The Guns at Last Light

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:33:33 -0500

Summary

The final installation in Atkinson’s WW2 trilogy, which follows the allies from D-day to V-day from 1944-45 in the European theater.

Thoughts

Leading up to D-day there was a lot of uncertainty in the outcome of the war, but with the success of D-day allied victory over Germany seemed like a given, it was only a matter of time. This reminds me of playing the game Age of Empires, ( which is a real time strategy game where players control an empire and try to destroy the other players’ empires) there comes a point in the game where the balance falls so far to one side that, outside of miraculous intervention, the outcome is decided, from here on out it is up to the losers to decide how long to prolong the fight before surrendering. This was essentially the Axis’ position post D-day, Hitler just refused to give up and intended on doing everything in his power to make a miracle happen. This caused the war to drag on for nearly another year incurring another two hundred thousand casualties in the already battered German army. On top of that you had the absolutely brutal allied bombings that laid to waste many of Germany’s large cities inflicting another estimated five hundred thousand civilian casualties. This feeling of how unnecessary this conflict was tinged the book for me, it wasn’t as ’enjoyable’ as the other books because nothing seemed in to hang in the balance anymore, but still you had to watch people die anyway for a decision that had already been made. The single most important lesson I took from this book was never underestimate the power of production and logistics.

V_day on George's Blog

The Guns at Last Light