LM#79--What If Liberation Was Never Inevitable

The Drums Of Liberty

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Those are the drums of Liberty. 90 hours is how long it takes you to walk from the beaches of North Africa to the banks of the Elba River. If the man walking you there was Rick Atkinson. I just finished that walk. Let's talk about it on this Liberty Minute.

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Welcome to the Theory to Action Podcast, where we examine the timeless treasures of wisdom from the great books in less time to help you take action immediately and ultimately to create and lead a flourishing life. Now, here's your host, David Kaiser.

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Hello, I name David, and welcome back to another Liberty Minute. And this one didn't happen in a single sprint. This one took over six years, but I'm quite quite proud that I achieved it. You see, I started uh reading An Army at Dawn back in September of 2020. 26 hours, unabridged, cover to cover. And then life happened, and the way it always does, other things crop up. And the trilogy,

A Six-Year 90-Hour Reading Trek

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the liberation trilogy we're talking about today, sat on the shelf for a while. But I came back to it. I remained committed to it back in May of 2024 from volume 2, the day of battle. 32 plus hours. Finished that one in June of 24. And then just picked up volume three, the final volume, The Guns at Last Light, this past May, finishing it just at the end of July, some three weeks ago. And that was another 32 plus hours of listening. 90 hours total. Six years start to finish. From North Africa to the Elbow River, one volume at a time. And boy, I haven't stopped thinking about it since. So why does all this matter today? I'm not just gonna give a book report. Because we're seven years out from the 80th anniversary of VE Day, Victory in Europe Day, and the men who won that war are leaving us faster and faster every year. Some of you probably have been on honor flights. Um or sponsored honor flights or been at the airports when the honor flights come home. I know my dad participated in several. He was never a World War II vet, but he always loved to go to the local airport and welcome back the veterans. Um but soon there's going to be no veterans left of that war that remember it firsthand. And Atkinson wrote

Why Remembering VE Day Matters

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these books so that we would never be allowed to forget. And here comes our first nugget of wisdom for today. The entire liberation trilogy by Rick Atkinson, which is again, give everybody a briefer. An army at dawn is volume one. That's that gets you from roughly the invasion of North Africa, 1942-1943, and then you got volume two. Well, go going back, volume one was written in 2002 by Atkinson. The Day of Battle was written in 2007. That takes you into Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944, and then volume three, The Guns at Last Light, was written and completed in 2013. That is Western Europe, 1945 to 1940. I'm sorry, 1944 to 1945.

Meet Atkinson And The Trilogy

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So Army at Dawn, 26 hours, the day of battle, 32 hours on Audible, and The Guns at Last Light, 32 plus hours on Audible. Now, to just give you some background about Atkinson, he was a staff writer and senior editor at the Washington Post for more than 20 years. He is a Pulitzer Prize winner, twice over, once for journalism, once for volume one, Army at Dawn itself, which took the Pulitzer Prize for history. And I don't think that's incidental. I think it's part of his whole background in writing. It really comes through. He was raised inside the world that he later spent 20 years writing about. So we've already gone through each of the books, but I'll just give you a quick summary, one-sentence summary of each book that I had written down on my own notes. An Army at Dawn really surprised me because it really highlights the United States' entry into World War II, into the North African campaign, and the U.S. Army's brutal but humbling education in modern warfare. You realize we we don't get into World War I until very late, 1917, 1918. Certainly suffered many casualties, but our sense of modern warfare was really limited. And Atkinson makes the case that the U.S. Army is very green when it gets to North Africa. And boy, do we make a lot of mistakes. Tons of mistakes.

Failure, Learning, And Honest History

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Day of Battle, Sicily and Italy, 1943, 1944. The long, agonizing climb up the Italian boot. We're getting better. You can see us getting better coming out of North Africa. We've gone to school. We've we've we've certainly had many setbacks. We learn from those setbacks. We make remedies and then we get better as a fighting unit collectively, still making mistakes. And that's part of the the what I really like about Atkinson's writing is he doesn't he doesn't give you a rah-rah. He he tells you the mistakes frankly, wholeheartedly. Now granted he's writing, you know, 50, 60, 70 years after the fact, but it is it is not a it's not a I said rah-ra, but it's it's not like a uh it's not a triumphalist type book. Atkinson gives you an honest accounting, and that's why I liked all three volumes. I started off reading volume one just to see if I liked Atkinson's writing, and I did, just wasn't able to get back to it faster than I thought I would. So Atkinson does not let off America easy. He shows you friendly fire deaths, the commanders who got young men killed through their own vanity or poor planning, tells you about racism in a segregated army. He tells you about the sheer chaos of the Kasserine Pass, where very green, very green inexperienced American troops got their teeth kicked in by Rommel's Africa Corps, who was certainly way more experienced. And you listen to how he closes out that first volume once the North Africa campaign finally falls for for Germany. Let's go to the book because this is where Atkinson will describe the the moment the tide turned for good. Go on to the book. Africa was the first step on that long journey. There was, for the first time in the war, a real lifting of spirits, Churchill later wrote. Less than a year later, or less than a year earlier, the Axis had been advancing exorbitant on all fronts. Rommel's drive into Egypt had filled the Cairo rail stations with refugees while panicking British diplomats burned documents in their gardens. Now only in the U-boat campaign did the Axis retain anything like sustained offensive, a sustained offensive, and that was waning. The first Allied convoy to complete passage of the Mediterranean since 1941 left Gibraltar on May 17th and reached Alexandria without loss nine days later. Hitler had lost the strategic initiative forever. Indeed, Hitler had lost that strategic initiative forever. And I just love I just love Atkinson's writing. So you get 90 hours of that history makes paragraphs like that one every hour worth it. Now, like I had said, some listeners might expect that rah-rah account and want to know why why I'm recommending a book that's this unflinching about our mistakes. And I want to be frank because the greatness of the American Soldier isn't that he never fails, it's that he has failed and adjusted and came back and finished the job anyway. And Atkinson's earn he earns the victory in volume three because he made you sit through those failures in volume one. I mean, you come out of volume one, honestly. You come out of volume one and you're like, holy smokes. Not sure if you put yourself in their position, not sure that we are going to win in volume two. And slowly we get better and better. When we come out of volume two, we're getting ready to hit the beaches in Normandy. Certainly make tons of mistakes, gliders, way off course. You get all of those mistakes, all the mistakes that that many of us have started to learn, but you get all of those in detail. And that's not a knock on the book, that's what makes it true. And you get a real sense that liberation was never inevitable. It was paid for. It was paid for in North Africa, in Sicily, in Normandy, one soldier at a time. And that price is almost beyond comprehension. Because this American century was not inevitable. It was not preordained. It was paid for. So we didn't win by momentum. We didn't win by industrial output alone. Though those mattered plenty. Against guns they couldn't see. For a country most of them would never fully understand the stakes of until they were finally standing in it. So now this book will connect directly to a Mojo Academy book brief we had talked about earlier of Victor Davis Hanson's The Second World Wars, how the first global conflict was fought and won. And the great thing there is Hansen doesn't tell us the story chronologically, the way Atkinson does. He breaks the whole world or the whole war, frankly, apart by theme air, sea, land, industry, leadership. And then he asks the very cold question: why did the Allies actually win? And Hansen's answer is industrial capacity and the fighting of free men. Two very distinct

