This year marks the 250th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord and the eightieth anniversary of World War II’s V-E Day and V-J Day. Although separated by nearly two centuries, the American War of Independence and World War II have something fundamentally in common: liberation. The War of Independence liberated the American colonies from British rule. World War II helped liberate half of Europe from Nazi tyranny. Liberation is the common theme running through award-winning historian Rick Atkinson’s trilogy on America’s armed forces in the Second World War and his first two books of a trilogy on the War of Independence, the latest of which, The Fate of the Day, has just been released.  

Atkinson began his writing career as a journalist for newspapers in Kansas and later joined the staff of the Washington Post. He wrote books on the West Point class of 1966, the Persian Gulf War, and the war in Iraq. He began his World War II trilogy with An Army at Dawn (2007), which described how a woefully unprepared American army achieved a costly victory in North Africa in 1942–43, at places such as Casablanca, Oran, Algiers, El Guettar, Kasserine, Sidi Nsir, and Bizerte. Atkinson characterizes the fighting in North Africa as “a pivot point in American history, the place where the United States began to act like a great power—militarily, diplomatically, strategically, tactically.” The North African campaign revealed, he writes, “a nation and an army unready to fight and unsure of their martial skills, yet willful and inventive enough to prevail,” most especially because of “the prodigious weight of American industrial might.”  

General George Marshall didn’t want to fight there. To him and other American military planners, North Africa was a sideshow that British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had persuaded President Franklin Roosevelt to undertake as a preliminary “second front” promised to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Marshall wanted a single, overwhelming thrust in northwest Europe, but the fighting in North Africa showed that America’s armed forces were not yet ready to invade Hitler’s fortress Europe. “If [North Africa] provided one benefit above others,” Atkinson concludes, “it was to save Washington and London from a disastrously premature landing in northern Europe.”  

Atkinson’s next volume, titled The Day of Battle, recounted the invasion of, and fighting on, the island of Sicily, then the action in Italy, supposedly the “soft underbelly” of Europe. General Marshall opposed this sideshow, too, but as before Churchill won out. The fighting was anything but soft on the way to Palermo and Messina in Sicily, then in Italy at Salerno, Cassino, Ortona, San Pietro, Anzio, and on the way to Rome, which was liberated on June 4, 1944—two days before D-Day. The topography of Italy favored the defender, and American soldiers overcame it with blood and guts.  

The fighting in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy proved the truth of Clausewitz’s observation that “friction” is always present in warfare. The best tactical plans rarely survive contact with the enemy. But as Atkinson notes, the American armies were learning fast, and so, too, were their commanders: Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley, Truscott, Clarke, and many others. Meanwhile, America’s industrial might armed all of the Allied powers. The Axis empires both in Europe and the Far East were steadily contracting in the face of overwhelming Allied resources and power.  

Atkinson completed his World War II trilogy in 2013 with The Guns at Last Light, which follows the American armies from D-Day, June 6, 1944, to V-E Day, May 8, 1945. The armies that invaded Normandy suffered frightful casualties on D-Day, then slugged it out with the Germans in the merciless hedgerows (“bocage”) where every fifty to one hundred yards was its own universe of battle. Atkinson quotes one American infantryman who referred to this terrain as “the Gethsemane of the hedgerows.” (My father, a sergeant with the 175th infantry regiment of the 29th Division, fought in this terrain before heading to Brest, then the Siegfried Line, the Roer River battles, the Rhine, and to the west bank of the Elbe River. I tell his story in Somewhere in France, Somewhere in Germany: A Combat Soldier’s Journey Through the Second World War).  

Ahead would be Patton’s dash across France, the liberation of Paris, the failure of Operation Market Garden, the broad Allied offensive, dashed hopes of an early end to the war, Hitler’s Ardennes offensive leading to the brutal Battle of the Bulge, the intense bombing of German cities, and finally the American sweep across the Rhine to the Elbe River, while the Russians took Berlin. This fighting, Atkinson noted, showed once again that “war is never linear, but rather a chaotic, desultory enterprise of reversal and advance, blunder and élan, despair and elation.” Thus it was for the liberation armies, whose soldiers also liberated concentration camps and slave labor camps (my father’s division liberated the Dinslaken slave labor camp). The liberation armies experienced, in Atkinson’s words, “nobility, villainy, immeasurable sorrow.” 

Atkinson’s current project is a work in progress, and it is about America’s first liberation armies—the brave colonials who fought at Lexington and Concord, Bunker Hill, Trenton, and many other battlefields to end British rule in America—in a sense, the military forebears of the men who liberated half of Europe in the 1940s. The first volume, The British Are Coming, appeared in 2019.  

