The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (Volume Two of The Liberation Trilogy)

"Rick Atkinson . . . excels at describing the furor of battle, and the Italian campaign provides him with abundant raw material . . . Mr. Atkinson, a longtime correspondent and editor for The Washington Post, conveys all of this with sharp-edged immediacy and a keen eye for the monstrous and the absurd."—William Grimes, The New York Times  

"In The Day of Battle, Rick Atkinson picks up where he left off in An Army at Dawn, his history of the North African campaign, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003. A planned third volume, on the Normandy invasion and the war in Europe, will complete The Liberation Trilogy, which is shaping up as a triumph of narrative history, elegantly written, thick with unforgettable description and rooted in the sights and sounds of battle . . . He excels at describing the furor of battle, and the Italian campaign provides him with abundant raw material . . . Mr. Atkinson, a longtime correspondent and editor for The Washington Post, conveys all of this with sharp-edged immediacy and a keen eye for the monstrous and the absurd."—William Grimes, The New York Times

“Monumental . . . With this book, Rick Atkinson cements his place among America’s great popular historians, in the tradition of Bruce Catton and Stephen Ambrose.”—The Washington Post

“The majestic sequel to his Pulitzer Prize-winning An Army at Dawn . . . Atkinson’s achievement is to marry prodigious research with a superbly organized narrative and then to overlay the whole with writing as powerful and elegant as any great narrative of war."—The Wall Street Journal

“Atkinson proved what a determined and assiduous researcher could achieve in An Army at Dawn, his bestselling account of the North Africa campaign, and he has been no less thorough in The Day of Battle . . . But while there is new material here—like information about the death of Allied servicemen from American mustard gas at Bari—it is his ability to ferret out astonishing amounts of detail and marshal it into a highly readable whole that gives Atkinson the edge over most writers of this field. Anyone who devoured An Army at Dawn with relish will be delighted with his account of the Sicilian and Italian campaign. All the same ingredients are here, from sharp one-liners (`Camaraderie and good fun,’ he says of the resumption of negotiations at the Trident conference in Washington, `promptly pooped like soap bubbles’) to brilliantly observed character portraits . . . The minutiae of events combined with telling character observation enables Atkinson to write about Eisenhower—and others, like General Patton, Clark and Truscott—in a way that makes readers feel they knew these men personally. Opening with a fine account of the Trident conference between Roosevelt, Churchill and their chiefs of staff, Atkinson notes that the Italian campaign was really all about Allied strategy, or rather diverging views on strategy between American and Britian . . . The Day of Battle of is a very fine book indeed. `Here the dreamless dead would lie,’ Atkinson writes in a very moving passage about the aftermath of the bloody Rapido, `leached to bone by the passing seasons, and waiting, as all the dead would wait, for doomsday’s horn.’ Even the great Ernie Pyle would have liked to have written that one.”—James Holland, The New York Times Book Review

“The Day of Battle is the second volume of Rick Atkinson’s monumental history of the US Army’s western experience in World War II. It chronicles, with all the verve, perception, and insight for which he has become celebrated the painful advance of Allied forces from the beaches of Sicily to the grand piazzas of Rome . . . Atkinson’s book is a model of historical narrative and analysis. His accounts of the great battles evoke in vivid detail the horrors endured by the participants. I find it hard to quibble with any of his judgments. This is not least because he understands so wonderfully well the doubts and difficulties of the men of 1943-1944. He does not seek, as do too many historians, to impose upon them the values and perspective of the twenty-first century. The British historian Professor Sir Michael Howard, himself a veteran of the Italian campaign, often remarks: `We make war as we can, rather than as we should.’ This was profoundly true of the Italian campaign, which Atkinson chronicles with glittering distinction.”—Max Hastings, The New York Review of Books

"Near the end of his copiously reported, briskly written The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-144, Rick Atkinson quotes an unnamed BBC reporter who burst into Allied media headquarters in Rome on the morning of June 6, 1944. The Allies has just liberated the Eternal City, but elsewhere in Europe it was D-Day. `Boys, we’re on the back page now,’ the reporter said. They’ve landed in Normandy.’ And so it has been, for six-plus decades. The fight for Sicily and then up the rugged, heavily defended Italian coastline to Rome and beyond largely is forgotten beneath the avalanche of journalism and moviemaking that chronicles the grand crusade from the beaches at Normandy to Hitler’s bunker in Berlin. If the Allies’ middle campaign, between defeating Rommel in North Africa and storming ashore at Normandy, is to get its due, it well might be from The Day of Battle, the second volume of Atkinson’s intended trilogy of World War II. His first in the series, An Army at Dawn, won him his second Pulitzer Prize in 2003. The reporting is meticulous and heavily footnoted . . . The Day of Battle does not glamorize incidents that today would have been instant scandals, like the conduct of individual soldiers or the failure to block German soldiers from fleeing Sicily . . . One of Atkinson’s triumphs is his ability to capture the specific incident and the lesson that lurks beneath.”—Tony Perry, Los Angeles Times

“During World War II, Winston Churchil...