Book Review: An Army at Dawn

Over the years, I've read extensively about the Second World War from all sides, but especially from our own American perspective. As such, I was rather familiar with America's first act in the European Theater of Operations, Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa in November of 1942. This of course led to months of brutal fighting, before all Axis forces on the southern Mediterranean littoral were defeated in May of the following year. But even with all of my reading, I'd never encountered so magisterial a chronicle of those brutal months as Rick Atkinson's An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa , 1942-1943.

Even with the widespread popularity of the war, thanks to prolific and gifted authors such as the late Stephen Ambrose and individual efforts such as Brokaw's Greatest Generation and Bradley's Flags of Our Fathers, I feel that I wasn't alone in my relative ignorance of this first campaign, unique in the annals of the war. I think this ignorance stems largely from the same success of authors such as Ambrose, whose focus was almost exclusively on the last eleven months of the war, from Normandy to the Elbe. Atkinson, a former writer for the Post, has thus performed a great service in producing a tome both incredibly insightful and nuanced without losing sight of the overarching strategic campaign, all spun in eminently readable prose that often borders on the lyrical.

And it's certainly a story worth telling. Because of that same bias that limits the reading public's understanding of the conflict to its final phase, we often unknowingly digest a fallacious story of an American Leviathan, inexorably freeing Europe and crushing Nazism. Atkinson paints a radically different picture, one in which US troops were woefully inadequate and leadership too often incompetent. Operation Torch could have been a disaster in the mold of Dieppe had the landings been opposed by the Germans; instead Vichy French forces put up an inconsistent resistance that varied from the spirited to the nonexistent. But even once firmly ashore, green troops and officers made poor decisions and failed to exploit opportunities, lengthening the campaign by months and forcing troops to endure brutal fighting in horrific weather and over inhospitable terrain. Meanwhile at the highest levels of command, things were hardly improved as US and British generals, in stark contrast to the warm relations between the "cousins" so often depicted, were mutually distrustful, with the British having little regard for the Americans' martial abilities. These unfortunate elements fed into unnecessary carnage, most notably the bloodbath at Kasserine Pass (perhaps the best-known battle of the North African theater thanks to its cameo in Patton).

Thus Atkinson suggests that the final, overwhelming Allied victory - a quarter-million prisoners taken, several of the most storied German formations utterly destroyed, Rommel's fighting spirit broken - was almost in spite of itself. Sheer weight of numbers, an American ability to make good losses of men and materiel in the face of German shortages, played a significant role in that outcome. But so too did the fact that the same uncertain soldiers who blundered ashore on November 8th were by the end hardened veterans, capable of beating the Germans at their own game, though even then commanders too often flung the lives of their men away.

Also of note are those commanders that Atkinson brings to life. He skillfully depicts Eisenhower's evolution through the campaign, beginning with a commander few Americans would recognize as the victorious Ike; he also confirms the common conceptions of others, especially Montgomery (arrogant and insufferable) and Patton (vainglorious).

Thankfully, Atkinson didn't craft An Army at Dawn as a stand-alone work. Rather, it's the first of a trilogy he calls the Liberation Trilogy. The second volume, The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944, is due out this autumn; I for one am eagerly anticipating its release.