The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy, 2) Paperback – Illustrated, September 16, 2008

This is volume two of Atkinson's fine history of World War Two. Like the first volume, it is very well written with a sharp eye for detail. An immense amount of research is presented in excellent prose with an artistic flair for the human story. The Italian campaign is rather depressing and one wonders if it was necessary although, as Atkinson points out, the Allies could not have spent the ten months between the victory in Sicily and Overlord resting. Stalin would not have tolerated this interlude and Hitler would have benefited, although perhaps not as much as the Allies believed.General Mark Clark was one of Marshall's two favorite subordinates, along with Eisenhower. He completely skipped the rank of colonel and was one of the youngest three star generals in the history of the army. Clark succeed to command when Eisenhower and Montgomery left for England to plan the Normandy invasion. This book shows his weaknesses as a commander. He hated the British and constantly resented the role of Alexander, the commander in chief for the Mediterranean Theater. The campaign involved two amphibious landings, Salerno and Anzio. The lessons learned may have been the best reason for the invasion of Italy. The campaign was always underpowered in men and ships. The Allies dominated in the air but the weather was terrible most of the time. Kesselring, the German commander, made the most of terrain best suited for defense. Churchill's enthusiasm for the "soft underbelly" of Europe was especially misplaced in Italy. The only soft underbelly was in France, the site of Anvil, an operation Churchill determinedly opposed.Atlkinson uses men's diaries and personal stories to advance his narrative. Some of it is heartbreaking when the diarists and letter writers do not survive. It is the most personal and revealing war history I have read and is similar to some of the best writing about the US Civil War. It is not really a story of triumph and more of survival. The campaign was conducted through a wet and cold Italian winter. The capture of Rome, at last, occurred the day before the Normandy invasion so Clark was denied the great publicity he sought. The book is a well written and very well researched story of a dreary and depressing campaign. All in all, it is well worth reading for those who want to know about the Italian campaign, which is a far less common topic for World War II history.

Rick Atkinson's "The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944" is a masterpiece of military history that should be read by anyone with any interest in World War II or American military history. Following on the heels of his Pulitzer Prize-winning "An Army at Dawn," this is the second work in Atkinson's "Liberation Trilogy" and deserving of yet another Pulitzer Prize. This book is awash in details about the difficult - and often forgotten - fighting in the Mediterranean Theater, but it also clearly and effectively describes the bigger picture of the war in Sicily and Italy.Two things will immediately strike the reader about this book: the detail with which Atkinson describes the fighting, and the dazzling prose that he uses to tell this story. Atkinson describes the personalities and details of the main characters in the story - the leaders, from Eisenhower to Kesselring to Patton to Mark Clark to - and also gives telling glimpses of the personal lives of the "grunts" who did the fighting on the ground. His emphasis on detail knows no bounds, as he describes Churchill's meals, the furnishings in Mark Clark's office, and the "Anzio Ritz" - the underground cinema at the Anzio beachhead that showed movies to the soldier's at the world's largest self-sufficient POW camp.For many authors, these details would detract from the story, but through Atkinson's incredible writing, these details instead add life, character, and flavor to this story. He captures the frustrations and difficulties of preparing and leading these forces, such as when he says that "for reasons known only at echelons above reason" a typical convoy required more than six thousand pages of names.My only complaint or criticism is that, in his effort to weave a seamless narrative, some of the militarily-significant details - the exact unit's designation, the exact date and time, the number of casualties - are omitted. That prevents this book from being a definitive source on the fighting in Sicily and Italy and means that anyone trying to do research on these campaigns needs to look elsewhere.But despite that extremely minor criticism, this book stands head and shoulders above most other military histories. I've waited for this book for over three years, since reading "An Army at Dawn," and it was well worth the wait. I am already anxiously awaiting Rick Atkinson's concluding work in the "Liberation Trilogy."