A fine treatment of the Italian campaign, 1943-1944. I find this a less interesting book than Atkinson's previous volume, Army At Dawn, because the first book undertook a unique project: how did a brand-new American army coalesce in its first real experience of war? Here, we follow the same army but the project is different, much as the project in Sicily and Italy was different.

The Allies had an army in Africa; it had no way to bring them all back to England for the invasion, and even if they were in England, there weren't enough landing craft to carry them to France. That they had to find employment seems a preposterous justification for a terrible campaign, but it is not clear that the US and Britain could reasonably have sat on their hands for a year while Russia carried all the weight.