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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (95710)	4/23/2003 10:23:02 AM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

Finished the WWII North African campaign last night, that is Rick Atkinson's book on it, An Army at Dawn. If you are having trouble keeping up your reading in the book, let me encourage you to keep on keeping on. I got bogged down several times but the overall experience is well worth the perseverance. It may not, however, be as much of an eye opener for you as it was for me. I knew absolutely zero about it, well about as close to zero as possible. I was unaware of Patton's minimal role, of Eisenhower's long, steep learning curve, of the wholesale troop slaughter (certainly not on the scale of WWI but nonetheless huge), and I was unaware that this campaign marked, and this is one of Atkinson's arguments, a transition not only to a military capable of fighting on the European continent but one in which the US became the dominant partner. Until then the British were. I found his attempts to sketch portraits not well done; he lacks the novelists eye for anecdotes which catch personality. And I found his storytelling of battles hard to follow. His maps were essential to keep a picture of the flow in mind. And I found it terribly depressing. Paradoxically, we were breaking in a new power cable for the stereo system so I've had the music running a great deal while reading. And I found the marching music in Shostakovich's 7th and Mahler's 6th particularly soothing. Now I'm ready for volume II and the Italian campaign. This one is likely to be like reading Caro on LBJ. Just hope the period between books is not so long. Here, incidentally, is the Amazon plug. It gets it just about right. amazon.com Amazon.com In An Army at Dawn,, a comprehensive look at the 1942-1943 Allied invasion of North Africa, author Rick Atkinson posits that the campaign was, along with the battles of Stalingrad and Midway, where the "Axis ... forever lost the initiative" and the "fable of 3rd Reich invincibility was dissolved." Additionally, it forestalled a premature and potentially disastrous cross-channel invasion of France and served as a grueling "testing ground" for an as-yet inexperienced American army. Lastly, by relegating Great Britain to what Atkinson calls the status of "junior partner" in the war effort, North Africa marked the beginning of American geopolitical hegemony. Although his prose is occasionally overwrought, Atkinson's account is a superior one, an agile, well-informed mix of informed strategic overview and intimate battlefield-and-barracks anecdotes. (Tobacco-starved soldiers took to smoking cigarettes made of toilet paper and eucalyptus leaves.) Especially interesting are Atkinson's straightforward accounts of the many "feuds, tiffs and spats" among British and American commanders, politicians, and strategists and his honest assessments of their--and their soldiers'--performance and behavior, for better and for worse. This is an engrossing, extremely accessible account of a grim and too-often overlooked military campaign. --H. O'Billovich