The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 »

Rick Atkinson was a staff writer and senior editor at The Washington Post for more than twenty years. He is the bestselling author of An Army at Dawn, The Long Gray Line, In the Company of Soldiers, and Crusade. His many awards include Pulitzer Prizes for journalism and history. He lives in Washington, D.C.

In the second volume of his epic trilogy about the liberation of Europe in World War II, Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Atkinson tells the harrowing story of the campaigns in Sicily and Italy

The New York Times Book Review - James Holland

Rick Atkinson proved what a determined and assiduous researcher could achieve in An Army at Dawn, his best-selling account of the North Africa campaign, and he has been no less thorough in The Day of Battle, the second part of a projected "liberation" trilogy. But while there is new material here—like information about the deaths of Allied servicemen from American mustard gas at Bari—it is his ability to ferret out astonishing amounts of detail and marshal it into a highly readable whole that gives Atkinson the edge over most writers in this field. Anyone who devoured An Army at Dawn with relish will be delighted with his account of the Sicilian and Italian campaign. All the same ingredients are here, from sharp one-liners…to brilliantly observed character portraits.

List of Maps xvi Map Legend xvii Allied Chain of Command xviii Prologue 1 Part 1
1 Across the Middle Sea 29 Forcing the World Back to Reason 29 Calypso's Island 46
"The Horses of the Sun" 58 Death or Glory 68
2 The Burning Shore 75 Land of the Cyclops 75 The Loss of Irrecoverable Hours 91
"Tonight Wear White Pajamas" 105
"The Dark World Is Not Far from Us" 112
3 An Island Redoubt 123
"Into Battle with Stout Hearts" 123
"How I Love Wars" 129 Snaring the Head Devil 135 Fevers of an Unknown Origin 142 A Great Grief 149
"In a Place Like This" 161 Part 2
4 Salerno 179
"Risks Must Be Calculated" 179 Plots, Counterplots, and Cross-plots 187 The Stillest Shoes the World Could Boast 197 The Moan of Lost Souls 216 A Portal Won 227
5 Corpse of the Siren 239
"I Give You Naples" 239
"Watch Where You Step and Have No Curiosity at All" 249 The Mountainous Hinterland 256
"The Entire World Was Burning" 266
6 Winter 279 The Archangel Michael, Here and Everywhere 279
"A Tank Too Big for the Village Square" 293 A Gangster's Battle 297 Too Many Gone West 307 Part 3
7 A River and a Rock 321 Colonel Warden Makes a Plan 321
"Nothing Was Right Except the Courage" 328 The Show Must Go On 351
8 Perdition 359
"Something's Happening" 359 Through the Looking Glass 372 Jerryland 385
9 The Murder Space 398 This World and the Next World at Strife 398 The Bitchhead 412
"Man Is Distinguished from the Beasts" 432 Part 4
10 Four Horsemen 445 A Fairyland of Silver and Gold 445 The Weight of Metal 453 Dragonflies in the Sun 473
11 A Kettle of Grief 483 Dead Country 483
"Put the Fear of God into Them" 494
"You Are All Brave. You Are All Gentlemen"501
"On the Eve of Great Things" 509
12 The Great Prize 521 Shaking Stars from the Heavens 521 A Fifth Army Show 536 The Cuckoo's Song 555 Expulsion of the Barbarians 564 Epilogue 577 Notes 589 Selected Sources 731 Acknowledgments 763 Index 771