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

4.0

Fantastic final volume to this excellent trilogy. Atkinson combines broad narrative history with personal details to bring the last year of the war in Europe vividly to life. He spends just enough time on the more familiar events; D-Day invasion of Normandy, MARKET-GARDEN fiasco; while exploring lesser known battles such as the follow-up landings in Southern France. As with the first two volumes, he does a fine job illuminating the tensions within the Anglo-American alliance and the complex personalities of the principle commanders. The concurrent Soviet drive in the the East is given short-shrift, understandable given the author's main focus, but it would have been interesting if the allies' fear of Soviet domination and the suggestion (by Patton and others) to take a more aggressive stance had been discussed. Only Montgomery's drive to the Baltic Coast to cut of Schleswig-Holstein (and thus Denmark) from further Soviet expansion was mentioned. Quibbles aside, the volume, and the whole trilogy, offers a masterful and accessible history of the Second World War in the West.