Mark Clark

About this book

He stands with the other celebrated Americans who led the Allied victory in Europe—Eisen- hower, Bradley, Patton. But never before has there been a full-length treatment of General Mark Wayne Clark. It is a surprising oversight, for Clark was important. He was also as fascinat- ing as any of the others, full of striking contra- dictions. Was he, for example, a heroic com- mander or—as many claimed—a glory hound who rigged his campaigns for maximum public- ity and was responsible for deadly fiascos in Italy? Now Martin Blumenson, eminent historian and author of the monumental work The Patton Papers, gives Clark the rich and authoritative study he deserves. His account begins with Clark’s boyhood in Illinois—he was the son of an army officer and an Arizona frontierswoman— and progresses quickly to the onset of war and Clark’s stunningly swift rise in rank. Here is the whole story of his famous secret mission to enemy-occupied North Africa, its triumph and also its comic sidelight. New material—much from Clark’s own diary—reveals formerly unsus- pected frictions in the Anglo-American com- mand and sheds new light on Eisenhower and George Marshall. The bloody battles of Anzio, Rapido, and Cassino take on new meaning when seen as Clark saw them. And it is little known that after the war, Clark played a major role in keeping Austria out of the Soviet orbit and in achieving the Korean armistice. Mark Clark brings us a colorful, complex man who stood at the center of the cataclysmic events of his time.