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The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe

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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.

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.

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.

"The Bitter Road to Freedom" is first and foremost a work written by and for Americans. Unlike in much of (continental) Europe, where the ambivalent and tragic nature of the end of WWII and the postwar settlement is widely recognized, in the United States the story of the 'good war' is generally one of fairly unabashed triumphalism. One need but think of the acclaimed series 'Band of Brothers' or the popular portrayal of figures like Patton to see this. It was therefore incumbent on the American historian William Hitchcock, specialist in 20th century European international relations at Temple University, to correct this all too self-congratulatory image. In this eminently readable book Hitchcock systematically describes the European experience of 'liberation' from West to East, starting with the launch of Operation Overlord and ending with the repatriation of the 'Displaced Persons' and the expulsion of the German-speaking peoples from Eastern Europe. As Hitchcock shows, from the 70.000 French civilian victims of Allied bombing to the Dutch famine of 1944-1945 and the lacklustre reception for Shoah survivors, the story of liberation was itself as destructive an episode of the war as the rest of it had been. In fact, World War II is remarkable for the fact that in every year the degree of violence, which seemed to have reached the maximum imaginable in each previous year, was raised to a further pitch, and the 'liberation' of Europe was but the final culmination of this.

This is not to say, of course, that anyone now doubts the absolute necessity for all powers involved to destroy Nazi Germany at whatever cost. But in recent decades the increasing historical distance to the real events has allowed for a more ambivalent and nuanced scholarship than was the case previously, and this has led to many debates on thorny moral and political issues arising from this final stage of the deadliest war the world has ever seen. Hitchcock navigates these deftly: while his approach is one of 'history from below', using the stories of civilian eyewitnesses, soldiers and UN workers wherever possible in lieu of a larger political analysis, he does not neglect the major controversies, and gets them right where it counts. The often needless destruction of the German historical cities, product not just of inadequate technology in strategic bombing but also of sheer vengefulness, is mentioned. So also is the failure of the Warsaw Uprising (where Hitchcock quite rightly notes that the Red Army had no ability to offer assistance, not a lack of will), the difficult relations between the military governors of occupied Germany and the 'Displaced Persons', in particular the Zionist Jews, and the painful decision to not liberate the urban Netherlands separately because of the military cost, condemning thousands to die of famine. Another useful corrective the author provides is to dispel the notion that it was only the Red Army in the east that, upon arriving in foreign territory, set about widespread rape and looting. In fact, the western Allies made hardly a better show of it in France or Belgium, and if Hitchcock is to be believed the Americans particularly had more warm feelings for the German civilians than for the ones they 'liberated' (despite attempts from on high to prevent this).

Hitchcock's warm and accessible writing style, his balanced judgement and judicious choice of anecdotal sources make for great reading. One could, however, object to the somewhat narrow focus of the book. It is very much oriented to Americans: the military experience is virtually entirely the American one, those elements of high politics provided as context are centered around American decision-making, and one could easily get the impression from him (though this is probably not intentional) that the liberation of Europe was largely an American effort, itself a popular conception that needs revising. Moreover, because the story starts when the Americans arrive with their main force on the scene, there is almost no attention for the interesting and tragic tale of the 'liberation' of southern Europe. Certainly the Italian experience after the switch of 1943, with its German reprisals and partisan warfare, the Yugoslavian story of self-liberation, and the Greek story of mass famine and British repression of the resistance movement would have been worth telling. One can hope however that Hitchcock or some other could do a sequel of this work, and include the Indo-Pacific theatre in it as well, which saw a possibly even more destructive 'liberation' and one where the Americans and other Allies shone (even) less obviously. Yet it is childish to accuse a good book of not being several good books, and there is no doubt that this work is part of a new and encouraging trend in historiography of World War II that takes a more 'revisionist' and politically ambivalent approach to the subject - one can think here also of Adam Tooze's wonderful book "The Wages of Destruction" (The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy). Recommended for all fans of WWII history, especially Americans.

Many books are written about the political or military history of war, but few have tried to provide a survey of the human history of war. William Hitchcock provides insight into the human costs of war in his work "The Bitter Road to Freedom." This book is a collection of essays on the various hardships faced by both civilians and combatants across parts of Europe.

The first section of the book focuses on the liberation of Western Europe - France, Belgian, and Holland. Along with a brief narrative on the major allied military actions to free the nations, each chapter contains personal recollections of the depravations faced after the "liberation" of their countries, as well as some localized conditions such as the destruction of Caen, France, or the starvation of the Dutch by the Nazis. Despite the horrors of what these people lived through, the writing was almost clinical and it did not make a personal connection to me.

The other facet to this section of the book focused on the interaction between the liberated and the liberators covering everything from alleged rampant crime to clinical discussions on the spread of venereal disease. Of special note, the chapters also discuss the perceived differences in actions between white and black American service-members. The summaries appear to be anecdotal based, with only the number of executions backed by empirical data.

