Summary Of Guns At Last Light By Rick Atkinson

The Guns at Last Light, Rick Atkinson’s final book in his Liberation Trilogy, focuses on WWII from 1944-1945 in Western Europe. Atkinson constructs a book which is incredibly well researched, and concentrates on the war from the Allied perspective. Unlike many scholarly works, Atkinson’s work does not immediately state a thesis. Rather, Atkinson crafts his story in such a way that his thesis is revealed over time. In this way, Atkinson argues that the Allied regime succeeded over the Axis powers because of their cohesion and the American’s resources. He supports this thesis by emphasizing the might of the American economy and focusing on the strength of the Allies’ alliance, and supports both arguments well. Atkinson also implies that

His argument is plagued by a lack of primary resources on the Axis alliance and writer’s bias. Rather than using his numerous resources to prove his claim, Atkinson merely claims that the Axis alliance is worse than the allied alliance while failing to provide as much argumentation on the subject as he did concerning the Allied alliance. His arguments against the Axis alliance were often similar to the following quotation: “The Allied way of war won through, with systems that were… ‘Centralized, unified, and coordinated,’ quite unlike the Axis systems” (Atkinson 632). Such a claim fails to provide hard evidence or an argument as to why the Axis systems lacked centralization, unification, and coordination. Furthermore, Atkinson’s weak assertion is not backed by extensive source use, like he supported his two previous claims (Atkinson 813-841). In his previous argument his use of sources made the claims strong and persuasive, but with this argument a lack of sources to back his claims makes the argument frail and impotent. An addition factor which makes his claim weak is the bias inherited as an American writer selling to American consumers. Not only is Atkinson more likely to side with the Allied forces due to nationalism, but he is also selling his book to Americans who likely share a similar nationalist bias with Atkinson and would thus be more inclined to read a pro-American account of