MADreads

Winning the peace

May 1st, 2009 Katie H.

With the sixty-fifth anniversary of the D-Day invasion rapidly approaching, the number of books published on ‘the good war’ shows no sign of abating.  Perhaps not surprisingly, the majority present the reconquest of Europe from the Allied forces point of view, giving little attention to the liberated lands once Allied tanks rumble past.  Historian William I. Hitchcock offers a different view of World War II, one that picks up where most war histories leave off.  In The Bitter Road to Freedom, Hitchcock considers the civilian side of the liberation and its lasting repercussions.

It’s not a pretty picture.  Hitchcock focuses mostly on northern Europe and Poland, regions particularly familiar from films and historical studies.  Drawing on civilian memories and regional records, the image of an orderly conquest and welcoming crowds is replaced with scenes of utter devestation, created as much by inaccurate Allied bombing as German shelling.  Hitchcock details the wretching decisions by Allied commanders to bypass Nazi-occupied Holland in favor of a war-shortening drive into western Germany, leaving millions of Dutch to face starvation.  Eastern Europeans, trapped between the retreating German army and a Soviet army trying to exact revenge after from its own brutal invasion, hardly had a sense of liberation as their lands fell under Communist rule.  And the Jewish victims of Hitler’s death camps continued to suffer under terrible conditions for months as the hoped-for exodus to Palestine became a political hot potato among British authorities and Jewish groups.

Hitchcock doesn’t mince on details, and the descriptions of camp life especially are very graphic.  Puzzlingly, Hitchcock almost entirely avoids discussion of Italy’s liberation, instead concentrating on the efforts of the UN’s early efforts to provide aid to displaced civilians.  It’s perhaps a topic that has recieved little attention in the past, but the gap in coverage is annoying in a work that purports to cover all of Europe.  However, Hitchcock’s blend of anecdotal personal accounts with analysis of the larger forces at work makes for really readable history, and the sprinkling of photos and maps puts visuals to the story.

Entry Filed under: Nonfiction