![]() Take a page near the conclusion of The Day of Battle. ![]() We are made to feel the full measure of a general’s arrogance or plain stupidity - and there was plenty to go round in the Allied campaign in Italy - and then given a vivid and visceral sense of the chaos and needless carnage that all too often resulted. Other historians have essayed a combination and ended up with two parallel narratives, from headquarters and the trenches.Ītkinson’s gift is to make one element illuminate and deepen the other. The number of books about World War II is beyond counting, and many choose between individual grunt-level experience and the strategic thinking at the command level - in the happy cases where it existed. The figure lends a renewed urgency to the preservation of their memories, and while Burns’ achievement is imposing, if sprawling, Atkinson’s is a truly remarkable fusion of a higher order. ![]() The airing of Ken Burns’ The War and the release of Rick Atkinson’s second volume of what promises to be a landmark trilogy on the liberation of Europe invariably draws attention to the sobering statistic that our veterans of World War II are dying off at the rate of a thousand a day. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |