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Erin: Welcome to T2A webchat for Wednesday, October 17th. We are meeting Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author Rick Atkinson. He discusses the second volume of his Liberation Trilogy. In The Day of Battle, Rick follows the American and British armies as they invade Sicily in July 1943, attack Italy two months later, and then fight their way, mile by bloody mile, north toward Rome. The first volume of the Trilogy is An Army at Dawn The War in North Africa, 1942-1943. Rick was a staff writer and senior editor at The Washington Post for more than twenty years.
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Wondwossen, Ethiopia (email): Would you find it plausible to say the Battle of Normandy and the war route followed through Sicily and Italy from North Africa were used as a show of force and a display of new war equipment and fighting tactics? What do you think the two fronts would’ve been like if we were fighting World War II with modern weaponry?
Rick: I think the course of the war was more ad hoc than your question implies. The war was fought in Sicily and then in Italy because the Allies were already committed in the Mediterranean. Certainly there were tactics and equipment that were developed in those earlier campaigns and then used in Normandy and beyond. As for hypotheticals along the lines of fighting World War II fought with contemporary weapons, that's probably best left to the science fiction writers.
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Thomas, Ibotomi / Imo-Obong, Nigeria, John (email): What was the actual cause of World War II and what significant changes did it bring to the world?
Rick: Most historians would agree that the causes of World War II derive from unresolved problems connected to the First World War I, including the German sense of aggrievement, which Hitler exploited very well. The changes wrought by World War II were profound, including a beginning of the end of colonial empires. In the United States, the war was a catalyst for putting women into the work force, for the establishment of a permanent military-industrial complex, and for the pursuit of civil rights.
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Ashok, India (email): Germany was mainly a land-based power during World War II. To what extent was this factor responsible for the outcome of the war?
Rick: The German military rose and fell on its commitment to a land-based way of war. Given the overwhelming superiority soon developed at sea by the Allied forces, and the eventual superiority in the air by those same Allied forces, the German stress on land power was severely hampered. Rommel at one point likened the act of fighting without air superiority to having only one arm.
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Jonathan (email): During your studies, did you uncover any type of evidence suggesting a German presence in Monte Cassino prior to the bombing? Also, my grandfather was injured, not sure what time period or exact area, but at a place they referred to as the “bowling alley” Can you explain what this was?
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Rick: The evidence is quite compelling that there were no German forces in the abbey at Monte Cassino prior to the Allied bombing that destroyed the abbey on Feb. 15, 1944. The German commander in that portion of the Gustav Line, General Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin, was a good Catholic who had given his word to the Catholic Church that he would not violate the sanctity of the abbey; his superior, Field Marshall Kesselring, a Bavarian Catholic, had the same attitude. Moreover, they held enough observation points around the abbey that they didn't need the building itself. After the bombing, the Germans immediately occupied the rubble, which made excellent defensive strongholds. As for the Bowling Alley, that was a sector of the battlefield at Anzio; there was intense fighting there during the German counteroffensive in Feb. 1944.
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Tom (email): As the American Army moved from North Africa to Italy, do you believe its battle doctrine was influenced more by its own experience or by learning from the British? Was there an improvement in the way the US Army fought?
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Rick: There was such intense Anglophobia in the upper ranks of the U.S. Army in 1943 that any direct influence of British battle doctrine would have been despite the druthers of the American high command. (Eisenhower, incidentally, was an exception to this, since he actually liked the British.) Sure, the Army that fought in Italy was more capable than the Army that arrived in North Africa in Nov. 1942. There were four American divisions with battle experience at the end of the Tunisian campaign in May 1943, and they provided a hardened core for the Army that subsequently fought in Sicily and Italy. But there were many green units that arrived for those later campaigns, and green units almost always go through a difficult period.
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Clement (email) and Kachitenha, Angola (email): What impact did World War II have on Africa?
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Rick: As I mentioned earlier, the war hastened the end of colonialism--or at least the baldest forms of colonialism. President Roosevelt had recognized as early as the conference in Casablanca in Jan. 1943, for example, that there would no place in the post-war world for the reconstituted British and French colonial empires. The subsequent history of Africa reflects that recognition.
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Kemal, Ethiopia (email): 1943 is a long time ago. How were you able to gather the information you used to write your book?
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Rick: There are hundreds of archival resources all over the U.S. and all around the world, and I spend my days, weeks, months and eventually years in those archives: the Library of Congress, the U.S. Army Military History Institute, the National Archives (both in the U.S. and in Britain), among many other examples. Most state universities in the United States have World War II archives of some sort, and many U.S. Army divisions have museums or archives of some sort. There's also the Naval Historical Center in Washington, the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives in London, and the Imperial War Museum. I also spend a lot of time on the battlefields, trying to understand the tactical challenges and listening to what the ground can tell you.
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Okonkwo, Nigeria (email): What was the number of casualties in World War II and how did Africa become involved?
