Two War Books Shine a New Light on Crucial Moments in
World War II
The Cutting
Edge News
B. C. Knowlton
August 11th 2008
Atkinson,
Rick. The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944. (New York: Henry Holt,
2007).
Holland,
James. Italy's
Sorrow: A Year of War, 1944-1945. (New York: St. Martin?s, 2008)
It is tempting to
say that, just as the Allied campaign in Sicily
and Italy in World War II
was of less significance and decisiveness than the one that carried the Allies
from Normandy to Germany,
so the course of the historiography has tended to emphasize the last year of
war in northern Europe. And no doubt there
have been more books written about D-Day, The Battle of the Bulge, and the
collapse of the Third Reich, than about the race to Messina,
the Salerno and Anzio
landings, the bombing of Monte Cassino, the capture of Rome, and what followed.
But it can't
really be said that historians of the war have overlooked the Mediterranean
theater. Douglas Porch has recently seen it as The Path to Victory for the Allies; Robin
Neillands has followed the British Eighth Army from North Africa to the Alps;
Lloyd Clark has revisited Anzio; and Robert Katz has recounted both the
military campaign and partisan activity involved in the Battle for Rome. Rick
Atkinson won a Pulitzer Prize for An
Army at Dawn, about the war in North Africa with an emphasis on the
U. S. Army; and James Holland has written about the Italian and German siege of
the British-held island of Malta, and the stand of the British and American
Allies, they having forged their alliance, in North Africa.
It is now
tempting to say that in coming to these most recent World War II histories by
Atkinson the American and Holland
the Englishman, we can expect to see the perspectives and the prejudices of the
wartime Allies researched and represented. Why Britain
should have been fighting in North Africa in the first place; and why North
Africa should have been the first place in which America would fight, are two points
that must be covered in histories of the war in the Mediterranean theater.
Whether and why the Allies should have gone from North Africa to Sicily, and from Sicily
to Italy,
are two more questions that call for historiography.
And then it was
indeed in the Mediterranean theater that the British and the Americans learned
how to fight alongside each other, and to get along with each other as they
fought the common enemy. The American troops who came ashore in Operation Torch
were quite green; the British troops who had just defeated the Afrika Korps in
the Battle of El Alamein had been battling Germans and Italians for over two
years. This occasioned a good deal of condescension and resentment between the
English-speaking Allies.
Though Winston
Churchill knew well that Britain could not win the war without the Americans,
and knew as well that before the war was won American manpower and industrial
production would far surpass that of the Empire and Commonwealth, still he was
determined to exert as much influence as he could, for as long as he could, on
Allied war planning. Churchill argued for the North African landings, for
following up that victory with the invasion of Sicily, and then for maintaining the
Mediterranean strategy by attacking the long and mountainous soft underbelly of
the Axis. He practically insisted upon Anzio, and repeatedly declared that the
capture of Rome was the key to weakening the enemy ahead of the landings in
France, which he assured the skeptical Americans he was all for, but not yet.
Though Atkinson again emphasizes the American experience of the war, The Day of
Battle begins with a Prologue recounting Churchill's arrival in the United States
for meetings with President Roosevelt in May of 1943. In his meetings with
Roosevelt at Casablanca
in January of that year, Churchill's persuasion, and his staff's preparation,
meant that the Mediterranean strategy would not yet give way to D-Day. Just as
the U. S. Army had improved its performance over the course of the North
African campaign, so had the U. S. Army staff gotten better at preparing
itself, and protecting the President, against Churchill's adventurous diversions.
By the end of the TRIDENT conference he and the British war planners had
succeeded in holding their Mediterranean ground, but the final agreement did
set a date for the Normandy invasion, and did stipulate that several army
divisions and many naval vessels would be withdrawn from the Mediterranean and
sent to England in anticipation of OVERLORD. More men and materiel would later
be redeployed for the planned ANVIL invasion of southern France. These
decisions would have a telling effect upon the daily battles of the year of war
in Italy.
Atkinson's
narrative of battle begins with the execution of Operation HUSKY and ends with
"the expulsion of the barbarians" from Rome. That, of course, happened just one day
before D-Day; and so, like most of the journalists covering the war at the time
and many historians ever since, Atkinson has decided that the capture of Rome
is the perfect moment to turn his attention from what was after all a secondary
theater to what was always going to be the main theater of Allied operations.
The Third volume of his "Liberation Trilogy," according to the back
flap of this one, "will recount the climactic struggle for Western Europe,
from the eve of Normandy to the fall of Berlin." In
complementary contrast to this Whiggish history of the war, Holland's more
sorrowful account begins on the eve of the battle in which the Allies would
finally break through the Cassino Line and out of the Anzio beachhead, and ends
just before the fall of Berlin with the surrender of German forces in northern
Italy, who by that time were fighting the Allies in the midst of often
barbarous partisans.
