The Liberation Trilogy
 More
than ten years ago, I started a project, which I dubbed the Liberation Trilogy,
with the intent of telling the story of the American military’s role in the
liberation of Europe during World War II. With the
publication of volume two, The Day of Battle:
The War in Sicily
and Italy,
1943–1944, I’m now two-thirds of the way toward that goal. This new book
picks up where the first volume, An Army at Dawn, left off, telling the
epic tale of the invasion of Sicily
in July 1943, and carrying us into the campaign for
Italy—to
Salerno, Anzio,
Cassino, the
Rapido
River—through the fall of
Rome
on June 4, 1944, two days
before the Normandy landings.
From the beginning of this enterprise, my presumption has been that no
twenty-first-century reader can understand the ultimate Allied victory in
Europe, in May 1945, without understanding what happened in the
years before Normandy. Those
victorious armies, those soldiers and commanders who filled the ranks, had a
history, a bloody history, of sorrow and error and valor. It started in
North Africa, and now their story continues through
Sicily
and up the boot of Italy.
 The
Mediterranean campaigns have long been overshadowed in the American
consciousness by Normandy, the
Battle
of the Bulge, and the ultimate fall of the Third Reich. Yet three-quarters of a
million American soldiers served in Italy;
23,000 of them were killed there. Total Allied casualties in the Italian
campaign exceeded 300,000. Walt Whitman once complained that “the real war will
never get in the books.” In a similar vein, one of the best journalists working
in Italy in
1943–1944, Martha Gellhorn, wrote, “War was always worse than I knew how to
say.” Part of my task in The Day of Battle, whether in writing about the
grandest of grand strategy or about life for Joe and Willie in a foxhole, is to
find the words that Gellhorn couldn’t, to put the lie to Walt Whitman, and to
ensure that the real war does get in the books.
Rick Atkinson
An Army At
Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1943-1944 is the first installment of a
three-volume history of the Allied liberation of Europe in World War II,
covering the War in North Africa.
The second volume is The Day Of Battle:
The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944, covering the Allied invasion
and liberation of Italy.
The third volume, a history of the war in Western Europe, will be published
in the future.
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