As a late Baby Boomer I feel like I know very little about World War II other than what I studied in school (History and Political Science major) and saw in the movies or on TV.  So after reading a glowing review about Rick Atkinson’s World War II trilogy, I decided to give it a try.

An Army at Dawn is the first in the series, focusing on the entrance into the war by the US and the initial efforts of the Allies to push the Germans and Italians out of North Africa before going into Europe. What I hadn’t fully realized was the vast scope of this war.  Atkinson chillingly summarizes it this way: “September 1, 1939, was the first day of a war that would last for 2,174 days, and it brought the first dead in a war that would claim an average of 27,600 lives every day, or 1.150 an hour or 19 a minute or one death every 3 seconds.”

What becomes clear at the outset, is how unprepared and how inexperienced the US was at that time. “In September of 1939 the US army was ranked 17th in the world in size and combat power, just behind Romania,” says Atkinson.   Not only that, the Great Depression had taken such a toll on the nation’s health to such an extent that when the conscription process began forty out of every hundred recruits were rejected.

In it’s last war, WWI, the US had fought in trenches and with horse drawn artillery and cavalry as the backbone of their battle plans. Indeed, Atkinson quotes an American military journal published just two weeks before the beginning of the invasion of North Africa  saying,  “The idea of huge armies rolling down roads at a fast pace is a dream,” claiming that the horse would remain the backbone of the military for the foreseeable future.  As Field Marshall Sir John Dill, Churchill’s chief military representative in Washington said in a report to London, American forces “are more unready for war than it is possible to imagine.”

But inspite of these limitations, Churchill was desperate to have the US enter the war. So in 1941 when German forces invaded the Soviet Union in violation of the non-aggression pact of 1939 and the Japanese attacked at Pearl Harbor, and Hitler and Mussolini declared war on the US in solidarity with Japan, Churchill wrote: “I knew the the United States was in the war up to the neck and in to death. I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and the thankful.”

The focus of this book is really about how a “callow and clumsy” army learned from its mistakes, found the leadership it needed in men like Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley and MacArthur, trained men (and women) to become tenacious and tough soldiers, learned to work with their allies in spite of their cultural differences, and focused America’s “can do” spirit and know how into a massive military support system in order to overcome their deficit in war material. But it wasn’t an easy task.

Atkinson research is quite extensive and he delves into personal letters, in addition to the military correspondence from both the Allies and the Axis armies and as a result we hear from not only the generals but all the way down the chain of command to even individual soldiers which adds a sense of realism and poignancy to the preparations for and descriptions of the battles.  Although Atkinson doesn’t quite have the skill of  a Bernard Cornwall in writing about battles, I found I was able to follow and get the essence of what was happening.  Atkinson allows the main characters speak for themselves, quoting extensively from their letters and reports.  Sometimes this seems a bit cumbersome but what I really appreciated was the way their own words reveal their personalities, and character and you can also begin to see how they are changing and developing.  This is especially true of Eisenhower who at first seems indecisive and then begins to grow into his role as Supreme Commander.

I am glad I decided to read these books and am planning to read the next two books in the trilogy as well.  My history teachers would be proud!

Brenda’s Rating: *****(5 Stars Out Of 5)

Recommend this book to: Ken and Keith

Book study Worthy: Yes

Read in ebook format