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Atkinson's gripping "Battle" chronicles Allies in Italy

Little went right for the Allies in the brutal Italian campaign of 1943-44 -- except for the ultimate result.

By Casey Common, Star Tribune

Last update: October 8, 2007 - 10:18 AM

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THE DAY OF BATTLE

By: Rick Atkinson. Publisher: Holt, 816 pages, $35.

Review: A well-researched, well-written account of the Allied campaign in Sicily and Italy during World War II -- just in time to augment your viewing of Ken Burns' "The War."

New releases of related interest: "Brothers in Battle, Best of Friends: Two WW II Paratroopers from the Original Band of Brothers Tell Their Story," by William Guarnere and Edward Heffron (Berkley); "The Airmen and the Headhunters: A True Story of Lost Soldiers, Heroic Tribesmen and the Unlikeliest Rescue of World War II (Harcourt); "The Ghost Mountain Boys: Their Epic March and the Terrifying Battle for New Guinea," by James Campbell (Crown); "The Library of Congress World War II Companion," edited and with an introduction by David M. Kennedy (Simon & Schuster).

Event: 10 a.m. Oct. 20, World War II History Roundtable, Fort Snelling (at Hwys. 5 and 55) in St. Paul.

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On Sunday, July 11, 1943, the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment winged its way across the Mediterranean Sea, on its way to reinforce the U.S. beachhead on Sicily. German troops had pulled back from the area, and the night drop was expected to be uneventful.

A tracer bullet flew up toward the C-47s. Then hundreds, then thousands. Word of the drop never reached many of the U.S. ground forces on Sicily, and U.S. bullets were cutting the U.S. paratroopers to ribbons. When the shooting stopped, 23 U.S. planes had been destroyed and at least 400 U.S. soldiers were dead or wounded.

It's just one of the horrors of World War II chronicled in "The Day of Battle," the gripping and thorough new book by Rick Atkinson about the Allied campaign in Sicily and Italy and the second part of Atkinson's "Liberation Trilogy." The first part, "An Army at Dawn," earned Atkinson the Pulitzer Prize for history in 2003.

"Army at Dawn" depicted the U.S. Army's baptism by fire in North Africa, and "Day of Battle" follows the Americans and their British allies in their long, bloody slog up the Italian boot.

We're reminded right from the start that it was the U.S. military that gave birth to the acronym SNAFU: Situation Normal: All, um, Fouled Up.

The Italian campaign, conducted in largely mountainous terrain ill-suited to mechanized offensive assaults, featured one snafu after another: an ill-advised assault at the Rapido River that resulted in much slaughter but no gain; a Liberty ship loaded with mustard-gas bombs that exploded in the harbor at Bari, resulting in more than 600 casualties from release of the gas; the destruction of the abbey at Monte Cassino, which was occupied by civilian refugees, not German troops, but was pounded into rubble by Allied bombs.

So much goes wrong here that you start to wonder how we won the campaign. Atkinson credits two familiar factors: first, the American industrial machine, which was kicking into high gear in 1943 just as Germany began to reach the bottom of its supply barrel; and second, the determination of the common soldier not to let his comrades down.

Victory did not come, according to Atkinson, as a result of superior Allied generalship. Scenes of George Patton wrestling with his demons in Sicily will be familiar to those who have seen the 1970 film "Patton." His successor in Italy, Mark Clark, depicted as a compulsive self-promoter, doesn't come off much better.

Rather than choose between focusing on the strategy and the generals or on the soldiers in the foxholes, Atkinson tries to have it both ways -- and he pulls it off. As in "Army at Dawn," he combines an impressive depth of research with a knack for taut, compelling narrative, marred only by an occasional weakness for ten-dollar words and a few overwrought passages that should have been reined in by an editor. ("Here the dreamless dead would lie, leached to bone by the passing seasons, and waiting, as all the dead would wait, for doomsday's horn.")

The third part of Atkinson's trilogy will be the D-day invasion and the Allied advance though Western Europe. Unlike North Africa and Italy, the beaches of Normandy have been well-trod by historians in recent years. But if "The Day of Battle" is any sign, it will be a story worthy of the retelling.

Casey Common is a copy editor for the Star Tribune's Business section.

Casey Common • ccommon@startribune.com

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Here are some of Books Editor Laurie Hertzel's favorite sites and blogs. Got a literary link to share? E-mail Laurie.

Talk of the Stacks An author series from the Library Foundation of Hennepin County.
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The Loft Literary Center The Website for the Loft, a local place for writers and readers.
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Lost Manuscripts Just what it sounds like - a blog (sporadically updated) devoted to missing and destroyed manuscripts.
Maud Newton Very hip, reviews, links, a little attitude.
bookreporter.com A plethora of online book reviews and reading guides.
Rain Taxi Rain Taxi Review of Books.