Endgame 1945: Victory, Retribution, Liberation

This isn't a book I'd usually buy or read, but after reading a couple of reviews I thought I'd check it out. This is a book for the general reader, rather than the academic historian. While his writing style is solid rather than particularly exciting or inspiring, David Stafford does a solid job of story-telling & some impressive research has gone into compiling & editing the narratives of the protagonists. This is mainly a "ground-up" rather than a "top-down" account of the closing stages of WW2 in Europe. Having said that, its view is very much from the Western side of the fence. The Soviet army & people bore the brunt of the fight against Nazism, so its a pity there's no first hand input from anyone on the Soviet side here. Equally, I'd like to have heard more from the civilian side, both in the occupied countries & Germany itself.

Much of what we see & hear now abt this period concentrates on the big set pieces like D-Day & the Battle for Berlin/Hitler's Bunker, & (quite rightly) the Holocaust. Naturally this book has to concern itself with the last days of Berlin, but much of the book's power comes from the stories of other campaigns which aren't so well known to most people. I've always been interested in the Italian phase of the war, as my uncle Leslie was killed at the Anzio landings. Rather than go over familiar ground like the battle for Monte Cassino, DS uses the story of Geoffrey Cox to recount a chilling tale of the deadly & relentless grind through Italy - I could practically feel the cold & mud at times. A lot of this was totally new to me - for example, the narrowly-avoided war between Allied Forces & Tito's partisan army at Trieste.
When I was growing up in the 50's/60's, everyone's parents had been involved in the war in some way - now WW2 is as distant from us as WW1 was in the Sixties. This makes these accounts even more important. The narrators include a journalist, a radio-reporter, various front-line soldiers (British, GI & Canadian) & a German mother interned in the camps, with her children in the hands of the SS.
As indicated by the book's subtitle, "Retribution" is a major theme in the book. Its totally understandable how people would want revenge & rough justice for Nazi collaborators, but DS takes the story further to show how the mania for vengeance nearly got totally out of hand in France & Italy, leading to serious social problems. For the soldiers & reporters, it was the discovery of concentration camps all over Western Europe that inspired a raging hatred of their enemy & an unforgiving attitude towards the German civilian population. Again, I knew vague images of French women with shaven heads, but hadn't realised the intensity & widespread nature of the settling of scores.
Another of the book's strongest aspects is in evoking the plight of the millions of refugees & "displaced persons" all over the Continent, particularly throught the story of Francesca Wilson with UN refugee relief agency. Recent insane outbursts in Europe like the Balkan Wars put refugees on our tv screens again, and given the misery, devastation & un-mendable lives left
behind by these wars, its almost impossible to imagine the same things on the scale they were at the end of WW2.
As I read the book, I had to keep reminding myself that these soldiers were mostly very young men at the time, in their early 20's. Its salutary to wonder how we'd have coped if flung into the kind of cauldron described in this book. I had plenty of "lump-in-throat" moments reading this, but one of the saddest bits comes very near the end, with GI Robert Ellis leaving the war, in his words "...embittered in many ways & ambivalent about the army & whether the horror we had experienced & the losses undergone - whatever the iniquities of the Hitler & Japanese regimes - were worth the price paid?"
Its chilling to contemplate the experiences that could make a man feel that way.
At its best, this is a powerful & thought-provoking book, & anyone reading it can only come away with an enhanced admiration & respect for the WW2 survivors around us.

Some fascinating personal stories (6/7 people found this helpful)

David Stafford has unearthed a number of amazing personal stories here that I had not read in previous books on this subject.

Particularly poignant is the story of Fey Von Hassel, who's father was one of the Hitler Bomb Plot conspirators and she is imprisoned as a result and separated from her young children.

Endgame 1945: Victory, Retribution, Liberation

David Stafford

Reader Reviews:

War, what is it good for... (16/16 people found this helpful)

Some fascinating personal stories (6/7 people found this helpful)

Similar Products

Categories