Carlo D'Este is the best. ( )

The current go-to title about the Sicily campaign from a US perspective is probably Rick Atkinson's Day of Battle, which I have yet to read. Carlo D'Este's book about Sicily follows the classic commander's and officer's perspective paradigm, a study in leadership and (lack of) strategy. The Mediterranean theater allowed the American generals and forces to slowly level up against a limited number of opponents and on non-strategic ground. Often, the American forces had to endure higher friendly casualties than those caused by the enemy. The USAAF bombed anything that moved, the Navy pummeled the Allied gliders and planes with incessant flak. Fortunately,. the US 7th army and the British 8th army faced only four German divisions on the island of Sicily, which could have been trapped by ingenious generalship. Unfortunately, Allied generalship was mediocre. D'Este is especially harsh on Harold Alexander who looked like a general but created a strategic and intellectual vacuum - quickly filled but not constrained by the theater's two prime donne Monty and Patton.

Monty's strong beginning quickly turned into a futile war of attrition in Eastern Sicily. Patton, meanwhile, went on a senseless goose chase in Western Sicily (conquering Palermo) that sent his troops away from the Germans. As D'Este points out, a better plan would have been to follow up the invasion of Sicily with a second one in Calabria, thus bottling up the German divisions on the island. The Allies did much worse: In a masterful operation, the Germans managed to evacuate all of their forces (and some Italians), with hardly any Allied intervention. Thus the title "Bitter victory", as apart from headlines and a poverty-stricken island, the Allies gained little more than experience (although the subsequent landings in Italy weren't showcases for lessons learned).

Overall, an interesting well-written account of the campaign that suffers a bit from German and Italian input. D'Este's unfamiliarity with German shows, for instance, on page 203 where he explains to his American readers that the German term for "one hell of a mess" is "Riesenauri", which is patent nonsense. The word he probably had in mind is "Riesensauerei", one of many, many German pork-based expressions of disapproval (Sauhaufen, Saustall, Schweinerei, Schweinehund, ...). Raising pigs was big business for the sausage mad Germans. Today, incidentally, it is Denmark that rules Europe's pig production. ( )