear the flatulent noises the corpses made. `Slowly I am becoming insensitive to everything,' wrote one soldier in his diary. `God in Heaven, help me to keep me humanity.'" - from THE DAY OF BATTLE

Were I to poll the common American on the street, I suspect that those even cognizant of World War Two at all would confirm what I suspect to be the self-centeredness of the popular mythology surrounding the U.S. role in the war against Nazi Germany, i.e. that it was the United States that pretty much single-handedly won the war against the Third Reich with a little help from our English-speaking cousins in the British Commonwealth forces, and that the apocalyptic battles and combat deaths in the millions that occurred on the Eastern Front would be relegated to the Forgotten War. Moreover, as far as the Western Theater is concerned, the awareness would center on the American victories in France and Germany following the D-Day invasion. After all, what legends there are have been built around the Normandy landing itself, the subsequent dash by Patton's Third Army across France, the stubborn defense of Bastogne, and perhaps the seizure of the Remagen Bridge across the Rhine. Would John Q. Citizen on the street even know that the U.S. Army fought in North Africa? And Sicily - wasn't that where George. C. Scott slapped a dogface?

Author Rick Atkinson has previously written a superlative account of America's North African campaign, An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943 (Liberation Trilogy). And in THE DAY OF BATTLE, he now gives us an exceptional narrative summary of the conquest of Sicily and the subsequent slow and brutal slog up Italy's boot to culminate in the capture of Rome, an eleven-month ordeal characterized too often by suspect strategy, unimaginative tactics and leadership at corps levels, dismal weather and near-impossible topography, and friction between top American and British generals that almost reached the level of insubordination:

"`(General Mark Clark, Fifth Army Commander) appears never to have accepted (General Sir Harold) Alexander (Commander, Allied Armies in Italy) as his real commander,' wrote W.G.F. Jackson, an author of the official British history. Later, Clark claimed he had warned Alexander that he would order Fifth Army `to fire on the (British) Eighth Army' should (its commander, General Oliver) Leese attempt to muscle in on (the capture of) Rome. Shocking if true; General Alex disputed the story."

Indeed, the only reasons the Allies seemed to have prevailed at all were their overwhelming superiority in artillery and air coverage and the abundance of war-making materials. Had the Germans had even parity in those parameters, the skill of their leadership and the fighting capabilities of their battle-hardened troops might have achieved at least a stalemate if not driven the bickering invaders back into the Med.

Atkinson's style is not to get bogged down in the mundane mechanics of field maneuver. Rather, he paints the big picture and then illuminates the whole by spotlighting on the battlefield fortunes of selected units and the experiences and personalities of individual fighters and commanders. His narrative is thus richly engaging and informative as he surveys the conflict from Sicily to Salerno to San Pietro to Ortona to the Rapido River to Anzio to Cassino back to Anzio and, finally, to Rome.

THE DAY OF BATTLE includes twenty eminently useful maps, the allied chains of command for both the Sicily invasion and Operation Diadem, the final drive to Rome in May 1944, two extensive sections of photos, 141 pages of Notes, and 31 pages of Selected Sources; Atkinson did his homework.

As the strategic necessity for an invasion of Italy still causes heated debate, the author suggests a practical answer. At the cessation of hostilities in North Africa, where could the victorious Allied forces have otherwise been sent? Not back to England, certain to soon overflow with fresh Yanks arriving for the Normandy assault. Kept idle in North Africa? Certainly not with Josef Stalin clamoring for a second front to relieve pressure on his Red Army. If not Italy then, where? Following a certain inexorable logic, it was a battle that had to be fought.

In the end, it was supremely ironic that the glory associated with the capture of Rome, so ardently desired for the Fifth Army by its temperamental, self-serving, and haughty commander, Mark Clark, proved to be so ephemeral. It dominated newspaper headlines for perhaps a day before being relegated to the back pages by Eisenhower's cross-channel amphibious assault on the French beaches. From then to the end of the European war, the Italian front was but a backwater sideshow. As correspondent Eric Sevareid recalled of the news:

"Most of us sat back, pulled out cigarettes and dropped our half-written stories about Rome on the floor. We had in a trice become performers without an audience ... a troupe of actors who, at the climax of their play, realize that the spectators have all fled out the door."