Ogden School Foundation Fall author event coincides with North Africa invasion anniversary

Best-selling author Rick Atkinson knows something about the importance of the date Nov. 8 in world history. In fact, he won a Pulitzer Prize 2003 for his book about Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of North Africa during World War II that took place on that day.
 
Rick Atkinson will be the featured speaker on Nov. 8, 2012, during the Ogden School Foundation’s fall author event at the Eccles Conference Center.
 
Atkinson’s book An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943 won the 2003 Pulitzer for history. It is the first in his acclaimed The Liberation Trilogy The American landings for Operation Torch in Morocco and Algeria were initially opposed by French Vichy  forces and cost many American lives, over 1,000 casualties were suffered in the Sebou river landing and the assault on the Kasbah to take Port Lyautey (Kenitra) and the casualties  in Algeria were far higher. The Americans learnt valuable lessons on sea borne invasions which were invluable for the Normandy landings. Operation Torch and the subsequent campaign in Tunisia against Rommel's Afrika   Korps cost 70,000 lives on the Allied side. The American sustained their baptism of fire and learned valuable combat lessons which turned them into an efficient fighting force which then pushed on into Sicily and the Italian front. The successful conclusion of the north African was the allies first victory. The Reich Propoganda Minister Joseph Goebbels described it as a second Stalingrad, Army at Dawn recalls.

North Africa was at the centre of the Second World War and Moroccan and Algerian troops fighting with French forces played an important role. The fightingin Algeria and Tunsia was particularly intense particularly at the
Kasserine pass. Towns like Bizerte were almost totally destroyed.If the Axis forces had won itcould have changed the world. As it was the war began the process which eventually  ended in decolonisation and  final
independence .One less desirable legacy are the mines which are still being dug up and continue to inflict casualties.

Atkinson, a former staff writer and senior editor at The Washington Post, is also the best-selling author of The Long Gray Line, a saga about the West Point class of 1966, and Crusade, a narrative history of the Persian Gulf War. He also wrote In the Company of Soldiers, an account of his time with General David H. Petraeus during the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
 
The second volume of his Liberation Trilogy is The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944, published in 2007. The final volume, to be published this spring, focuses on the last 11 months of the war in Europe, beginning on the eve of the Normandy invasion and through to the German surrender.
 
At Thursday’s event, “I’m going to talk about the legacy of World War II and specifically the Army that we sent forth to World War II,” Atkinson said in an interview with the Standard-Examiner. His address will also include writing about history and the challenges that presents.

Tables of 10 available for $700, $900, $1,200 or $1,500. Individual tickets, $70-$150. To reserve tickets, call the Ogden School Foundation at 801-737-7305.