I bought this on the strength of Gooderson's "Airpower at the Battlefront", and was not disappointed. The narrative of the campaign's in Sicily and Italy is sound, but where Gooderson really shines is in his analysis of those campaigns, how the two sides - and especially the Allies - were learning and improving from their experiences in battle. The analysis is comprehensive, balanced, and supported by extensive archival research.

In common with practically all books on the Italian campaign, "A Hard Way To Make A War" is very heavily front-loaded. Roughly half the book is on the preparation for and invasion of Sicily, a quarter on Salerno, much of the remainder up to the capture of Rome, and only a few pages on the last year of the war north of Rome. This is, given the thrust of Gooderson's thesis, understandable (i.e., by the last year of the war the Allies had pretty much figured out how to beat the Germans) but still a little unsatisfying, since there was a lot of hard fighting, and and a lot of innovation and excellence there that gets glossed over. ( )