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Rick: No one knows precisely how many died in World War II but a good estimate is 60 million. Nearly half of those were in the former Soviet Union. Africa was drawn into the war both through Benito Mussolini's empire building, and through the conflict that evolved in North Africa, which intensified after German forces were sent, eventually under Rommel, to help the Italians who were besieged by British troops. The war in Africa expanded on Nov. 8, 1942, when Anglo-American forces invaded Morocco and Algeria, and subsequently turned toward Tunisia in an effort to control the southern coast of the Mediterranean. That campaign eventually ended on May 13, 1943.
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Ken (email): I've heard it said that German troop deaths from influenza may have turned the tide in the Allies' favor during World War I, and that access to yellow fever vaccine may have done the same in the Pacific theater in World War II. Are there any similar significant public health stories to relay from the European front in World War II?
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Rick: I don't think that German flu deaths could be called tide turning. But there are some very interesting medical issues in the Mediterranean theater. For example, the Americans and British grossly underestimated the threat from malaria in Sicily in the summer of 1943. Anti-malarial medications were indifferently distributed, and other prophylactic measures were not pursued as aggressively as they should have been. Consequently, almost overnight the Anglo-American force in Italy had more than 20,000 malaria casualties. This lesson was learned a year later at Anzio, where the Germans had deliberately destroyed the dikes and canals in the Pontine Marshes in an effort to wage biological warfare with a type of mosquito that was a notorious malaria vector in that part of Italy. But the anti-malarial efforts by Allied commanders were much more robust, and malaria cases proved to be a small fraction of those that had afflicted the army the previous summer.
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joselocsin: How did World War II in Italy influence the Roman Catholic Church.
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Rick: The Catholic Church was pulled in different directions as a consequence of the war. There are some historians who believe the pope was an enabler of Hitler and Mussolini. On the other hand, the church was often courageous in hiding Italian Jews, escaped Allied POWs, downed Allied fliers, and so forth.
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James (email): Was World War Two really justified?
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Rick: I guess that depends on what you mean. If you mean, was Hitler justified in invading Poland and beginning a course of conquest that resulted in many millions dead, you'd have to say no. If you mean, were the Allied powers--the U.S., Britain, the Soviet Union and others--justified in resisting Axis aggression and fighting to the death to destroy the regimes in Tokyo, Rome and Berlin, I think you'd have to say yes.
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Erin: Your father was a career Army officer. How did that influence your approach to this topic…and did you ever consider joining the military yourself?
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Rick: My father joined the Army in 1943, came back from Germany after serving in the Constabulary--an armored cavalry unit with remarkable police powers in Bavaria--then went to college and rejoined the Army to serve as an officer until the late 1970s. Growing up on military posts in the 1950s and 1960s, World War II was very much a presence; it was a vibrant part of the culture. I was born in Munich because my father was stationed in Salzburg (the Army hospital was across the border in Germany.) So the question always lingered: what were we doing in central Europe? Yes, I considered following my father's career choice, and had an appointment to the West Point class of 1974 -- Dave Petraeus's class, incidentally. I decided at the last minute not to go, saving myself and especially the Army a lot of trouble.
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Erin: You recently wrote “In the Company of Soldiers,” a book that chronicles your two months with the 101st Airborne in Iraq. What experiences did you go through while you were in Iraq?
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Rick: Yes, I was embedded in the headquarters of the division commander, Maj. Gen. Dave Petraeus, and spent two months at his elbow; from the time we left Ft. Campbell, Kentucky, in Feb. 2003, through the fall of Baghdad in April. The experiences are laid out in the book, but I would say that even for someone who has been around the military all his life, the view of the Army was uncommonly intimate. And watching the stresses on the commanding general, seeing the relationships between leaders and led in combat, even living the infantry life with riflemen for weeks on end, all that gave me a better understanding when it came to writing about those issues historically, within the context of World War II.
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Erin: What made you decide to start writing the Liberation Trilogy – and with so much already chronicled, what was the challenge (or lack thereof) in finding compelling new material?
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Rick: I was living in Berlin for several years in the mid-1990s, as the Berlin bureau chief for the Washington Post. So I was there for that endless succession of 50th anniversary commemorations: of Normandy, the Bulge, the end of the war. And I realized that you cannot understand what happened at Normandy and thereafter without knowing what happened before; that army, those men, those commanders did not leap from the ether. They had a cumulative history, individually and collectively, and it started in North Africa and continued in Sicily and Italy. It's the greatest story of the 20th century. There's more to write, there will always be more to write. It's bottomless. And if you're willing to do the archival spadework, there are wonderful things to discover.
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Erin: That wraps today’s T2A webchat. Our thanks to Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author Rick Atkinson – and to you for joining us. You can see the transcript of this chat and learn more about Rick by going to voanews.com. We hope you join us next Wednesday, October 24th at 18 hours universal time when we meet Bill Drayton. He founded and leads Ashoka, the global association of the world’s leading social entrepreneurs. This organization of includes men and women with system changing solutions for the world’s most urgent social problems. Bill is currently spearheading a movement called ‘Get America Working!’ and ‘Youth Venture’. That’s October 24th at 18 hours utc on voanews.com See you then.
Back to Past Chats
On 17 October 07, at 1800 UTC, We met Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author Rick Atkinson. He discussed the second volume of his "Liberation Trilogy".