The Guns at Last Light
The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945
By: Rick Atkinson
Narrated by: L. J. Ganser
Series: The Liberation Trilogy, Book 3
Length: 32 hrs and 18 mins
The Phoenix is trained and ready for its final engagement with the foe. From the invasion of Normandy to liberating concentration camps. This concluding volume covers an episode of history that I am somewhat familiar with. Unlike its predecessors, I didn’t feel like I was filling in large holes but rather cracks in my knowledge.
Three points were notable.
The lack of purpose that the army experienced after the Falaise Pocket prior to its invasion of Germany proper. Why die for a cause that wasn’t worth fighting for? Harsh discipline helped keep the army together but would not have been up to the task. The atrocious reality of the Nazi concentration camps violated the fundamental value of human life that many GI’s had. In seeing the depravity of their fellow humans, it gave the men a purpose for which to die. This motivation was essential in completing the war.
The dehumanizing acts of war. It is in this book that events are brought forth, describing the dehumanizing of the American GIs. Some of the best fighters were also some of the most desensitized to the battle. They were willing to shoot point-blank into an enemy. Were they a group of German’s that were surrendering? Were they just a bunch of Nazi’s that were not worth the air they were breathing? Understanding the stark contrast between a generic soldier in combat in North Africa to that same generic soldier (now a non-com) is a journey in and of itself. It is a journey of understanding the meaning of death and desensitizing of man to it.
The ethereal realization, at the end, of loss. The loss of brothers in arms, of the innocent and of innocence, of the greatest event that would happen to them in their lifetime. The great tragedy bound together men against the greatest existential threat that they would ever know. Never again would they experience such unity of purpose in the mortal struggle of right against wrong in a day to day conflict between life and death.
Personal notes:
One of my favorite anecdotes from this series is of a surgeon. He spent days on end attempting to save lives. He cut off many limbs and saw many men die. After the war, he opened up a practice as an obstetrician. He found that one of the greatest antidotes for the trauma he had been through was to see new life come into the world.
I’ll close with one of my favorite quotes from the final chapter of the final volume:
This, the profoundest of all mysteries, would be left for the living to ponder. Soldiers who survived also would struggle to reconcile the greatest catastrophe in human history with what the philosopher and Army officer j. Glenn Gray called “the one great lyric passage in their lives.” The war’s intensity, camaraderie, and sense of high purpose left many with ‘a deplorable nostalgia,” in the phrase of A. J. Liebing. “the times were full of certainty,” Liebling later wrote. “I have seldom been sure I was right since.” An AAF crewman who completed fifty bomber missions observed, “Never did I feel so much alive. Never did the earth and all of the surroundings look so bright and sharp.” And a compact engineer mused, “What we had together was something awfully damned good, something I don’t think we’ll ever have again as we live.”
They had been annealed, touched with fire. “We are certainly no smaller men than our forefathers,” Gavin wrote his daughter. Alan Moorehead, who watched the scarlet calamity from beginning to end, believed that “here and there a man found greatness in himself.”
The Guns at Last Light, Rick Atkinson, Chapter 91