Recommended Reading

am reading "Liberation: The Bitter Road to Freedom, Europe 1944-1945". it gives adifferent perspective on D Day.

In recent times, the world has become more sensitive than once it was about so-called “collateral damage” - the injury or killing of bystanders in the course of mankind's wars. In 1944-45, however, while the allied liberators of Europe did their utmost to spare the innocent and succour the afflicted, civilians suffered appallingly for their deliverance from tyranny.
Guilt for abuses was certainly not evenly shared. The Russians behaved vastly worse than the Anglo-American armies. But William Hitchcock writes: “Liberated civilians viewed their liberators with anxiety and even, at times, fear...The young American, British or Russian soldiers who defeated the Germans were seldom as virtuous in their behaviour as the cause for which they fought. They frequently abused their power and authority.”
Hitchcock, an American college professor, has produced the first book I have read that explicitly addresses the plight of civilians during the “crusade for Europe”. He begins with the experiences of the population of Normandy in the summer of 1944, which go far to explain the bitterness with which many greeted their disappointed “saviours”.
Some 3,000 French people died on D-day - about the same number as allied deaths on the same day - amid the storm of bombs and shells that accompanied the assault. In all, nearly 20,000 civilians perished during the campaign. Great areas of the region were laid waste by the allies: nearly 800 civilians died in the beautiful cathedral town of Lisieux alone. “Words can't describe the destruction,” said one witness. “Coventry and London are nothing compared to this...If a bomb had been placed in every house the damage could not have been greater.”
Beyond deaths, many households within reach of the battlefield suffered pillage. My own father wrote an account of encountering a flock of geese in a Norman farmyard under fire, which with some difficulty he caught and killed with a penknife, before returning to his delighted messmates with a laden Jeep. No more than thousands of other British and American soldiers did he stop to think that livestock represented the livelihoods of local farmers. Hitchcock says that the theft and looting began almost immediately after D-Day: in Colombières, just a few miles from the landing beaches, one woman had her house ransacked by Canadians: “It was an onslaught throughout the village. With wheelbarrows and trucks, the men stole, pillaged, sacked everything... clothing, boots, provisions, even money from our strong box.” Many French people later asserted that the allies were less respectful of property than the Germans were.



From the autumn of 1944 until the end of the war, Belgians also complained bitterly about American troops systematically looting furniture and household possessions. The Liège press started using the term “gangsters” about US soldiers, and there were reports of armed hold-ups and the theft of valuables from passers-by. American official hypocrisy in refusing to regulate brothels also ensured that the armies carried venereal disease everywhere they went (by the end of the war, helped partly by a shortage of condoms, 14% of American troops were estimated to have the disease). A recent French film seeks to glamorise the wartime contribution of French colonial troops, yet in truth their units were notorious for rape and murder.
Hitchcock, whose study of military behaviour focuses chiefly on the US Army, notes that while only 15 white American soldiers were executed for crimes in Europe during 1944-45, 55 black Americans were hanged for rape or murder. This almost certainly represented the harsher attitude adopted by the American high command towards black offenders. Many men guilty of grievous mistreatment of civilians were lightly treated. The author writes: “The evidence shows that sexual violence against women in liberated France was common.” With the American entry into Germany, the situation seems to have have become even worse, with the army's Judge Advocate General reporting “an avalanche” of new cases. When a Stars and Stripes reporter tried to file a story in March 1945 about the widespread prevalence of rape in the Rhineland, it was suppressed by army censors.
The British Army was by no means blameless. Yvette Levy, a concentration-camp victim who was liberated in 1945, experienced terrible cruelties at the hands of the Red Army, which was as ready to beat and rape Hitler's victims as his people. But, when at last she and some of her companions reached the western zone, they met British soldiers demanding sex in exchange for food. “A man in uniform loses all his dignity,” she said bitterly. “I don't know what these men thought of us - they must have taken us for wild animals.”
There were an estimated 5.7m foreign civilians in Germany, a mixture of prisoners and forced labourers, all in desperate circumstances. Most became DPs (displaced persons), herded into allied camps where some remained for years. The unlucky were repatriated eastward, to face Stalin's savage vengeance against even those of his citizens who had been captured fighting bravely, as well as those who had chosen to serve the Germans. Hitchcock omits a significant, oft-missed nuance about the Cossacks returned to the Soviet Union. It is mistaken to perceive them all as innocents. In German uniform, many had been involved in frightful atrocities against Yugoslavs and north Italians.
The author, though, tells extremely well the story of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), the newly created organisation that sought to relieve the plight of millions. It suffered, he says, “from a good deal of reckless amateurism, poor planning and just plain naivety. Its well-meaning but overmatched staff sometimes seemed like playground matrons trying to keep order in a nasty world of knife fights and street brawls”. But he concludes, surely rightly, that given the colossal scale of the problems that UNRRA faced, running camps and shipping $4 billion of food and medical aid across Europe and Asia amid constant friction with the military authorities, it did as well as anybody could have expected.
Some of the book's most striking passages address the liberation of the concentration camps. Most histories record the outpouring of compassion by men and women of the allied forces towards the human skeletons they found huddled behind the wire. Yet instead, says Hitchcock, the overwhelming sentiment among soldiers and reporters was “physical repulsion and disgust...It is not the closeness but the distance between the liberators and liberated that stands out”.
The incomers tried to do the right thing, sure enough, but it was hard for them to grasp the nature of the unspeakable experience that the prisoners had endured. There was a tendency to treat all as a common herd, and an impatience towards Jews who sought recognition of the unique nightmare for which their people had been chosen.
A British general objected to the appointment of a Jewish chaplain as liaison officer between Jewish DPs and the army, writing that this would “involve the creation of special preferential treatment for the benefit of a particular religious sect, and therefore [be] unacceptable”. At the end of 1945, a British Control Commission official wrote complaining that “Jews seem to be using Belsen as a focal point for world agitation to emigrate to Palestine”.
Extraordinary though it may seem to a modern generation, it should be acknowledged that even after the revelation of Hitler's death camps, residual anti-semitism lingered in British and American societies. Hitchcock notes that at no stage of the war was the allied campaign to liberate Europe portrayed as a crusade to deliver the Jews: “That may help to explain why American and British officers and soldiers in Germany at the end of the war had little knowledge of the plight of the Jews, and failed to treat the survivors they found...with anything like the sensitivity or sympathy they deserved.” It was a notable irony, remarked upon by the author, that despite the initial “nonfraternisation order” issued to Eisenhower's armies, British and American soldiers soon found the clean, obedient, eager-to-please Germans more sympathetic than the filthy, broken, mutinous inhabitants of DP camps.
Hitchcock's narrative sometimes loses coherence by straying into accounts of battlefield experience. But he has performed an important service by focusing attention on a neglected aspect of the war and its aftermath. Armed conflict is an inherently inhumane activity, from which misery must derive. The western allies tried hard to do the right thing in Europe in 1944-45, and their failures are less surprising than their relative success. But this tale vividly demonstrates that there was no cause for triumphalism in the condition of Europe following the defeat of Hitler.
Liberation by William Hitchcock

rcs wrote: »

Has anyone read this book yet? Released this year by Thomas Bartlett:

Ireland: A History - Thomas Bartlett

Heard about it on the radio & seems interesting... Covers Irish History from 431 CE to the present day..

Anyone read it or read anything else by the author before?

I took some of his courses in university, I thought he was excellent.

I have read one or two other pieces that he published, again I thought they were very good.

I had a look at this book the other day, I haven't bought it yet but I intend to buy it soon.

Corcaigh wrote: »

The Forgotten Soldier by Guy Sajer. True story about the author who was conscripted to the German Army in WW2 when he was 17 because he had a German mother. Touches all the feelings of war i guess, hate, fear, love, desperation and emptyness on the Eastern front.

There is a major on going debate about his account of the war, best to treat it as a work of fiction

Looking for books on the following

William Martin Murphy



Also a book that covers what happened in detail from May 1916 till January 1917, explaining who was organizing things and what they were up whilst the leadership was in Gaol

Einhard wrote: »

I'm in the midst of an American Civil War buzz. I'm about to finish Team of Rivals, and plan to follow it up with the imaginatively titled documentary on the conflict, The American Civil War. Would anyone have an further reading suggestions. Team of Rivals is a fairly dense work, and I'm looking for something more concise, and more focused on the cause and course of the conflict than the personalities. Suggestions greatly appreciated!

Is it Ken Burns American Civil War that your watching? Quite possibly the best historical documentary series you'll ever watch.

'Battle Cry of Freedom' by James Macpherson is very highly rated. I've only used it as a reference but I read two of his books on civil war soldiers and both were excellent.

If your interested there are lots of soldiers diaries from the civil war that are great reads, and at times very moving.
'Co Atych' - Sam R. Watkins
'All For the Union': The Civil War Diary of Elisha Hunt Rhodes'
'Hard Tack and Coffee' - John D. Billings
'Hard Marching Everyday': Civil War Letters of Wilbur Frisk'
...to name but a few.

I would strongly recommend The Atlas of Cork City by Crowley, Devoy, Linehan and O’Flanagan. It is as thorough an account of the city as any there is. Each chapter is written by specialists in that area so it is very well informed. Its an expensive book at around 60euro but a great reference.

I'm not sure about walking tours of the city however, i'd say you'd need to get on to the library or county council maybe.