Americans are justly proud of the role their country played in liberating Europe from Nazi tyranny, but Americans often overlook the wartime experiences of European people themselves--the very people for whom the war was fought. Here, historian William I. Hitchcock surveys the European continent from D-Day to the final battles of the war and the first few months of the peace, and shows that the liberation of Europe was both a military triumph and a human tragedy of epic proportions. This multinational history of liberation brings to light the interactions of soldiers and civilians, the experiences of noncombatants, and the trauma of displacement and loss amid unprecedented destruction. Today, with American soldiers once again waging wars of liberation in faraway lands, this book serves as a timely and sharp reminder of the terrible human toll exacted by even the most righteous of wars.--From publisher description.

Liberation in the west. Prologue: D-Day. "Too wonderfully beautiful": liberation in Normandy ; Blood on the snow: the elusive liberation of Belgium ; Hunger : the Netherlands and the politics of food -- Into Germany. Prologue: armies of justice. Red storm in the east: survival and revenge ; A strange, enemy country: America's Germany -- Moving bodies. Prologue: "They have suffered unbearably." Freedom from want: UNRRA and the relief effort to save Europe ; "A tidal wave of nomad peoples": Europe's displaced persons -- To live again as a people. Prologue: "We felt ourselves lost." A host of corpses : liberating Hitler's camps ; Americans and Jews in occupied Germany ; Belsen and the British.