Author James Holland reminds us that, by comparison to other European battles of World War II, the Sicily campaign has had relatively little coverage. This is both unfortunate and true, so any new book is an important addition to the genre. And if all you want is weight of paper, this is a hefty addition to the genre.

I'm not sure it really gives much insight, though. It is primarily a low-level history, telling the story of the campaign mostly as seen from the standpoint of the people on the ground -- particularly American and German soldiers, although there are a few Italians and British, and the Canadian author Farley Mowat, then a junior officer, also gets his place. If you want to know just how awful it was to fight in Sicily -- which was baking hot, malarial, and undeveloped, so there were few roads to bring supplies or allow troops to advance quickly -- this is a great book.

But it also has great big holes. There are a lot of anecdotes, but the overall picture is fuzzy, and if you want to know about a unit which Holland doesn't describe, forget it. For example, my chief interest is in the 51st Highland Division. It would have had a fine viewpoint character in Lieutenant Hamish Henderson, who like Mowat later became famous for other things. But Henderson never appears, and while there are oblique references to the 51st, we don't get much idea of what it was doing.

I also thought that there wasn't really enough discussion of the arms and armor. We spend a little time hearing about the Tiger tank, and its strengths and weaknesses, but what about the American Shermans that it fought against? The German 88mm antitank gun that had so often decided battles in North Africa? The various sorts of artillery? We hear a bit about the German pilots flying the Me-109, but little about the Spitfires they fought against. And on and on -- except for the Tigers and the Messerschmitts, it's basically all infantry fighting, despite the tremendous efforts made to bring aircraft and tanks to the island.

More about the geography of Sicily would have helped, too, because you can't understand the Sicily campaign without knowing about Mount Etna and the interior ridges. It's not enough to just tell us that there were a lot of hills and that towns were built on them! And not covering Patton's "slapping incidents" until the postscript is almost criminal.

Holland deserves credit for adding to the relatively limited supply of Sicily books, and for giving us insight into the infantryman's plight. But you probably would do better to read a different book -- perhaps Carlo d'Este's Bitter Victory: The Battle for Sicily July-August 1943 -- to give you an overview before you start on this book. ( )

This is the first war book I have ever read in my life. I spotted it on a supermarket shelf and immediately knew I wanted to read it, because I have a thing about Sicily since I visited there in 2016 (and have watched all episodes of 'Inspector Montalbano'). I found it shocking, because of the casual accounts of random killing along the way, but also fascinating. I found myself wondering how human beings could have endured such an experience. I also found myself wondering how it was that no-one seemed to stop and question what it was all for, especially on the Axis side. It's not the best-written book in the world and the information being relayed isn't the easiest to take in. I learnt to gloss over the start of paragraphs dense with unit names, military terms and abbreviations, which I found I couldn't absorb anyway, and cut to the action. I would definitely read another of his books though, because it's all true and he brings it to life so that one almost feels one has been there. ( )