The section on the Eastern Front is told from a completely different perspective - after discussing at a macro level the atrocities of Hitler's Wehrmacht, the personal recollections of the horrors of war are now told from a German refugee's perspective. The victor is now the vanquished and suffers the same indignities they had inflicted on their former subjects. This section also includes a macro look at how the American's political naïveté sold out the Polish and other Eastern European nations at the Yalta conference. Not only did this deal fracture the Anglo-American alliance, it also submitted these nations to fifty years of additional repression at the hands of another tyrannical regime.

The book continues into yet another focus area with its next section on the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) efforts in Greece and other nations to help rebuilding their nations after the departure of the Germans. This section was filled with many vignettes that finally connected with me on a personal level.

I found the chapter "A Tidal Wave of Nomad Peoples: Europe's Displaced Person's" by far to be the most interesting chapter. The discussion on the "Liberation Complex", a psychological condition showing the personal qualities of revenge, hunger, and exultation, is a great lesson for any civil affairs operation dealing with liberated peoples.

The fourth major section of the book focused on the plight of the Jews. It's not that the Allies intentionally treated them any worse - the Allies main concept of operations was to return refugees and prisoners to their homelands, so they could begin life anew. Lacking anti-Semitic sentiment in their homelands, British and American military planners did not consider the implications of collocating adversarial population segments in close proximity to each other without armed guards. Additionally, the full-extent of Jewish extermination had not come to light as the Allies were opening the concentration camps. The reality is the Allies were faced with an intractable personnel logistics problem with a broken transportation infrastructure and they did the best they could. The section concludes with a discussion on the very-motivated political movement to create a Jewish homeland in British-controlled Palestine.

Despite the book's declared European focus, I also feel there were significant omissions - where were the discussions of the Italians, English, and Scandanavians? The English suffered aerial bombardment in 1940 and had to support millions of American soldiers in preparation for the channel crossing. Although the English were not liberated, they certainly shared many of the same deprivations as the other Western European nations. Italy was liberated beginning in 1942, yet there is no discussion of the conditions in their country.

Hitchcock did adequate research for his essays, but the omissions of the other nations are too significant to overlook. Furthermore, the chapters could have benefited from a common framework of analysis such as writing about the conditions under the Germans; combat operations to free the territory; immediate events after allied liberation; UNRRA relief operations; and the long term actions to rebuild the people's lives. Instead the book suffers from topical meandering - each chapter hits on multiple varying topics without a common thread to tie the content together. All things considered, these are stories that are worth reading -- however, the book is good, but not great.

Given some of the more critical reviews and comments, I feel compelled to establish bona fides: I'm a trained military historian, active duty army officer, and Iraq War veteran (twice). I can recognize revisionism when I see it, and I'm quite attuned to efforts at rewriting history with an agenda. Pause.

The Bitter Road to Freedom is simply one of the best books on the end of the war in Europe, 1944-45. Hitchcock looks at and assesses the experience of war from the perspective of combatants, civilians, POWs, displaced persons, Jews, bureaucrats, and politicians. His conclusions are not so much to "revise" the triumphalistic narrative of the war, but to round out our understanding of the consequences of military action, strategic decisions, and battlefield results (causes, conduct, and consequences -- these are the watchwords of the military historian's trade). There are consequences in war, some good, most bad -- General Sherman knew that you have to break things and kill people to obtain the noblest objectives, and Hitchcock acknowledges that. There was a constant tug-of-war between effort to defeat Nazi Germany to end the war and the effort (and risk) demanded to provide for the material and social needs of liberated populations. The military factors took precedence, and as in all things, trade-offs require a price to be paid. It was unfortunate that civilians had to pay the bill. It was a reality that Hitchcock assesses with candor and humanity.

Anyone who has run afoul of a government bureaucracy (especially a military one) will recognize immediately that "failures" on the part of the Allies were not intentional, but institutional. Hitchcock defines these institutional barriers that impeded the rapid libertation and reform of European society. His judgements are even handed and balanced -- the methods of Russian liberation of Eastern Europe get little sympathy, while the sections on how German civilians clothed themselves in the liberation fabric are quite revealing and interesting.

Overall, the book was compelling and illustrative of the requirements all militaries have to plan for the peace, and the demands these requirements placed on soldiers who were conditioned to kill, not hand out boxes of cookies. I think the final conclusion of The Bitter Road to Freedom is that when it comes to setting the peace, it may not be a job for soldiers, but sometimes only soldiers can do it.

Indeed, this is a bitter book to read. It is not an emphasis on European battles and allied soldiers, but on the civilians whose deaths from bombs, murder, mistreatment and starvation out numbered the deaths of those soldiers--on both sides--who fought in the war.

The author's writing style is engaging in the first third of the book, sufferable in the middle (he drones on with repetitive detail) and the latter third approaches absorbing. I suppose much of the information needs to be compiled "for the record," but he could have gotten his point across with a book half the size. And what is his point? See the preceding paragraph.

