"In solidarity with their Japanese ally, Hitler and Mussolini quickly declared war on the United States. It was perhaps the Führer’s gravest miscalculation and, as the British historian Martin Gilbert later wrote, 'the single most decisive act of the Second World War.' America would now certainly return to Europe as a belligerent, just as it had in 1917, during the Great War." 

While the Pearl Harbor attack dragged the United States into war with Japan, war between the US and Germany wasn't necessarily inevitable. Whether the US would have entered the war in Europe without Hitler's declaration is among the most hotly-debated questions surrounding World War II.

"The president had made the most profound American strategic decision of the European war in direct contravention of his generals and admirals. He had cast his lot with the British rather than with his countrymen. He had repudiated an American military tradition of annihilation, choosing to encircle the enemy and hack at his limbs rather than thrust directly at his heart. And he had based his fiat on instinct and a political calculation that the time was ripe." 

From this view, Roosevelt's decision to land in North Africa first rather than invade Europe from the English Channel was shrewd and courageous, given opposition from top military advisors. In addition, this quote speaks to the recurring theme that many of the North Africa campaign's most consequential decisions—both good and bad—were dependent on individual men's instincts and egos.

"He had reduced his extensive study of history and military art to a five-word manifesto of war: 'violent attacks everywhere with everything.'" 

The merits of General Patton and the extent to which he deserves his legacy as a brilliant general is another one of the more contentious debates surrounding World War II. This quote neatly encapsulates Atkinson's mixed view of the commander. While Patton was unquestionably well-versed in military tactics, his tendency to reduce the art of war into a simple calculus of aggression and will resulted in him making several tactical errors over the course of the war.

"'I have the feeling,' the war correspondent Don Whitehead later wrote, 'that he was a far more complicated man than he seemed to be—a man who shaped events with such subtlety that he left others thinking they were the architects of those events. And he was satisfied to leave it that way.'" 

Like Patton, General Eisenhower was another key figure whose performance and acumen during World War II is debated by scholars—albeit to a far lesser extent than Patton. Whitehead's view is supported by the attitudes Montgomery and other British commanders took toward Eisenhower, whom they dismissed as a good man but a bad soldier. In Atkinson's telling, Eisenhower's carefully cultivated sense of humility was crucial in corralling the egos of the men working under him toward a common goal.

"The seventy-four-hour battle had given him a chance to display his most conspicuous command attributes: energy, will, a capacity to see the enemy’s perspective, and bloodlust […] Yet Patton’s defects also were revealed: a wanton disregard of logistics; a childish propensity to feud with other services; an incapacity to empathize with frightened young soldiers; a willingness to disregard the spirit if not the letter of orders from his superiors; and an archaic tendency to assess his own generalship on the basis of personal courage under fire." 

Again, Atkinson's portrait of Patton is nuanced and his opinion of the man highly ambivalent. In fairness, it is difficult to evaluate Patton's record based solely on the North Africa campaign during which Patton was often sidelined at critical moments. At the same time, Atkinson details enough of Patton's successes and blunders to support his mixed view of the general.

"Few commanders in this war could function without arriving at a sensibility in which thousands of dead and wounded men could be waved away as 'insignificant.'" 

Though extraordinarily grim, this realization was one of the most valuable lessons American commanders learned during the North African campaign. Unlike many of their British counterparts, American leaders arrived in North Africa with significantly less exposure to the horrors of modern war. Eisenhower in particular, having served largely as a staff officer rather than a combat officer, learned this lesson painfully.

"They believed they had been blooded. They believed that overpowering the feeble French meant something. They believed in the righteousness of their cause, the inevitability of their victory, and the immortality of their young souls. And as they wheeled around to the east and pulled out their Michelin maps of Tunisia, they believed they had actually been to war."

While the comparative ease with which the Allies dominated the French was undoubtedly favorable, this also had the effect of generating a dangerous and unearned sense of invincibility among the young troops. While confidence is a vital attribute for soldiers to have, the speed with which German troops cut the overly cocksure Allies down to size caused their morale to slide in the other direction.

"Proverbially, no military plan survives contact with the enemy. This is never truer than when there is no plan to begin with." 

