Hitchcock does not challenge the reality of this narrative but reminds readers that the road to freedom Americans rightly celebrate was in the experience of the liberated, long, destructive, and bloody.
By telling the story from the perspective of the liberated, he makes clear why for many this was tinged with ambiguity. We are delighted about their freedom but the high cost they had to pay is appalling to read.
In the hands of a less deft historian, this project could have come across as a revisionist attempt to question the necessity, or at least the manner, of the liberation, but Hitchcock avoids that trap. The stories he tells of the Normandy invasion, the Battle of Stalingrad, and the occupation of Germany may be familiar, but the prose is gripping and the perspective of the liberated new to most readers.
This is a remarkable work of history that also sheds light on present-day debates about the merits and costs of liberating people.
2 comments:
Greetings Ms E. Sounds like a compelling read. I once hated reading history, but now addicted. Jacques Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence was/is an incredibly detailed and insightful summary of the last 500 years.
What is interesting to me about the last big war was Churchill's warning about the US becoming the next fascist state. There's a wonderful story in this month's Walrus magazine (a kind of Canadian Harper's) that addresses Canada's sad drift in the same rightist direction, and as a result, we lost our seat on the UN Security Council, which now puts us fully into the American geopolitical orbit.
As George Santayana famously remarked, "those who forget history..."
And we do, over, and over, and over...
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