Nearly the whole latter half of the book deals with the pre- to post-war physical, social and political treatment of the Jews by their own mother countries, the Nazis, and the allies after the war (in Germany).

As stated, this is a history not so much of the war, but of the liberation and aftermath. We see how the American and British armies, especially, were both the saviour of the Jews and the reluctant hosts of this devastated, homeless, stateless mass. This is a book--in the latter third--about how both the displaced Jews and the allied armies viewed the liberation. Their views did not always--even often--coincide.

In the preface of this book Dr. Hitchcock promises to give us a different slant on the liberation of Europe. He does a decent job of discussing the situation in France, Belgium and Netherlands during the 'occupation'. He does his best job in discussing France after liberation, but so so on Belgium and Netherlands.

The section on Germany is all post liberation and is slanted towards the 'good job' done by the American and British. He notes how in a very short time the Germans after liberation became 'survivors'. Before most people saw it coming, the Germans all became anti-Nazis and victims of Hitler's regime. They were mostly cowered by the SS and Gestapo, but never liked the "New Order". [All those cheering crowds we see in the old films must have been added in.] But he doesn't cover the French Zone where things were a lot different and the Russian Zone is quickly passed over.

The last section has to do solely with the plight of the Jewish Survivors of the Holocaust. He does a very detailed discussion of the treatment of the Survivors by the Americans and British Armies. The problem here is that it is very repetitive and slanted towards the obsession of the Survivors to go to Palestine. He mentions the British problem with upsetting the Moslem world by letting Jews immigrate. But he doesn't touch the case that Churchill and most of the British aristocracy were anti-semetic in attitude.

It's not that Hitchcock hasn't done his homework. He has sifted through a mountain of original documents. His presentation tends to be circular and redundant which makes the reading difficult and sleep inducing. He is an academic and this is definitely an academic book. Reading for those studying WW2 history and post-liberation Europe.

Zeb Kantrowitz

I thought this an invaluable book; very well researched. My guess is, some of the critics of this author are on the political right or conservative-leaning like myself. They seem to infer because William Hitchcock is a professor, he must be a leftist or a pacifist who lacks objectivity and impartiality.

Many, perhaps most historians have some kind of a bias - this is to be expected. I did not find this work to be highly tendentious or anti-American as some have portrayed it. I was particularly interested in Hitchcock's take on German atrocities, particularly in the east - against Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Slavic peoples and other "sub-humans" - and the German people's ability to honestly (or dishonestly) deal with the crimes of their leaders; leaders whose policies the German people supported in large measure.

Hitchcock paints a damning picture of denial and victimization amongst the German people. Blaming the Jews for Germany's lot was also a prevalent theme in post-war Germany, as was the view that the German people were innocent victims who were mislead by the National Socialists (Nazis) whom they supported. For me, this book is exceptional. A great resource.

William I. Hitchcock looks at the end of World War II from the perspective of civilians (Norman, Belgian, Dutch, Polish and East Prussian), displaced persons, Holocaust survivors, and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. With the exception of a gushing chapter about UNRRA, he finds everything dismal. The invasion of Normandy killed thousands of noncombatants and leveled whole cities. The Germans devastated Belgium as they retreated and during their brief return in the Battle of the Bulge, and the restored Belgian government was fractious and inefficient. The Dutch endured famine under their Nazi occupiers while the Allied offensive bypassed their country. The Poles and East Prussians were victims of officially authorized atrocities. The Allies found it difficult to relieve the suffering of millions of brutalized refugees and occasionally showed shocking insensitivity toward Jews traumatized by the death camps.

All that sounds true enough. Little of it is a revelation, though the book adds much well-researched, often gruesome detail. It also adds an undertone of hostility toward the whole project of liberating Europe. While the author now and then acknowledges that continued Nazi domination would have been worse than all the death and destruction of the last year of World War II, his louder and clearer message is that the Allies - either through incompetence (the U.S. and Britain) or intent (the U.S.S.R.) - meted out unconscionable harm to friendly civilians. Meanwhile, enemy civilians weren't punished nearly enough (except perhaps by the Soviets). What was needed, apparently, was a magic potion that could be sprinkled across Europe to dissolve Hitlerite malefactors into puddles of warm mush that, soaking into the soil, would cause food, fuel, medicine and houses to spring up spontaneously. The Allies having inexplicably failed to utilize that method of liberation, their histories of the war are bunk and "the greatest generation" a self-serving myth.

Fortunately, the reader can correct for much of the animus - can see, for instance, that stopping the drive into Germany in order to liberate the Netherlands would not have made any military, or even humanitarian, sense; that, despite Professor Hitchcock's cavils, the U.S. and British armies worked hard to ease the plight of the Western European populace; and that many decisions that look bad in retrospect were made in good faith on the basis of the facts known at the time. The only real villains are the Nazi and communist tyrants, the former for launching the war, the latter for turning liberation into an orgy of revenge, plunder and conquest.