The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 (The Liberation Trilogy, 3)

Before giving this review over to why this is a very worthy addition the many shelves of World War II military histories, let us try to understand what this book is not.Rick Atkinson's The Guns at Last Light is not a comprehensive , critical analysis of the last 340 days of the War in Europe. It is, from beginning to end a purely American version of the events, with scant attention to the life or contributions of many allies and virtually no narrative assigned to the Germans, Civilian, Soldier or Officer. There is minimal critical analysis of either strategic or tactical considerations. What is here is for orientation; more to prepare you for the next section than to educate you on military planning. This book does not catalog the various tensions between the various national, political and military staffs as each worked to balance between electoral, economic and battlefield considerations. There is a surprising amount of criticism surrounding individual decisions but much of this is tied to the costs of those decisions and not to any larger context.Because others have noticed this specific short-fall: The maps in this book are mostly for orientation. On a Kindle I cannot believe they have any functionality. Given my eyesight, I stop trying to read them an dI have the Hardback copy. If maps are important you you, I recommend , by reputation only,  The West Point Atlas of War: World War II: European Theater  now listed at less than $5 for hard copy.In short if you are looking for a technician's critique of or an academic exhaustive accretion of events into a definitive whole; Guns at Last Light is not the book you want. Others have and will publish better histories than this one. By way of introducing my reason for granting a less than academically brilliant book is to remind you that Mr. Atkinson is a Pulitzer Prize winner. The prize was for book one in this trilogy. The salient point is that the Pulitzer Prize is from a point of view that favors journalism over academic scholarship. Least this seem dismissive given a modern cynicism against the media, journalism is of itself proud and honorable and in The Guns at Last Light there are hundreds of pages of end notes and lists of references, documenting the meticulous research that supports Mr. Atkinson's writing.The Guns of Last Light is basically a telling of the American Army's European ground war from D-day to the German signature of the surrender documents. Some reviewers will state that Atkinson's achievement is to make real to a reader the feel modern ground war. In fact what Atkinson makes every reader confront is that you either have this experience by surviving war, or you cannot understand this experience. However large the word count, the evocation of bloodied images and reference to smells; either you have been there or you have not.Instead what Atkinson has accomplished is something like an emotional history of the American Ground War in Europe. The reader is carried though chapters written to help the reader feel a literary equivalent to what soldier experience. The mood of the lead in to D Day is expectant. There is something at once grand and foreboding about the business of loading into ships, handling the pages of plans and tonnage of materials. The landing and breakout from the beach is something of a shock. It is given to us in flashes or recollection and reconstruction. The reader sees pieces of the larger events much as a soldier will have moments of clarity between moment of keeping his head down and hanging on. An atypical aspect of Atkinson's D-Day is the role of Generals; Roosevelt and Cota in particular. Both were present on the beaches and contributors to the breakout. The more typical story of Normandy are the soldiers, maybe their sergeant making the discovery in semi-isolated groups that the beach would be the home of the dead and dying, the living would be those who find a way up and around German gun pits and pillboxes.It is at the section covering the Bocage that the reader begins to learn that Battles do not adhere to plans. Battle winners will have to adopt, learn new strategies and modify equipment. Clearly the progress of the invasion is not going to be a succession of victories as a clever enemy retreats to expected lines of defense. German strategy would become Hitler's strategy and he was not one to care about the advantages of defensible, fall back positions. There was no plan for the Bocage. The Germans were not supposed to be there.And so this war continues; weeks of very little and hours of too much. Some units always seem to be taking the point to the result that entire Divisions would suffer 200% casualties. That is for every soldier in their per-invasion count, they would need 2 replacements before war's end. Again unusual for a typical academic history we have a lengthy discussion of losses due to trench foot and a shorter one about desertion. Ultimately when soldier's frustration over the stubbornness of German refusal to end the fighting takes hold and soldier kill, including surrendering enemies one has some sense of the frustration and distrust that leads a man, including leaders to loose their finer sensibilities.Even allowing for this approximation of sympathetic identification individual acts can be sobering. A soldier arriving in a German home, is so incensed that he grenades a piano, then pours paint over the remains. Both this soldier and the reader know that there is more war to come.It is in his dealing with senior leadership that Atkinson allows himself some creativity. Ike is a hero of the book, if somewhat remote. Patton is clearly the authors favorite. Not to say that Patton gets a free pass on all his doings. I would have liked to know more about Bradly but somehow Atkinson does not see him as a big enough personality. Prime Minister Churchill is alternately a drunken figure of fun and a clever statesman.The most complex portrayal is that of Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery. To him, Atkinson grants full credit as the planner of the Normandy invasion and as the father of the initial strategy for the early days of the invasion. After that he is nearly ridicules. We read several clearly wrong dispatches and are then told that Monty was not a lier, just not entirely to be trusted for the truth. Initial dispatches from Montgomery's operation Market Garden are wrong to the point of being delusional.Atkinson details that the Market Garden attack would depend on tanks and mounted units, moving forward two abreast up a narrow road. Their instructions were to ignore flank attacks. In a formation two abreast, all you have is flanks. Clearly Atkinson missed something in this passage, or planners were not thinking. Either case, this attacked failed, failed early and resulted in the wastage of good soldiers.By the end of this book, the reading will have exposed the reader to the cycle of life as a soldier. The art is in the fact that the book itself. The words chosen and the pacing of events carry the emotions that those of us not there, have as reader, analogues experiences. If the soldier is being ground down by the relentless stressed sameness of war; the reader can find passages piled on that recreate this same feeling of literary grind. This is an artistic effect. An effect not expected in a historical recounting and emblematic of superb writing.Atkinson makes it clear that no one can hold a book and know what it is like to be "there". In Guns at Last Light, Atkinson allows us to achieve an understanding, at remove, but based on the craft of good writing.

