The Guns at Last Light (Rick Atkinson, 2013)

Atkinson has a real gift for taking an overwhelming mass of facts - many of them already well-known to any reader who would bother to pick up a book like this - and turning them into a surprisingly fresh, coherent story line complete with compelling characters.  This is the third of his WWII trilogy.  I had confidence I'd like it based on how much I enjoyed book #2 (discussed here) - though I was a bit, and entirely unnecessarily as it turned out, concerned that my mildly greater familiarity with the Normandy-VE Day material covered in this third book might make this one less interesting.

Not so (and it turns out I wasn't familiar with much of anything anyway).

Now I need to go back and read the first volume of the trilogy.

Stuff I found interesting:

1.  Does a good job of making the reader feel like you know something about the key political leaders and the top military guys.  Without losing sight of the lower officer ranks and the regular soldiers - plenty of personal stories about them as well.  The biographical elements are useful.

2.  Eisenhower's quote about Montgomery seems spot on:  "a good man to serve under, a difficult man to serve with, and an impossible man to serve over."

3.  Never knew anything about Yalta other than a vague sense of the agreements reached, FDR looked awful, and the conference was held somewhere in the Crimea.  So the descriptions were interesting (including czarist origins of the meeting place, logistical difficulties, etc.).

4.  I didn't know much about the Western Front beyond D-Day, Market Garden, Battle of the Bulge, race through Germany.  Sure it was no eastern front in terms of carnage and scale of battle - but it seems the Germans fought much harder and longer in the west than I realized.  Lots of nasty battles.

5.  I had this vision of the U.S. as an inexhaustible well of manpower - but not so.  At least in terms of shortages of men for some of the key fighting positions.  Interesting discussion of the loosening of physical (and psychological) standards as manpower needs accelerated.

6.  The book gives a glimpse of the incredible overload that so many GIs must have experienced - no doubt worse for those who served longest, but bad for all.  I lose sight that for some of the GIs, things started in Africa, slogged through Italy, then onto Normandy and into Germany - a parade of "normal" war awfulness, made worse by atrocities against soldiers, wrecked towns, wrecked civilians (often reduced to un-civil behavior), fatigue, awful weather, food problems, etc.  Then as they move into Germany and the end nears - the unhappy reality of the swarms of DPs relentlessly on the move, often hopeless.  When it's hard to imagine what else they might run into - now they start to encounter the concentration camps - worst of the worst.  Just amazing.  How did so many of these guys come back and thrive?

7.  Related - the book hints at a sense of the apprehension - in the background but so-real - relating to the Pacific War.  For anyone that survived the list in the previous paragraph - a very real possibility of success in Europe being followed immediately by a quick trip to hell in the Pacific.  No respite in sight.  Not discussed in this book, but I'm thinking that this factor is another piece of the puzzle in understanding why the A-bomb was dropped on Japanese cities.  Could anyone really ask America-writ-large, after all this, to take massive GI casualties in a conventional invasion?

8.  Military logistics are unfathomable to me in general, and the European invasion must have been the most unfathomable of all.  It took a while to take control of Antwerp - with it, provisioning was next to impossible.  Without it - the invasion could hardly have succeeded at scale.  Nazis were great wreckers of sites they scuttled, but failed to wreck Antwerp (though it became a V-2 target).

9.  I don't think I ever had read a word about the landing at Marseilles and the push up from the south of France.  Interesting story throughout.

Gift from PJr and Nedda, quite delightful.