Holland's Prologue recounts not
the colorful drama of political summitry but the setting and detonating of a
partisan bomb on the Via Rassella in Rome which
killed over 30 members of an SS police regiment and led to the massacre of more
than ten times as many Roman civilians in the Ardeatine Caves.
That was more than two months before the Germans left and the Allies entered
Rome; but the capture of Rome was, for Holland, just the beginning of a brutal
summer of fighting in which the Germans could hold their ground only by
pacifying it, and the Allies could advance only by devastating it. The Germans
massacred partisans and civilians quite indiscriminately; fascist and communist
partisans also fought each other; and even in areas liberated by the Allies,
Italian civilians sickened and starved, and women and girls sold themselves to
their liberators for food and supplies. The war would continue through one more
brutal winter in which rain, mud and misery was the infantryman?s lot, and one
more stalemate would play out before the last offensive led to the end.
Both Holland and Atkinson have
carefully researched and compellingly represented the human experience of total
war in the Italian peninsula. They note that it reminded many people of the
experience of World War I. Both authors make routine and telling use of oral
and written accounts of common soldiers and noted journalists. In Atkinson?s
book we hear more from Americans, and in Holland?s
from all of the Commonwealth. Atkinson relies heavily on Ernie Pyle; Holland less obviously on
Eric Sevareid and Martha Gellhorn. The BBC is heard only when it broadcasts
coded messages to the partisans. Audie Murphy and Bill
Mauldin have prominent cameo roles in The Day of Battle; Italy's Sorrow
features such unknown but colorful characters as Sergeant Sam Bradshaw, a
tanker from the north of England by way of North Africa, a South African
subaltern named Kendall Brooke, Canadian infantryman Stan Scislowski, and Ken
Neill, a fighter pilot from New Zealand.
They all survived
the war; and though their experiences do represent the mortal danger of it all,
their survival does elide a bit the deaths and silences of so many others.
Atkinson's account, however, of the experience of Lieutenant Colonel Jack
Toffey of the U. S. Army, who was killed near Palestrina as the Allies were on
their way to Rome, conveys both the documentary plenitude of a survivor?s
memoir and the unaccountable and incommensurable sense that death in battle can
happen at any moment to anyone involved and that as the war ends for them it
goes on as if interminably for everyone else. Holland also incorporates the accounts of
many German soldiers ? most of whom, somehow, survived -- and of partisans of
all persuasions -- many of whom, in one way or another, did not. And both make
the most of the fact that Field Marshall Albert Kesselring, the German
commander in Italy,
survived the war, was spared the firing squad, and wrote his own memoirs.
In matters of
strategy, involving again the commanding generals and their political
superiors, Atkinson and Holland have more to say, respectively, about the
Americans and British; but both focus appropriately on the exigencies of the
alliance, and are equally even-handed in according praise and attaching blame
to both sides. General Mark Clark was indeed a prima donna, but was also an
able and courageous commander. General Sir Harold Alexander was a bit of an
enabler, but his diplomatic handling of his American subordinate served the
interests of operational harmony and efficiency. The Anzio operation was inadequately planned and
insufficiently supplied; but General John Lucas was still not up to the job.
Winston Churchill?s initial insistence upon SHINGLE turned predictably to
officiousness about its execution; but he was justified in questioning whether
Lucas should be put and then kept in command of it. When Lucas had been
replaced by Lucian Truscott, and the Allies had broken out from what they
called "the Bitchhead," Mark Clark did indeed disregard an order from
Alexander to drive northeast toward Valmontone, and so cut off the German tenth
Army then retreating from Cassino; and he did do this so that his Fifth Army
would be the one to capture Rome to the northwest. But Alexander was being
adamant about his strategy while Clark could
make a case for maintaining tactical flexibility. And it was not certain that
the German army could be cut off, or that the Allied army would not be taken in
the flank as it made its way toward Valmontone. Still, what Clark did he did,
in Atkinson's words, "with duplicity and bad faith" (549); and it
was, in Holland's
words, "seriously bad form" (162).
Both books are
over five hundred pages long, but are filled with well-informed and
illuminating detail; and both maintain an admirable and harrowing narrative
intensity and momentum. They do complement each other very well, and very
satisfactorily supplement the historiography of the Second World War in the
Mediterranean theater. But neither author has a merely scholarly interest in
the history. They are actively involved in the preservation of source materials
and the dissemination of current understandings of the Second World War.
Atkinson writes for the Washington Post, and has also written about the war in Iraq. Holland collects oral
histories online, leads tours to battlefields, and has also written historical
novels. The Day of Battle
and Italy?s Sorrow show both the best
and the worst of the war, and so should find an audience among those who both
enjoy reading about it and appreciate what they are reading.
Mr. Knowlton
is an Assistant Professor of History at Stonehill
College in Easton MA..
The review was adapted from one which ran on www.HistoryNetworkNews.com.
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