Military Review English Edition May-June 2014 | Page 80

THE GUNS AT LAST LIGHT
The War in Western Europe 1944-1945
Rick Atkinson, Henry Holt and Company,
New York, 2013, 896 pages, $40.00

Col. AM Roe, Ph.D., British Army

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EARLY TWO DECADES AGO, Rick Atkinson embarked on a Herculean venture to retell the narrative of the Allied forces in Europe and North Africa during World War II. The project, consisting
of three linked but stand-alone volumes, was named “The Liberation Trilogy.” The first book in the set,
An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943, was published in 2002. Lauded by reviewers
and historians alike, it won a Pulitzer Prize for history. The second volume, The Day of Battle: The War
in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944, appeared in 2007. It was likewise extolled and quickly became a New York
Times best seller. In a review of the second book, New York Times book critic William Grimes referred to
the then-unfinished trilogy as “A triumph of narrative history, elegantly written, thick with unforgettable
description and rooted in the sights and sounds of battle.” The long-awaited final tome, The Guns at Last
Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945, was released in 2013. The third volume describes the
struggle for Western Europe, the end of the Third Reich, and the defeat of Nazi forces. From Normandy
to Berlin, the book uncovers the hardships, exhaustion, and sheer horror of warfare in the European
theater of operations. It also describes in uncompromising detail the contentious Anglo-American relationship, the Blitz in England, the liberation of Paris, the horror of the labor camps, and the coming of
age of the American warfighting machine. By 1944, the American military was no longer the untrained
apprentice.
Atkinson’s first two books described how Allied forces fought through the challenging conditions of
North Africa and Italy to the threshold of victory. The Guns at Last Light ta