Summary

Army at Dawn documents the United States entry into the fight against Germany in North Africa. This picks up after the allies seized the critical port town of Tunis. This allied victory opened the possibility of attacking in the words of Churchill “the Axis’ underbelly” in Italy. Crossing from Tunis to Sicily (the island attached to the toe of the Italy’s boot) the allies began their slow march towards Rome. During and after the capture (or liberation if you prefer) of Tunisia there was a great deal of disagreement between the British and the US over what the next target of attack should be. The Americans favored a cross channel invasion jumping from England to France, but on the other hand, after the Dunkirk debacle the Brits were much keener on the idea of invading Italy. So in a compromise they decided to do both, but since the allied troops were already stationed near Italy it was decided that the cross-channel invasion would occur a year later to allow for planning and logistical difficulties to be sorted out. In the meantime, the allies would use their deployed units to invade Italy and try to take some pressure off of Russia. It sounds good on paper, but as the casualties mounted and progress crawled to a halt in the inhospitable Italian mountain winter, victory was far from certain.

Thoughts

Another really well-done thorough book by Atkinson. The meat grinder of war, the anticipated losses. For as long as steel has existed it has been used as a catalyst for violence. In a perverse way it is almost as if the material itself has an insatiable blood lust. It is constantly taking new forms to sever, pulverize and otherwise disfigure. As time progresses, the ratio of pounds of steel to pounds of flesh deployed in war tends to approach zero asymptotically. It was said that to kill a single German soldier it cost the allies $25,000 worth of shells, one soldier asked whether it would be smarter to just offer every German that money to defect instead, but steel had different ideas. Doing a bit of napkin math, it turns out that there were an estimated 10.5 billion pounds of combatants used in the European theater as compared to 34.5 billion pounds of artillery. That is only artillery ammunition, but steel was still not satisfied. It mutated into planes, tanks, and monstrous battleships. Speaking of ships, some fun facts, the luxury liner Queen Mary was refitted as a troop ship. They stripped and stored all the fine rugs and fancy china and painted over its elegant colors with a navy grey. It helped to transport German POWs to the states which total reached around 450,000 at the war’s peak. Evidently, we also have WW2 to thank for the popularization of the bikini, as it was in part brought about by fabric restrictions put in place during the war. One final piece of trivia is that Rome and its surrounding architecture was in some sense saved by Hitler. By this point in the war, scorched earth tactics were used by both sides. If you were going to cede any ground, you were going to destroy anything useful to the enemy before giving it up. As it became clear that the allied capture of Rome was close to a certainty, the Fuhrer was asked whether or not he wanted to start the destruction of Rome, but he decided against it due to Rome’s historical significance. A fantastic history of this slice of the global conflict.