WILLIAM I. HITCHCOCK

The traditional image of Europe in 1945 is of grateful civilians showering soldiers with flowers and dancing in the streets. In reality, liberation was an extraordinarily violent and chaotic process. Using first-hand accounts, Hitchcock describes the catastrophic effects of invasion on Northern France, Belgium and Holland, the huge civilian death tolls from indiscriminate bombing, with towns destroyed and crops burnt. He shows that the motives and behaviour of the Allied forces were far from noble; they frequently abused power and authority, looted homes and sexually assaulted women. Hitchcock also writes about the discovery of the major concentration camps, and the often shocking lack of empathy shown by its liberators. Lucid and compelling, Liberation explores the paradoxes of 'the good war', its glories and its horrific human costs.

From the ashes of World War II to the conflict over Iraq, William Hitchcock examines the miraculous transformation of Europe from a deeply fractured land to a continent striving for stability, tolerance, democracy, and prosperity. Exploring the role of Cold War politics in Europe' s peace settlement and the half century that followed, Hitchcock reveals how leaders such as Charles de Gaulle, Willy Brandt, and Margaret Thatcher balanced their nations' interests against the demands of the reigning superpowers, leading to great strides in economic and political unity. He re-creates Europeans' struggles with their troubling legacy of racial, ethnic, and national antagonism, and shows that while divisions persist, Europe stands on the threshold of changes that may profoundly shape the future of world affairs.

A lucid, highly readable survey of modern European history.World War II cost the European nations as many as 40 million people—a figure that, writes Hitchcock (History/Wellesley), translates to 18,500 deaths each day between 1939 and 1945. Yet, he notes with the detachment of a trained realpolitiker, that vicious bloodletting "had in the long run a positive effect on the European economy" inasmuch as all the destruction forced a modernization and reconstruction of nearly every aspect of society—and, as well, the establishment of political institutions that would encourage economic growth and social stability, institutions that eventually combined in the European Union. The political reorganization attendant in this change was profound, Hitchcock observes, though in many respects incomplete; countless former Nazis, fascists, and Stalinists, for example, turned up in post-WWII and post-Cold War positions of authority across the continent, and their presence may account at least in part for what Hitchcock calls "the basic conservatism of European politics" today. Europe's golden age, as Hitchcock sees it, was the 1950s, "a decade of unprecedented material comfort, opportunity, and genuine liberty"—at least in the nations west of the Iron Curtain—"after so many years of harrowing fear and privation." It's not as if things have gone downhill since, Hitchcock allows, but subsequent European history has been marked by economic dislocation, episodes of social upheaval, bouts of genocide in the Balkans, and, perhaps most intractable of all, deeply ingrained racism: "The good news is that the majority of Europeans are tolerant of ethnic, cultural, and religious diversity," Hitchcock writes. "The bad news is that the number of those who are intolerant is large, and growing." Scholarly without being tedious, a sturdy companion to Richard Vinen's A History in Fragments and other recent revisionist views of the Cold War.