This quote speaks to the Allies' lack of preparedness in meeting the Axis in Tunisia and to the limitations of even the most brilliant tactical operations. Repeatedly, tactically-sound plans fell apart due to logistical failures, communication breakdowns, poor decision-making from individual actors, and sheer bad luck.

"'It was a rather unpleasant incident, to be sure,' Kesselring said, yet their predicament was less bleak than Nehring believed. The field marshal now had a sense of his Allied foes: they were cautious and tentative, disinclined to bold tactical gambles." 

Among the many shortcomings of the Allied force in North Africa, few recurred more frequently than its lack of aggressiveness, particularly in the wake of strategic triumphs. Atkinson suggests this was as much a psychological issue as it was a tactical one. After winning a fierce battle, Allied divisions were often all too happy to put space between themselves and the enemy to the extreme detriment of the war effort.

"In truth, he spent at least three-quarters of his time worrying about political issues, and that preoccupation poorly served the Allied cause." 

Of all the ways in which Eisenhower improved upon his performance as the campaign progressed, this is the area where the commander displayed the most growth over the course of the book. As a man of exceptional political acumen, Eisenhower can be forgiven for thinking it prudent to play to his strengths in the early going. By allowing himself to be distracted by issues of public opinion that were tangential to the actual fighting of the war, Eisenhower lost control of the increasingly convoluted command structure under him.

"Churchill in London declared that Djedeïda had been captured. Soldiers who had failed to do just that guffawed at the BBC again, and the Tunisian theater edged into that inevitable condition of war in which anything might be believed, except what was uttered by persons in authority." 

This quote reflects the dual role misinformation played on the battlefield. On the one hand, commanders framed conditions in the field to their superiors as being far rosier than they really were, at which point politicians embellished things even further to the public as a form of propaganda. On the other hand, rank-and-file soldiers accepted without question grisly rumors shared by their peers of Arab cannibals and headless Nazi phantoms.

"People who fight a war like that will be hard to beat."

Spoken by an unnamed Allied soldier, this quote reveals the chasm between the Germans' level of commitment and that of the Allies' at that point in the war. The German soldiers' willingness to let their friends burn while they removed plane wreckage blocking the runway suggests a cold-bloodedness the Allies did not yet possess. It also raises the question of whether the righteousness of the Allies' cause inhibited them from fighting without mercy or humanity.

"The best way to describe our operations to date is that they have violated every recognized principle of war, are in conflict with all operational and logistic methods laid down in textbooks, and will be condemned, in their entirety, by all Leavenworth and war college classes for the next twenty-five years." 

This letter from Eisenhower—written arguably at the nadir of the North African campaign—supports the claim that the commander's sunny disposition in public and with colleagues was a calculated persona. In private correspondence with friends, Eisenhower can come across fatalistic and bitter.

"True, they did not hate yet; but they were developing the capacity of hatred, which required a nihilistic core of resignation and rage." 

According to Atkinson, one of the ironies of war is that defeating an enemy requires a measure of hatred that can only be achieved by suffering heavy losses. The idea of morale becomes far more complicated. While the disadvantages of low morale are clear and obvious, such a poor condition also provides a fertile breeding ground for the "nihilistic core of resignation' required to annihilate the enemy. 

"Yes, the Yanks had been outgeneraled, and their shortcomings as strategic planners revealed—to none more clearly than themselves. But the British would never impose their will so easily again. Casablanca, like the African campaign as a whole, was part of the American coming of age, a hinge on which world history would swing for the next half century." 

One of the dominant themes of the book is the necessity of failure to the process of growth. In this instance, by failing in their efforts to extract key concessions from the British at Casablanca, the Americans received a clear-eyed view of their own diplomatic weaknesses—weaknesses they addressed and corrected at future summits with Great Britain and other world powers. 

"A week later, when the moment for excuses and scapegoats had arrived, Eisenhower would remind Marshall that it 'would naturally be a delicate matter for me to interfere directly into tactical dispositions.' No one asked whether it was not less delicate to permit the destruction of his men. In truth, Eisenhower—preoccupied with strategic and political issues, and having no personal combat experience—had simply failed to grasp the tactical peril on that Valentine’s Day morning. In trying to serve as both supreme commander and field general, he had mastered neither job." 

