No Rain
Rain all around the area but not here. Looking at the last 12 months of temps and I find 7 months above normal. Almost one degree above normal. Great that we get warmer and warmer.
What I’m Reading
I’ve been reading Rick Atkinson’s series on WWII. The first is An Army at Dawn, describing in great detail (704 pages) the invasion of North Africa. Read this book and you will gain a real understanding of the complexity, chaos, and tragedy of war. We think of WWII as a noble effort supported by a uniformly positively public. A flawless and well-executed war.
Can’t be farther from the truth. Atkinson describes campaigns designed by planners unfamiliar with the units they were deploying using faulty intelligence. Over time the planners and soldiers learned from their mistakes but before they learned tens of thousands of troops died. Atkinson’s analysis is clear-cut and fast-moving.
The second book in the series is The Day of Battle, describing the invasion of Italy. Once again, in fascinating detail (816 pages) Atkinson faithfully follows the Allies across the Mediterranean from Tunisia to Sicily and onto the continent. He is especially good at assessing the decisions made by generals and describing how their personalities affected their confidence or skepticism about battle campaigns.
The Italian campaign’s outcome was never certain; in fact, Roosevelt, Churchill, and their military advisers engaged in heated debate about whether an invasion of the so-called soft underbelly of Europe was even a good idea. But once under way, the commitment to liberate Italy from the Nazis never wavered, despite the agonizingly high price. The battles at Salerno, Anzio, and Monte Cassino were particularly difficult and lethal, yet as the months passed, the Allied forces continued to drive the Germans up the Italian peninsula. Led by General Mark Clark, American officers and soldiers became increasingly determined and proficient. Atkinson tells us how they began the war untested and uncertain but emerged by the Spring of 1944 as battle-hardened and effective commanders.
Atkinson skewers the idealistic view of war that Nemerov mocks in the poem below.
The War In The Air by Howard Nemerov
For a saving grace, we didn’t see our dead,
Who rarely bothered coming home to die
But simply stayed away out there
In the clean war, the war in the air.
Seldom the ghosts come back bearing their tales
Of hitting the earth, the incompressible sea,
But stayed up there in the relative wind,
Shades fading in the mind,
Who had no graves but only epitaphs
Where never so many spoke for never so few:
Per ardua, said the partisans of Mars,
Per aspera, to the stars.
That was the good war, the war we won
As if there was no death, for goodness’s sake.
With the help of the losers we left out there
In the air, in the empty air.
——–from The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov.
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