It is the WWII equivalent of Shelby Foote’s magisterial The Civil War: A Narrative. While all his books are good, his Liberation Trilogy, focused on the American Army in World War II, operates at an entirely different level. Simply put: Rick Atkinson is the best narrative historian I’ve ever read. Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777 And though it was fought in the age of reason, infused with Enlightenment ideals, this war, this civil war, would spiral into savagery, with sanguinary cruelty, casual killing, and atrocity…” Unlike most European wars of the eighteenth century, this one would not be fought by professional armies on flat, open terrain with reasonable roads, in daylight and good weather. Instead, what became known as the American Revolution was an improvised struggle between two peoples of a common heritage, now sundered by divergent values and conflicting visions of a world to come. “This would not be a war between regimes or dynasties, fought for territory or the usual commercial advantages.
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