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26 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sobering, Meticulously Researched, and Deeply Affecting, October 23, 2008
This review is from: The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe (Hardcover)
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As a WWII buff I have certainly read my fair share of histories of the end of the European phase of the war. But as Professor Hitchcock of Temple University brilliantly illustrates in his introduction to this serious, sobering account of the devastation of Europe, the traditional focus has been on the war leaders, the efforts of the troops, and the victories and defeats along the way. Little is mentioned of the people who inhabited the cities and towns now famous for so many battles and bombings, and how the Allies dealt with the "liberated" after the Nazis were defeated.
This book ably fills the gap. Meticulously researched, with substantial endnotes for those interested in learning more, and culled from many first-hand accounts, Professor Hitchcock walks us slowly through the path of incredible destruction and the challenges facing Allied troops who found themselves "liberating" destroyed towns, defeated populaces, and millions of displaced slave laborers. Compounding this of course were conditions of poverty, hunger, and destruction of basic aspects of civilization of a magnitude never before seen in human history. Given all of these challenges, the Allies (at least in the West) acquitted themselves fairly well, with many many exceptions that Hitchcock documents through solid research and impeccable sourcing.
For those unfamiliar with this piece of the story, the facts will be eye-opening. I particularly liked the generous sprinkling of photos, archival maps and documents, and other embedded images throughout the book that add texture and dimension to the heartbreaking story of Europe immediately after the war.
Hitchcock's contribution adds significantly to the growing body of recent literature focusing on this horrific phase of the conflict in Europe. Yet I was slightly troubled that he, despite all his copious research, failed to cite or otherwise utilize the groundbreaking facts assembled by Giles MacDonogh in his recently-published After the Reich; the amazingly poetic recollections of life after wartime by Gunter Grass in his recent Peeling the Onion; or the grim, deeply disturbing account of the Allied European bombing effort laid out masterfully by Jorge Freidrich in The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940-1945.
These are minor quibbles, however. In sum Professor Hitchcock has delivered a gripping, major work of historical non-fiction that will leave you struggling with the moral and ethical dilemmas that all of faced and many of us rose to confront admirably and courageously in this most amazing of times.
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A people-centric coverage of the last stages of WWII, October 14, 2008
This review is from: The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe (Hardcover)
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This is a well-researched book focusing on the later, or liberation phase of World War II, from the perspective of those civilians in Europe who were surrounded by the military muscle of nations from around the world.
Such a maelstrom of men, machinery, and bureaucracy is sure to create difficult living conditions for civilians, and a depiction of that history is not radical-- just not covered much.
It is simply the focus on this subset of history that may make it seem more hypercritical than it is to some.
Yes, it primarily deals with the civilian impact of decisions that were made, not the final results or motivations, or the big push. That's what the book is about, the civilian impact.
Now, where the book seemed particularly critical was in the conduct of the Communist government of the Soviet Union. Especially under Stalin, this was a regime known for human rights abuses on a grand scale.
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12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Lessons Not Learned, November 24, 2008
This review is from: The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe (Hardcover)
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Between "The Greatest Generation" and "The Good War", American popular history seems to have spent the better part of the past 50 years forgetting what an ugly, lethal business the liberation of the people of Europe from Hitler's grasp was. William Hitchcock's book will go a long way toward remedying that and is a disturbing but needed piece of the historical puzzle. Even if the specifics seem distant in time the overall picture he paints reminds us of how easily the ugly realities of war and post-war are buried "down the memory hole." His book raises important questions of historical memory and of the "collateral" consequences of grand-strategic military policy.
As Americans are by now sadly aware, the liberation of peoples struggling under the yoke of an oppressive dictator is often an ugly and deadly business. Wrecked infrastructure and ruined lives do not re-assemble so easily. While author Hitchcock suggests parallels between his history and the recent American experience in Iraq, he wisely declines to pursue them too much. But we all need reminding that prettied-up histories can lead to hubris and rotten policies.
What this book does remind us of is that any liberation still hinges on some sort of overarching policy and that factoring the civilian population into that policy is a complex business that can have unpredictable, but usually deadly, consequences. Hitchcock does not belabor the point, but throughout his history he reminds us that both US and Soviet military policies hinged around the total destruction of Germany and the German forces; and that destruction left the liberators with the task of preserving and improving the livelihood of millions of people amidst a Dantean wasteland.
"The Bitter Road to Freedom" includes an unflinching look at the protracted liberation of the concentration camps and of the struggles of the Jews to rebuild as a people and as a nation. It reminds us that bodies and minds too far and too-long broken will not be restored merely by smiles and chocolate bars. From the DP's (displaced persons) who had been ripped from their homelands for the Nazi slave-labor force to the starving people of the Netherlands, and including all the peoples who were merely "home" where the liberating armies churned the landscape, Hitchcock paints a picture of chaos and suffering as freedom's torch spluttered to life. For many of these people the distinction between occupier and liberator was not always so evident.
Hitchcock pulls no punches in describing the ravaging of the people of Eastern Europe by the Red armies. But he reminds us of the gargantuan scale of the suffering of the Soviet people at Hitler's hands and acknowledges simple, brutal vengeance as a motive. It seems clear that no one was really liberated in Poland and Eastern Germany in 1945. He offers a more nuanced look at the activities of the American and British troops moving east from Normandy, but that seems mostly because the western foot armies were less intent on either revenge or willful destruction.
The armies on foot may have differed in the lethality of their re-occupation, but the overarching policies of both east and west were clearly rooted in the total destruction of Germany. This was a lesson that many felt the trajectory of the post-WWI era had taught as necessity. But that destroyed country and continent was also to be the wrecked terrain in which the best and worst efforts of the US forces and UN agencies had to rebuild.
Hitchcock ducks only occasionally into the framing of this bigger picture and in that the book is somewhat uneven. He describes some of the decision-making of Roosevelt and Stalin and Churchill and gives a sense of how the hard pragmatics of war influenced them. He spends some time with the policymaking behind the air assault on the Germany civilian population and the ravaging of Eastern Europe. Sometimes he dives too deeply into minutiae: as when he seeks to broaden the perspective on the American force's occupation of France and Belgium with a discussion about racial biases quite evidently at play in US Army's disciplining of its own troops. Sometimes he wanders into the grand strategic: treating us to a fine summary of the shifting tides on the eastern front. But mostly he seems content to tell a story; well-researched, grimly convincing.
I would recommend this book without hesitation; but I suggest that if you get to a point where you lay it aside, as I did, you set it somewhere where it can be retrieved - as I did. You will have to look elsewhere for the roots of the decisions that led to such an awful mess, but "The Bitter Road to Freedom" certainly reminds us that such decisions have grave post-war consequences. Those consequences should be as important in framing policy as the merely military.
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