“An Army at Dawn”

Rick Atkinson

This is a “maps and chaps” account of America’s first experience fighting the Nazis on the ground. In 1942 and 1943 Allied forces under the command of General Eisenhower invaded French North Africa and proceeded to advance eastward at the same time Montgomery was driving Rommel’s forces westwards.

Atkinson’s book does not deal with the battle between Montgomery and Rommel, but is a US-centric look at the invasion and subsequent campaign that lead to the German’s final defeat in Africa. He covers as much of the British, French, and German experience as he needs to, but this remains primarily an account of the US Army at war. It’s also the story of a woefully underprepard US Army learning to fight a modern war and as such it’s full of stories of failure as well as victory.

Atkinson moves smoothly from personal accounts to the big picture in the parts devoted to the invasion and combat with the French, but later in the book he overemphasizes the forest at the expense of the trees, and the book becomes a bit of an impersonal slog. He also has the annoying habit attributing soldiers’ quotes as being from “a soldier” or some other nearly anonymous entity, though he seldom fails to quote generals by name and never neglects to properly attribute quotes from reporters’ accounts.

This is a good book about an often-overlooked theater of World War II, and I’m looking forward to his planned books on the invasions of Italy and France.