This is among Atkinson's harsher assessments of Eisenhower's performance. Rather than take responsibility for Allied losses stemming from the Axis' Valentine's Day offensive, Eisenhower suggested that it wasn't appropriate for a supreme commander to question the tactical decisions of his generals. It was, however, the supreme commander's job to put generals in place who didn’t make the kinds of tactical mistakes Fredendall did. Given the heavy casualties caused by those mistakes, Eisenhower's defense of himself rang hollow and spoke poorly of his abilities as a leader.

"He studied his mistakes—this practice was always one of Eisenhower’s virtues—and absorbed the lessons for future battles in Italy and western Europe." 

More than any other individual, Eisenhower embodied the theme of improvement through failure—an idea manifested in both the North African military campaign in general and America's fledgling diplomatic relations with Great Britain.

"Third was the broad realization that even an adversary as formidable as Erwin Rommel was neither invincible nor infallible. He and his host could be beaten. This epiphany was not to be undervalued: they could be beaten. Amazingly, barely two months would elapse between the 'hangheadness' of Kasserine and the triumph of total victory in Tunisia." 

Once again, Atkinson explores the nuanced calculus of military morale. Until that point, the Allied armies in Tunisia exhibited either too much confidence or not enough. Coming out of Operation TORCH, the Allies underestimated the effectiveness and the ferocity of the German army and believed they would march on Tunis within a matter of weeks. After being humbled repeatedly at the hands of Rommel and Arnim, morale swung in the opposite direction. It was only after notching a legitimate win against Rommel that the Allies truly began to earn their high morale.

"'The battle,' Rommel famously observed, 'is fought and decided by the quartermasters before the shooting begins.'" 

As before, Atkinson draws attention to the importance of supply logistics in any war effort. Though frequently less interesting to generals than tactics and morale, military logistics—in essence, getting soldiers what they need when they need it—is doubly important given that even the best-laid tactical plans can go awry. In these scenarios, a logistically-sound army is crucial for ensuring the necessary supply reinforcements and troop movements can be implemented efficiently.

"'Hitler wanted to be stronger than mere facts, to bend them to his will,' Kesselring’s chief of staff observed. 'All attempts to make him see reason only sent him into a rage.'" 

The Allies' success in both the North African campaign and World War II in general was a result of America's industrial strength, improvements and adjustments made by commanders, and the bravery of individual soldiers. At the same time, Atkinson points out numerous instances in which Hitler made large-scale strategic errors, many of which were rooted in Hitler’s ego and arrogance.

"'Once Monty had his reputation,' charged the British air marshal Arthur Coningham, 'he would never risk it again.'" 

The lack of aggressiveness with which General Montgomery's Eighth Army pursued Rommel after the Battle of El Alamein had significant consequences for the Allied troops. In Atkinson's telling, had Montgomery continued to engage with Rommel as he fled across Libya, the costly February 14 offensive might have been avoided. Coningham argued this was because of Montgomery's reluctance to fight a battle he knew he couldn't win, speaking to the theme that individual men's egos play an outsized role over the course of the war.

"He believed the firing unjust. In concocting a plan designed mainly to accommodate Montgomery, then changing it repeatedly, Alexander had hardly demonstrated brilliance. As for Patton, he had provided more snarling criticism than useful tactical advice or infantry reinforcements. Ward had been unlucky, Bradley believed. But luck in war was a general’s one indispensable virtue." 

While courage, a tactical mind, and a talent for logistics are all described as essential traits of a great general, perhaps the strongest attribute is the one a general has no control over: luck. This sentiment is echoed throughout the book as otherwise great men fall prey to forces they cannot control.

"Most Yanks arrived in Morocco and Algeria convinced that they were fighting someone else's war; now they were fully vested, with a stake of their own." 

This once again reflects the theme of how the North African campaign, for all its messiness, was an essential trial-by-fire through which the Americans had to pass to perform at the level needed to defeat the Axis in Europe. It also reflects the book's nuanced depiction of morale during the war. From one perspective, watching their friends and comrades die was a drain on troops' morale. On the other, it made the war effort a more intimate and emotional affair by bringing about the visceral hate needed to conquer the Germans.