I was a bit surprised when I went to post this review. There were already a number of reviews on Amazon about this book. Yet I had obtained an advance readers copy several weeks before the official release date of May 14 (my hardback copy was received that same day). I would like to state up front that I have read the whole book from cover to cover. It is an excellent book, with very few factual errors (in my opinion), most of which pertain to the discussion of the concluding phase of the Normandy campaign, e.g. the Mortain counteroffensive. For example, the 1st SS Panzer Division was not late because a shot down fighter bomber crashed on a tank in a defile. They got misoriented, in large part due to the hurried nature of the planning for the German counterattack on the morning of 7 August, and the fact they had to make a night road march in unfamiliar terrain. The 116th Panzer Division did NOT lag back when the attack kicked off, and as a matter of fact made the deepest penetration, with its Panther battalion (2/24 Panzer Regt) reaching Le Mesnil Adelee - where they were destroyed by a counterattack launched by the 119th Infantry Regiment (30th ID) and 3d Armored Division - not 2d Armored Division as Atkinson mentions. The commander of the 116th Panzer Division was relieved by the XLVII Panzer Corps commander because they did not get along personally, and because the German division commander (von Schwerin) was a brillant Terry Allen-like leader with exceptional tactical and leadership skills who built up tremendous espirit de corps within his unit while getting under the skin of his superiors. Other than that, I did not notice anything in the Normandy section. Nor did I notice anything else that jumped out in the remainder of the book. If I had to score his research, I would give him a 98% at a minimum. Those few errors, in my opinion, result from using dated (German accounts in the immediate post-war period)and not the latest academic scholarship using primary sources. That said, Atkinson's bibliography by itself (selected sources beginning on page 813) is well worth the price of this volume. The book is organized into four parts (each totaling approximately 160 pages), each with three chapters (about 40 - 50 pages apiece).Part One is entitled "Invasion" and consists of chapters entitled "Invasion," "Lodgment," and "Liberation." Atkinson is a superlative writer who can take a wealth of otherwise meaningless statistics and weave those numbers into meaningful prose. For example, the mind numbing detail involved in carrying out Operation Overlord is fittingly brought to life when Atkinson describes events that NEVER occurred in great detail, e.g. the Allied retaliatory chemical attacks in response to a German chemical or biological strike against the invading armada. The sheer scope of the allied endeavor is driven home when talking about such mundane topics as maps (pp. 23 - 24): "Armed guards from ten cartography depots escorted three thousand tons of maps for D-Day alone, the first of 210 million maps that would be distributed in Europe, most of them printed in five colors. Also into the holds (of ships) went 280,000 hydrographic charts; town plats for the likes of Cherbourg and St. Lo; many of the one million aerial photos of German defenses, snapped from reconnaissance planes flying at twenty-five feet and watercolors depicting the view that landing craft coxswains would have of their beaches...." PART TWO describes the Post-Cobra and Falaise gap events, e.g. Chapter 4 - Pursuit, Chapter 5 - Against the West Wall, and Chapter 6 - The Implicated Woods. The only complaint, and it is a minor one, is that Atkinson while writing Chapter 8 somehow overlooked a detailed article in World War Two magazine on the 9th Infantry Division's initial foray into the Hurtgen Woods in October 1944. The Germans reinforced their defenses in that sector because they thought they were facing "troops specially trained in forest warfare." PART THREE resumes the battles on the German frontier before ending with the Rundstedt offensive in the Ardennes with Chapter 7 "The Flutter of Wings," Chapter 8 - "A Winter Shadow," and Chapter 9 - "The Bulge." The fourth and final section details the post-Ardennes fighting as well as the Allied conferences in the last year of the war. The Yalta conference in particular is detailed very effectively. Atkinson is particularly effective in weaving small details into the larger narration (who otherwise would have known that one of the villas occupied by Allied representatives served previously at Rundstedt's headquarters?) I think that Rick Atkinson's work reflects a labor of love as he does not recount events and personalities dispassionately. It is clear that Rick appeared to be as frustrated with the French Army's behavior as Eisenhower following the Normandy invasion nor does the author have much sympathy for Montgomery's perennial "bad boy" behavior resulted from deep seated hubris. That said, this book focuses on the experiences of the American soldier and American armies. Our British and French allies are mentioned only when the narrative demands additional detail along those lines. As a professional historian, my own take on this story would have involved more discussion along the lines of "battalion X moved from Point B to Point C, sustaining 23 casualties in the process of killing of capturing XX German defenders...." Atkinson brings those events to life with a vivid literary brush that literally almost places the reader at the scene of the action. His research is for the most part impeccable, which translates into ACCURATE dramatic prose. I am genuinely thankful to the author for making these events accessible and interesting to so many more Americans than academic historians like myself. Mr. Atkinson's Liberation Trilogy represents the penultimate account of the US Army in the Mediterranean and European Theaters during the Second World War. With 29 maps and many photographs, it is well worth the price!ADDENDUM: Atkinson ends the book not with the final surrender in May 1945, but with a detailed description of the repatriation of American war dead from Europe and the gathering of other American war dead at newly created American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC)cemeteries. I think that this particular approach is a fitting and appropriate way to conclude an outstanding set of books.

