Hardcover: UK: Displaced in the aftermath of World War II

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In the months after the end of World War I, some 40 million people died amid a worldwide flu pandemic. Three million perished from typhus; 5 million Ukrainians starved to death. No more battles, but no food, no medicine, no shelter, no resistance, either: just milling chaos. The fighting had ended, but its baleful, destructive legacy lingered on. And the question for the Western allies, immersed in another world war some 25 years later and brooding on consequences long before Hitler admitted defeat, was whether they could do better second time round.

Ben Shephard sets out to provide the answers of formidably researched history. He can’t pull every strand together: There were millions of human stories. The challenge to the embryo “world community” of allied concern and its chosen solution, UNRRA — the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration — was likewise immense and infernally complex. For not everybody wanted to go home — or even knew where their true homes were.

UNRRA’s tally of “displaced persons” included Poles, Ukrainians, Balts, Russians and many more who’d kept Hitler’s factories turning as Germany ran short of infantry to hold the frontline. Some were forced labor, some willing volunteers. Some were happy enough to go back to Poland, some would do anything to avoid living under encroaching Soviet communism. Ukraine, then as now, was split two ways, one side looking east, the other West. The Balkan states were their usual mess. Italians, once Mussolini departed, proved neither friends nor foes, but a burden. Germans driven from their farms in Poland and Czechoslovakia flocked to find safety in their beaten, battered fatherland. And then, of course, there were the Jews.

In part, but only in part, Shephard charts the founding of Israel and, fascinatingly, sets it in a context few politicians (or readers) would recognize six decades on. How did UNRRA deal with the horror of the Holocaust? It didn’t. Nobody in the 1940s talked about holocausts. One Fabian Society report managed half a paragraph mentioning 2 million Jewish deaths in 26 pages examining Europe’s displaced persons.

There was the casual anti-Semitism of General George Patton as his conquering army scythed across Europe. The Jews he found and freed were, he declared, “lower than animals.” There was, still more surprisingly, an antipathy in the White House that would set Washington imploding today. “The Jews,” President Truman wrote in his diary, “are very, very selfish. They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as long as the Jews get special treatment. Yet when they have power, physical or political, neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment of the underdog.”

Shephard’s strongest suit as he chronicles these and other explosions of frustration or prejudice is that he leaves in all the raw edges and profound contradictions of the shattered world of the 1940s; he doesn’t try to smooth them into some conventionally heroic narrative. Remember, Harry Truman was also the most powerful friend of Israel’s creation. Patton reflected a widely prevailing opinion in top US military circles (and, frankly, much of US society). Britain’s sometimes saintly Labour government struggled might and main to fob off David Ben-Gurion and keep Chaim Weizmann’s softer brand of Zionism in time-consuming diplomatic play.