Rick Atkinson Books

Operation Torch was more than a military operation—it was a geopolitical gamble. As I narrate in the book, the plan required not just invading Vichy French territories in North Africa but also navigating the treacherous politics of collaboration and resistance. The Allied high command sought to draw...

From An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942–1943

The landings were both chaotic and heroic. At Casablanca, American troops met stiff resistance from French coastal batteries and the guns of the battleship *Jean Bart*. At Oran and Algiers, confusion and miscommunication added layers of peril. The Americans, many seeing combat for the first time, st...

From An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942–1943

The war began, not with grand strategy, but with confusion and tension on an April morning. When British regulars marched under Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith to seize colonial military stores in Concord, they expected order. Instead, chaos erupted. The shots fired on Lexington Green—unknown then ...

From The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775–1777

The colonists, flush with defiant energy, surrounded Boston, cutting off British access to the countryside. Yet they were little more than a ragged assembly until the Second Continental Congress appointed George Washington as commander in chief. I portray Washington as tentative yet driven, his lead...

From The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775–1777

After North Africa fell to the Allies, a fierce debate erupted among the Allied leadership over where to strike next. Churchill saw Italy as the key — 'the soft underbelly' of Hitler’s Fortress Europe. Roosevelt listened to his generals, many of whom preferred a direct assault across the English Cha...

From The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943–1944

Operation Husky, launched in July 1943, was the largest amphibious assault in history up to that time. Its planners faced a maddening complexity: coordinating Anglo-American landings across hundreds of miles of coastline while contending with erratic weather, unreliable intelligence, and inter-servi...

From The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943–1944