I’ve never felt such an overwhelming compulsion to plagiarize. But there’s no better way to describe The Guns at Last Light — the final volume of Rick Atkinson’s epic World War II trilogy — than to steal his own summary of the Battle of the Bulge: “War is never linear, but rather a chaotic, desultory enterprise of reversal and advance, blunder and élan, despair and elation. Valor, cowardice, courage — each had been displayed in this spectacle of a marching world.”

For 14 years (and almost 2,400 pages), Atkinson has chronicled the blood, sweat and tears shed as the Allies confronted Hitler’s armies in the Mediterranean and Western Europe. And The Guns at Last Light, an account of the final 11 months of the war that began with the D-Day invasion of France, is the bloodiest, sweatiest and most tearful book yet.

That may strike some readers as unexpected and even counterintuitive. The series’ first two works, An Army at Dawn and The Day of Battle, covered the early days of the war in North Africa and Italy, when the British were reeling from an unbroken string of defeats at the hands of Germany and Japan, and the Americans were untested rookies learning the trade of war one blunder at a time.

The final phase of the war, in a collective American consciousness shaped increasingly by such movies as Saving Private Ryan rather than the memories of the dwindling few who were there, is thought to have been much different: a bloody day on the beach at Normandy followed by a lightning sweep into Germany as Hitler’s military imploded.

Atkinson’s book is an agonized, eloquent corrective to the record. It’s a counter-cliché narrative in which a nurse in one military field hospital surveys a ward littered with broken corpses and severed limbs and declares, “Maybe it’s a good thing their mothers can’t see them when they die,” while another ends a letter home with the forlorn question, “God, where are you?”

Most soldiers in those hospitals were probably victims of the Germans. But many weren’t. Bombs and bullets almost never hit their targets. During the massive bombing of Normandy during the hours before D-Day, 98 percent of the shells missed the assault zone completely. Allied ships lobbed 1,200 artillery rounds at a single German battery overlooking one of the beachheads and hit it only once.

Allied generals cold-bloodedly accepted the error rate and the damage it inflicted on their own men. After ordering a tight-quarters bombing raid which, he was warned, would result in 1,800 pounds of explosives hitting his own troops, Gen. Omar Bradley chillingly referred to his men as “tools” and added: “War has neither the time nor heart to concern itself with the individual and the dignity of man.”

Atkinson, happily, does. Like war-correspondent-turned-historian Cornelius Ryan, whose books on World War II peppered strategic analysis with grunt’s-eye anecdotes from the battlefield, Atkinson never loses track of the men who fought the war. Mining their diaries and letters, he has produced an account that is achingly human:

A paratrooper’s frantic prayer, as he flies to his drop zone: “Give me guts. Give me guts.” A Canadian pilot, radioing home as his shot-to-pieces bomber plunged into the Atlantic: “Order me a late tea.” A badly wounded GI lying on a stretcher next to a bleeding German prisoner, murmuring aloud: “I’d kill him if I could move.”