Reflection on An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa 1942-1943 by Rick Atkinson

       This book was undoubtedly a masterpiece. You obviously need to be interested in WWII or military history to enjoy it, but Atkinson masterfully takes the reader from the biggest, highest strategic level down to individual foxholes. He makes the real-life individuals who fought in North Africa into characters as vivid as any novel. The writing is so elevated at times that it's poetic. Describing Eisenhower in Timgad, shortly after an operation resulting in heavy casualties, Atkinson writes,

Eisenhower and Truscott studied an inscription chiseled between two columns in the great forum: “Venari lavari ludere ridere hoc est vivere”: To hunt, to bathe, to play, to laugh—that is to live.

“When you remember me in your prayers, that’s the special thing I want—always to do my duty to the extreme limit of my ability,” Eisenhower wrote his wife a few hours later, during a stop in Constantine. Finally returning to Villa dar el Ouard after the long last leg to Algiers, he sat at the grand piano in the room where a few nights before he had belted out “One Dozen Roses.” Sometimes Eisenhower amused himself at the keyboard by plunking “Chopsticks” with two fingers. This night, weary and morose at the increasingly bad news from Tunisia, he instead, very slowly, picked out “Taps,” then stood without a word and went to bed. To err, to fret, to grieve, to learn—that, too, was to live.

    One major theme of the book is Eisenhower's transformation into a great war leader. He went into North Africa well-prepared, but unsure of himself, and overly deferential to the British. But he came out of North Africa firmly in charge of allied forces. In March, as the tide began to turn against the Nazi counterattack and the allies regrouped, Eisenhower wrote to his son at West Point, "I have observed very frequently that it is not the man who is so brilliant [who] delivers in time of stress and strain, but rather the man who can keep on going indefinitely, doing a good straightforward job." Later, Eisenhower's son, John, wrote that, "Before he left for Europe in 1942, I knew him as an aggressive, intelligent personality," but that he had transformed in the mountains of North Africa "from a mere person to a personage... full of authority, and truly in command. 

    I would say the biggest themes I picked up militarily are the important of supply and intelligence. It was absolutely critical to the allied victory that they just showed up with more stuff. As long as they were logistically supported, our Armies could face setbacks but keep moving. And then the fact that the Americans and British were breaking German codes was absolutely huge in our ability to counteract their maneuvers and catch them unaware.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• To be conscripted into the US Army, a soldier had to be at least 5' tall, 105 pounds, have twelve or more teeth, and no flat feet, hernias, or venereal disease. The Army drafted no fathers, no felons, and no eighteen-year-olds at first, but those standards changed quickly. The joke by the end of the war was that the Army no longer examined eyes, just counted them.
• Patton is exactly what you would expect. On of his diary entries: "When I realize the greatness of my job and realize that I am what I am, I am amazed, but on reflection, who is as good as I am? I know of no one."
• French General Giraud, who went over to the Allies, was famous for getting captured and escaping. In 1914, he was taken prisoner, but made it to Holland and then England disguised as a butcher, a stableboy, a coal merchant, and a magician in a traveling circus. Then, in 1942, when he was 63 years old, Giraud escaped a German prison in Konigstein by saving string used to wrap packages, forming a rope with it, and using it to climb 150 feet down to the Elbe River before hopping on a train to freedom.
• To deal with traffic fatalities in the invasion, the allies established a sliding scale of reparations for people killed: $500 for a dead camel, $300 for a dead boy, $200 for a dead donkey, and $10 for a dead girl.
• During the German counterattack in February 1943, a departing officer left at his headquarters a large wall map showing the battle lines around Stalingrad, where Paulus had just surrendered the German Sixth Army to the Soviets.
• For every six men wounded in the American Army in WWII, another was a neuropsychiatric casualty. More than 500,000 men from Army ground forces were discharged for psychiatric reasons and 12 percent of the 15 million draftees examined had already been culled as mentally unsound.
• Treatments for mental illness in North Africa included electric shock, barbiturates, and inducing deep sleep for 2-7 days. Army doctors found that "the average soldier reached his peak combat effectiveness in the first ninety days of combat and was so worn out after 180 days as to be useless and unable to return to military service."
• Venereal disease rates in Tunisia reached 34 cases per 1,000 white soldiers and 451 per 1,000 black soldiers. Atkinson doesn't give an explanation for this and I am stumped about why. 
• Another good Patton quote: when a subordinate told him that at least he hadn't lost any officers in combat, Patton said, "Goddammit, Ward, that's not fortunate. That's bad for the morale of the enlisted men, I want you to get more officers killed."
• It seems like war crimes were rampant. Some American soldiers would shoot at them for fun, sometimes making those Arabs suspected of being spies dig their own graves before shooting them.
• Every time you read about WWII, you find lots of examples of Hitler blowing it when his generals made good recommendations. In this case, he refused their suggestions to evacuate North Africa because it would be bad for morale, not understanding or refusing to understand that the German Army in North Africa would be completely wiped out by the summer of 1943.
• Interestingly, there was a huge divide within the allies among those who came with Montgomery from Egypt and had fought in the desert and those who came with Eisenhower from Morocco and had fought in the mountains. They really didn't like each other.
• The French faced a serious dilemma early on in the allied invasion of North Africa. They were under the Vichy regime, which was allied to Germany. But they hated Germany, having just been conquered by Hitler's armies. So when the Americans and British invaded, French officers suffered crises of loyalty, where some fought the Americans, some fought the Germans, and many fought both at different times or simultaneously