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

by Rick Atkinson

“I couldn’t imagine the bocage until I saw it,” Omar Bradley would say after the war. That failure of imagination was in fact a failure of command: Allied generals had been amply forewarned, and even Caesar had written of hedgerows that “present a fortification like a wall through which it was not only impossible to enter but even to penetrate with the eye.”

If GIs died, they were “nothing more than tools to be used in the accomplishment of the mission,” he later wrote. “War has neither the time nor heart to concern itself with the individual and the dignity of man.

“enemy artillery was not touched by our bombing.”

“Man cannot tell, but Allah knows / How much the other side was hurt.” In truth, German defenses had been blown to smithereens: the enemy was profoundly hurt, mortally hurt.

“Shall we continue,” he said with coarse humor, “and drive the British into the sea for another Dunkirk?”

The historian Robert Aron later calculated that as many as forty thousand summary executions of collaborators and other miscreants took place across France,