This is the third of Rick Atkinson’s trilogy and is just as thorough and entertaining as the two previous volumes.The author’s ability to convey the strategic picture, before “zooming in” to the experience of individuals actually doing the fighting is first class.This is a big book in terms of page count, but not one page is wasted in covering such a monumental period of history.I think the book will be enjoyable to both readers without prior knowledge of WWII and those who enjoy well written military history.

Todavía no me lo he comenzado a leer pero tiene buena pinta!

Very nicely packed book with no pages bending! impressive.

Perhaps a little too much on the American experience, but then that it the subject of the book. Still I would have appreciated a little more from the German point of view.Still a great book.

I started the trilogy at the end, but I'll soon ready the first two editions. I am not a novice at WWII history, having read many detailed reports of various battles and campaigns, but this ties it all together.Beginning just weeks ahead of D-Day the northern European campaign is spread out in remarkable detail. When the pace of advance is slow and bloody, the pace of the book slows too, with many first person reports and descriptions. As the advance across France moves into a sprint, so does the pace of the book. Now the problems of logistics and allies come to the fore.As the armies approach the Rhine the prima donna generals and their desires and problems get highlighted. The depth of reporting when the Battle of the Bulge (Ardennes) erupts is remarkable. Again the problems of logistics and lack or replacement troops are highlighted. And let's not forget the inter-Allies conflicts. Some of the very bitter but hardly reported local conflicts are described in bloody detail -- as are some of the political constraints and results.Finally the armies creep, jump and burst over the Rhine. The war should be so easily won, but problems persist (not least being the HUGE numbers of prisoners. The opening of the various death and concentration camps is described in appalling details. I already knew the stories (from family connections) but it's still stunning.There's a sense of ennui as the war ends (at least in Europe). I could feel both the thrill and the let down of the troops and the public. Over the horizon is still the war in Asia. In Europe the destruction and problems are manifest.This is anything but a dull history. The story is so personally told with anecdotes, extracts from reports and letters home, and a mass of other historical documentation.Highly recommended to anyone who want to learn even more about this last year of the European war. I'll head back in time to the beginning of the trilogy.