The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944
By Rick Atkinson
Holt, 791 pp., illustrated, $35
In the spring of 1943, after a series of calamitous defeats in the mountain passes of Tunisia, a bloodied Allied Army routed Erwin Rommel's Afrika Corps and took control of North Africa. Still, it was hardly a knockout blow, and the Allies planned their next moves against the Axis. An invasion of Sicily was set for the summer, but a bullish Winston Churchill, hoping to siphon German troops away from France and the Eastern Front, cajoled Franklin D. Roosevelt into extending the fight to the mainland. Orders were handed down to Allied commander Dwight D. Eisenhower to formulate a plan "best calculated to eliminate Italy from the war and to contain the maximum number of German forces."
The Italian campaign, the subject of Rick Atkinson's extraordinary history, would chew up soldiers, make and break careers of the generals who led them, and test Allied resolve as never before. War in Italy was an incredibly nasty business. Entire US infantry regiments were decimated; friendly fire killed many more. The battlefields around Anzio and Monte Cassino became charnel houses. Shells and bombs leveled ancient towns, as Italian civilians found themselves caught in a merciless crossfire.
The second volume of Atkinson's trilogy, "The Day of Battle" follows "An Army at Dawn," which dealt with the North African campaign. Like its predecessor, Atkinson's new book is a work of devastating artistry and narrative wonder. His mastery of sources, his profound grasp of tactics and strategy, and his use of quotes bring the conflict alive with a terrible vividness. In his attempt to wring poetry from war, Atkinson sometimes strains too hard for literary effect, but he is more often than not a breathtaking stylist. His descriptions of combat flow with a kinetic intensity - about one engagement, Atkinson writes how "[British] Eighth Army assault battalions shook out and surged forward through the vibrating air like wasps from an angry hive." But he also conveys the horror of battle in unforgettable detail: field hospitals stacked high with amputated limbs, charred bodies hanging from burned-out tanks, a soldier, crushed by a German halftrack, "his legs flattened to the thickness of a table leaf."
Atkinson has a deep respect for soldiering, yet he is unflinching in his considered verdicts of Allied bungling, which nearly doomed the campaign. From the start, plans were flawed by strategic vagueness. The US and British armies had not yet learned to fight together, and suspicion and in-fighting between their commanders did not help. Atkinson is evenhanded in his marvelous, three-dimensional portraits of these figures: legendary British general Bernard Montgomery, showboating teetotaler and hero of El Alamein; the canny Eisenhower, who deftly held this unruly coalition together; George S. Patton, whose almost psychotic zeal for combat nearly undid him; and the controversial Mark Clark, the lanky, Anglophobic commander of the US Fifth Army.
At nearly every turn, Allied troops met ferocious resistance from a battle-tested German Army. Still, Sicily was taken with relative ease, despite the mauling of the US First Division and a friendly-fire incident where American guns blasted planes carrying the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment out of the sky. The next strike was a crap shoot. "No consensus existed on what to do if the Germans fought for the entire peninsula," Atkinson writes of Allied strategy, "or whether this was a worthwhile battleground if Italy quit the war."
As it turned out, the Germans contested almost every yard; the Italians did quit the war, to little consequence; and questions persist whether Italy was a worthwhile battleground in the first place. Clark's Fifth Army landed at Salerno in early September, and met with a savage German counterattack that came close to pushing the Allies back into the sea. Barely hanging on, they thrust toward Naples and Rome, but the fighting grew worse in the winter and spring of 1944 as they pushed into the rugged terrain of the Apennines, and opened another beachhead at Anzio.
Nestled in heavily fortified defensive positions, the Germans commanded the heights, and the fighting bogged down into static lines reminiscent of World War I. Soldiers drowned in trenches; others perished in head-on assaults. Weariness set in: "One smokes too much - drinks too much if he can get it, and sleeps too little if he can get that," an American officer wrote in a letter home. The Allies tried repeatedly to break the German line, focusing on Monte Cassino and its famed hilltop abbey, which, along with the town below, was obliterated in a maelstrom of bombing raids and artillery fire. Poised to attack, Allied soldiers hooted and shouted huzzahs. Waves of American, Polish, and French troops, along with soldiers from a whole British Empire in miniature - Maori, Kiwi, Indian, Gurkha, and Canadian - stormed the ruins for a period of several months, taking heavy losses.
For some military historians, the futility of Monte Cassino symbolized the waste and folly of the Italian campaign. Certainly, the Allied casualties - all told, some 312,000 in a 608-day slog -were staggering. One British historian went so far as to call Italy "tactically the most absurd and strategically the most senseless campaign of the whole war." Atkinson takes a more measured view. He argues for the necessity of this Allied venture, but he never lets you forget what war did to the men who fought it.
Matthew Price is a critic and journalist in Brooklyn.