In the War of Independence, as in World War II, there was plenty of bravery, courage, and devotion to duty, but there were also cowardice, callousness, and atrocities. Towns and villages were burned. Women were raped. Looting, thievery, and pillaging were commonplace. Disease, hunger, and fatigue were ever present. Atkinson notes that the War of Independence lasted 3,059 days, involved more than a thousand separate actions and more than 240 naval engagements, and cost between 25,000 and 36,000 American deaths, “a larger proportion of the American population to perish in any conflict other than the Civil War.” It was both a war of liberation and a “civil war,” fought between “two peoples of a common heritage.” It came after decades of benign neglect by Great Britain followed by measures designed to rectify the financial problems of the empire brought about by the Seven Years’ War (the French and Indian War in America). 

Atkinson writes that British policy was based on three main false assumptions: “that most colonists remained loyal to the Crown . . . ; that firmness, including military firepower . . . would intimidate the obstreperous and restore harmony; and that failure to reassert London’s authority would eventually unstitch the empire.” King George III remarked that “When once these rebels have felt a smart blow they will submit.” Members of Parliament generally agreed, including a new member of the House of Commons named Edward Gibbon, who was working on the first volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Others, such as Edmund Burke and William Pitt, weren’t so sure. There were last-ditch efforts at diplomacy, led on the part of the colonies by Benjamin Franklin, but they failed, and the war came.  

Atkinson notes that at least a third of the colonial population thought of themselves as a separate people, a separate nation. They had become Americans who believed they were entitled to “rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” And they were willing to sacrifice and risk all to achieve independence. Meanwhile, King George and the British political establishment continued to believe that the rebellion was caused by a relatively small radical element, mostly in Massachusetts. 

The British Are Coming covers the war’s initial battles in a geographical theater that stretched from Canada to South Carolina: Lexington and Concord; Boston Harbor, Breed’s Hill and Bunker Hill; Montreal and Quebec; Lakes Champlain and George and the Hudson River Valley; Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and Long Island; Charleston Harbor; Trenton and Princeton. Indians fought on both sides but more heavily with the British. Atkinson provides character sketches of the key military leaders of Britain (Thomas Gage, Guy Carleton, William Howe, Richard Howe, Henry Clinton, John Burgoyne, Hugh Percy, and Charles Cornwallis) and America (George Washington, Nathaniel Greene, Henry Knox, Israel Putnam, Philip Schuyler, Horatio Gates, Charles Lee, John Sullivan, and Benedict Arnold).  

Atkinson agrees with the biographer James Thomas Flexner that Washington was the “indispensable man” of the American Revolution, who as a general came to understand that to achieve victory Britain had to decisively win the war whereas America would win as long as it kept fighting. The survival of Washington’s army was paramount. The American army was victorious in Boston, New Jersey, and South Carolina and suffered defeats in Canada and New York, but it always lived to fight another day despite logistical and manpower difficulties that would have doomed other armies. In the throes of defeat in New York, Washington rallied the army by telling them, “The time is now near at hand which must probably determine whether Americans are to be freemen or slaves . . . The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage and conduct of this army.” 

The Fate of the Day begins with the crucial diplomatic efforts of Benjamin Franklin to bring France (and perhaps also Spain) into the war on America’s side. Throughout the eighteenth century, Britain and France had fought for supremacy in the New World, most recently in the French and Indian War, which was a British victory. Meanwhile, the war dragged on in places such as Fort Ticonderoga and Oriskany in New York and Little Neshaminy Creek, Brandywine, Germantown, and Paoli in Pennsylvania. Congress had to abandon Philadelphia and flee to York, Pennsylvania. And it was America’s victory at Saratoga, New York, that finally brought France into the war.  

Atkinson describes Washington’s valiant efforts to keep the army intact at Valley Forge; the brutal fighting at Monmouth Courthouse in New Jersey; battles in Newport, Rhode Island, Savannah, Georgia, Hampton Roads, Virginia, and Stony Point, New York; the siege and surrender of Charleston; Franco-British clashes at sea; and the fear among the British of a joint Spanish–French armada leading an invasion of the British Isles. By 1780, the war’s outcome was still very much in doubt, but Washington’s spirits were revived when he learned from the Marquis de Lafayette that France’s Louis XVI was sending warships and combat troops to America. Washington wrote, “This is a decisive moment . . . the most important America has ever seen.” If we failed to take advantage of this assistance, he continued, “we must become contemptible in the eyes of all mankind.”