An Army at Dawn
Rick Atkinson opens his Liberation Trilogy with the Allied invasion of North Africa, the first sustained ground campaign against Nazi Germany. He follows green American troops as they land in Morocco and Algeria, blunder into the mountains of Tunisia, and slowly become the army that will fight across Europe. Atkinson works from diaries, letters, and after-action reports to put readers inside command tents, supply depots, and tank turrets at Kasserine Pass. He gives equal weight to generals and to riflemen, never losing the human cost behind the maps. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for History and set the tone for the trilogy that followed in Sicily, Italy, and France.
What you might want to know about An Army at Dawn
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
The first volume of the Liberation Trilogy follows the American and British campaign to push the Axis out of North Africa in 1942 and 1943.
Hanks named the entire Liberation Trilogy on his One Grand Books list, writing that the small details hold the DNA of the entire conflagration and that the final pages will rip your heart out.
An Army at Dawn works on its own, but reading the three books in order gives the full arc from North Africa through Sicily, Italy, and Western Europe.
An Army at Dawn was written by Rick Atkinson, published in 2002 by Henry Holt and Co..
An Army at Dawn is 681 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, An Army at Dawn takes most readers 10 to 15 hours to finish.
An Army at Dawn is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.