Why Victory Was Possible And Costly

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points. For the industrial capacity, he says 70% of the airframes in the war were allied. 90% of the aviation fuel came from the United States. Germany and Japan could win a border skirmish, but they had no way, no path to winning a global war against that kind of production. And you see, that's the piece Atkinson doesn't dwell on, but Hanson does. Hanson gives you the machine, the tanks, the fuel, the factories that made victory mathematically probable. Atkinson gives you the men who had to climb out of that landing craft and prove that the math was going to be right. One beach, one mountain, one stream crossing, one medic call. One book explains why liberation was possible, and the other actually shows you what it cost. So somewhere around hour sixty, I think, deep into volume two, deep into the Italian campaign. Atkinson describes a mountain assault. So costly, so grinding, that you eventually just had to pause the audiobook and just sit there and think about it. 90 hours. It's a long time to live inside a war. But for me, I came out the other side way more grateful, way more sober. I felt like I sat around a campfire and listened to these guys tell their stories. Guys and gals, frankly. And that has made me, like I said, more grateful for having learned the war, not from a textbook, but from real primary sources that Atkinson has drawn upon. Now, one more passage before I let you go, and we're going to go to the third volume, Guns at Last Light. This is Audie Murphy, 1945, January 26, near Vindvot, France. Go into the book. On January 26, 200 German infantrymen with half a dozen panzers attacked from the woods near Vindvot. Clutching a map and a field telephone, Second Lieutenant Murphy leaped onto a burning tank destroyer and for an hour repulsed the enemy with a fifty caliber machine gun while calling in artillery salvos. He killed them in the draws, in the meadows, and in the woods, a sergeant later reported, the dead including a dozen Germans huddled

The Human Price In Two Scenes

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like partridges in a nearby ditch. Things seemed to slow down for me, Murphy later said. Things became very clarified. DeLatra described the action as quote the bravest thing man has ever done in battle. But Murphy reflected that there was no exhilaration in there is no exhilaration at being alive. Second Lieutenant Murphy would go later to receive the Medal of Honor. A man alone on a burning tank destroyer holding off some 200 German infantry and half a dozen panzers with a fifty caliber machine gun. And then he tells you that there's no exhilaration in being alive. That's the whole trilogy in one paragraph. Sacrifice without a shred of swagger. Now, a little word of caution before we close. They're not easy books, 90 hours. It's a real commitment. It's not a weekend listen for sure. Like some of our other shorter titles have been, as we've covered in this show. But I will say this: if you want the definitive account of how Western Europe was freed from Hitler, written by a man who spent decades earning the right to tell it, there is no better trilogy in print, I don't think. Now, if you want a taste before you commit to the 90 hours, we got you covered there. All three Mojo Academy book briefs, one for each volume, are up on our Substack page. Each one carries a couple quotes straight from Atkinson himself, so you get a feel for his writing.

How To Sample The Books Free

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Before you invest a single hour, go there. They're free. Enjoy them. See if you want to grab the real thing. But for the last 80 years, we've been living in the American century. A century we have built on the back of that victory in Europe and across the whole of World War II. That American century seems to be slipping away from us now. But nevertheless, we should read this history. We should know the battles. We should know the names of the battles. We should know the details. We should know them like we know our own family history. Because it's our country's history. I hope each one of you will enjoy these three volumes as much as I did, especially if you just read the book briefs. I know I enjoyed them very, very much, and I enjoyed sharing them with you, and I will continue to do so as uh as they come up. But I have to say, God bless the men who never came home from North Africa, from Sicily, and from Normandy. God bless America. May we never take their sacrifice for granted. If you want to leave us a review, be sure to click in the show notes. If we've earned five stars from you, we appreciate it. High five and knuckle bumps all around. We greatly appreciate it. Thank you so much. But until next time, as always, keep getting your mojo on and keep fighting the good fight. Because so many have already done that for you. To live in the greatest country in the world.

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Thank you for joining us. We hope you enjoyed this theory to action podcast. Be sure to check out our show page at teammojoacademy.com, where we have everything we discussed in this podcast as well as other great resources. Until next time, keep getting your mojo on.