THE GUNS AT LAST LIGHT: The War in Western Europe 1944-1945
2014; The MIT Press; Volume: 94; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0026-4148
Autores Tópico(s)Italian Fascism and Post-war Society
ResumoTHE GUNS AT LAST LIGHT War in Western Europe 1944-1945 Rick Atkinson, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2013, 896 pages, $40.00NEARLY TWO DECADES AGO, Rick Atkinson embarked on a Herculean venture to retell the nar- rative of the Allied forces in Europe and North Africa during World War II. project, consisting of three linked but stand-alone volumes, was named The Liberation Trilogy. first book in the set, An Army at Dawn: War in North Africa, 1942-1943, was published in 2002. Lauded by reviewers and historians alike, it won a Pulitzer Prize for history. second volume, Day of Battle: War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944, appeared in 2007. It was likewise extolled and quickly became a New York Times best seller. In a review of the second book, New York Times book critic William Grimes referred to the then-unfinished trilogy as triumph of narrative history, elegantly written, thick with unforgettable description and rooted in the sights and sounds of battle. long-awaited final tome, Guns at Last Light: War in Western Europe, 1944-1945, was released in 2013. third volume describes the struggle for Western Europe, the end of the Third Reich, and the defeat of Nazi forces. From Normandy to Berlin, the book uncovers the hardships, exhaustion, and sheer horror of warfare in the European theater of operations. It also describes in uncompromising detail the contentious Anglo-American rela- tionship, the Blitz in England, the liberation of Paris, the horror of the labor camps, and the coming of age of the American warfighting machine. By 1944, the American military was no longer the untrained apprentice.Atkinson's first two books described how Allied forces fought through the challenging conditions of North Africa and Italy to the threshold of victory. Guns at Last Light takes forward the narrative from D-Day through the eventual liberation of Europe and the restoration of freedom to the continent. Atkinson is right to dwell on Operation Overlord, the ambitious air and sea assault of Normandy, in the early pages of his final volume. It was here that Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Com- mander, earned his spurs-planning and executing a complex operation fraught with difficulties. Six thousand ships and landing craft-including 700 warships-and 150,000 men, undertook the great- est amphibious invasion ever mounted. American casualties were predicted to reach 12 percent of the assault force alone, with the 1st Infantry Division estimating that under maximum conditions, casu- alties could reach 25 percent. Eisenhower needed to mitigate factors such as surprise, weather, and tidal conditions. Because of bad weather, he made the key decision to push back the operation 24 hours to 6 June 1944. Any delay thereafter would risk delaying the operation until the next full moon in July.An essential ingredient of the operation was a comprehensive deception plan-embellished by a network of British double agents-that persuaded German intelligence the main invasion would occur across the Pas de Calais. clever deception worked, as Atkinson observes, diverting the German 15th Army-which could have acted decisively in Normandy against Allied forces. Although Opera- tion Overlord helped set the foundations for Allied victory in Europe and was the major turning point in World War II, it came at an enormous cost to men and material. German shells and machinegun fire took their toll on the invading forces, and battles raged. Even so, the all-important conditions were set for the subsequent breakout.Following his narrative of the Allied landings on the Normandy beaches, Atkinson expertly chron- icles the major battles and activities as the Allies advanced east through Europe. He looks critically at the fighting to consolidate the beachhead before the attempted breakout by rapid armored assault, known as Operation Cobra. A description of the Falaise Pocket, the decisive engagement of the Battle of Normandy, is followed by an account of the liberation of Paris in August 1944. …
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