A review by mkesten
The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 by Rick Atkinson

5.0

As I sit in the warm, quiet comfort of my home, watching the falls leaves drift from the trees in my yard, I close the book on the third of Rick Atkinson's The Liberation Trilogy. Nothing, nothing can be so sad as war, certainly not WW2 where the skies rained so much steel upon mankind, and where ovens swallowed the slaughtered millions. So many of those soldiers in the Allied forces could not have had an inkling of what awaited them in defeated Germany. Those soldiers, those who lived and those who died, experienced more pain and fright and danger in a day than I will ever experience. For that I am grateful. I learned in this last volume how Allied soldiers sometimes misbehaved much in the way that Soviet soldiers misbehaved in their march west, or as French colonials misbehaved in conquered Italy. I learned how splintered the Allies were throughout the invasion of Europe. I also learned much more about the Canadian role in the conflagration than I knew in the past. Pray there isn't a next time.