The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe 1944-1945 (The Liberation Trilogy)

by Rick Atkinson

“Montgomery doesn’t protect his privates, but by Christ, I protect mine.

Clever

Captain Keith Douglas, a British veteran of North Africa and perhaps the most poignant poetic voice of the Second World War, had written of killing the enemy, “How easy it is to make a ghost.” And how easy to become one: Douglas died south of Bayeux, slain by a mortar splinter so fine that his body appeared unblemished.

Only from the high ground of history could perfect clarity obtain, and even then the simplest, truest answer remained the least satisfying: mistakes were made and many men died. What might have been known was not known. What could have been done was not done. Valor and her handmaidens—tenacity, composure, luck—would be needed to make it right. The trial ahead would also require stupendous firepower and great gouts of blood in what became the largest battle in American military history, and among the most decisive.

Graffiti scribbled on a concrete fortification in Lorraine read: “Austin White, Chicago, Ill., 1918. Austin White, Chicago, Ill., 1945. This is the last time I want to write my name here.

By 1945, the United States had built two-thirds of all ships afloat and was making half of all manufactured goods in the world, including nearly half of all armaments. The enemy was crushed by logistical brilliance, firepower, mobility, mechanical aptitude, and an economic juggernaut that produced much, much more of nearly everything than Germany could—bombers, bombs, fighters, transport planes, mortars, machine guns, trucks—yet the war absorbed barely one-third of the American gross domestic product, a smaller proportion than that of any major belligerent.