Summary
A history of the United States entering WW2 in North Africa. This 700 page book is the first of a trilogy about WW2 in Europe. It covers a single year of the conflict starting with the US landing in Northern Africa and ending with the capture of Tunisia.
Thoughts
A fantastic history, reading this book really gives you the feeling of living through the events. Not in a first-person sense, but more as a near omniscient deity who is really interested in America’s military. What feels like every skirmish, battle, air raid, and flat tire has been listed. Every shell casing counted, and temperature noted. All this is done in a way that manages to stay compelling throughout. -The Allies I never realized just how tense the relationship was between the Brits and the Yankees. There was quite a bit of animosity and distrust between the old power and the new power that was coming of age in this war. British folks thought of the Americans as inexperienced bumbling idiots who would only be useful as a support role in WW2. The Americans had their own reservations, one of my favorite quotes that sums up this new relationship was from Harold Macmillan:
We, my dear Crossman, are Greeks in this American empire. You will find the Americans much as the Greeks found the Romans – great big vulgar, bustling people, more vigorous than we are and also more idle, with more unspoiled virtues, but also more corrupt. We must run A.F.H.Q. as the Greeks ran the operations of the Emperor Claudius..
-The French Atkinson doesn’t seem to like the French at all, and nobody liked the Italians. The problem with France capitulating to the Germans was that they were then tasked with defending their territories in North Africa. This in turn means that our introduction to the French is them killing allied soldiers who are in some since fighting to free their country. -The Italians With this book you come away feeling like the Italians were never really in this war. They fought and they died, but in ways that seemed halfhearted. They were poorly equipped and poorly led. Just going from their portrayal in this book if you were an allied commander, you would much prefer a hill to be held by Italians instead of Germans. -Hate A recurrent theme in this book was the genesis of hate. It was noted that when the American soldiers landed in North Africa no one really hated the Germans, but with every new casualty and friend killed that feeling of hate started to grow. This is interesting to me in a game theoretic standpoint. As every allied general knew, a soldier that hates his enemy is much more useful than one that doesn’t. The question is how can you foster an environment that creates this hate as quickly as possible? I don’t think they came up with an answer more effective than war itself, but it highlights the insanity of war. We have millions of years of tribalism in our blood; we’ve managed to tamp down this tribalism with various mechanisms allowing you to interact with strangers while running near zero risk of being murdered. Then along comes this situation where you have to try to fan the flames of that ancient aggression and return humans to their barbarous roots in such a way that if you do run into a stranger, you murder them with no questions asked.