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vile cruelty in the world for us to be able to say with true satisfaction, “Good is victorious.”’ American Lt. Lyman Diercks, at Unterach near Salzburg in Austria, wrote: ‘Our celebration was low-key. An American in the town loaned us an American flag which we flew from a pole in the square. The elderly Austrian couple who owned the hotel cooked us a wonderful meal. She cried and said: “Maybe now my son will be able to come home from Russia where he is a prisoner.” But he never did.’ In the British lines, Corporal John Cropper described a sense of ‘instant relief – no wild cheering or running about. It was a case of thank God it’s all over and we were safe at last. We had nothing to celebrate with anyway, just compo tea and normal rations. It was if you’d had an exhausting day and you flop down in a chair at the end of it.’

The American and British armies in Germany looted energetically and raped occasionally, but few men sought explicit revenge from the vanquished. The French, however, saw many scores to be paid. Major Albrecht Hamlin, OC of a US Civil Affairs unit running Merzig (population 12,500), submitted a despairing report cataloguing wholesale acts of pillage following the arrival of a French cavalry unit: ‘Within an hour the city was in a state of complete confusion. The Chasseurs spread out … taking whatever houses they wished, ejecting civilians from their homes, impressing them on the street for forced labor, confiscating bicycles, automobiles, trucks, and general looting of houses and stores … The acts were manifestly committed as revenge upon the Germans. Reprimands to the officers were met with the repeated excuse that the Germans did these things to France, and now it was their turn.’

Hamlin described indiscriminate shooting, rapes committed by French colonial troops, the killing of an American sergeant by a French patrol. ‘The hotel in Mettlach was systematically sacked and contents shipped by truck back into France … 5 April Luitwin-on-Boch reported that French soldiers had discovered the art objects and curios stored in the basement of the ceramic museum of Villeroy & Boch, and were destroying them.’ To compound the chaos, liberated Russian prisoners rampaged freely and American soldiers were reported killing fish with grenades in the Hausbacher brook. By contrast the local inhabitants were entirely submissive, according to Hamlin. Though such scenes were widespread throughout Germany, in the Western Allied zone order was progressively restored during the weeks that followed. In the Russian zone, it was not. Institutionalised pillage, rape and murder persisted long after Germany’s military defeat had been acknowledged. The ending of the war in the west signalled a deliverance for the soldiers of America and Britain, but the miseries of Europe and many millions of its inhabitants were much slower to abate.

Japan Prostrate

In the spring of 1945, Indian and British forces led by Gen. Bill Slim conducted a brilliantly successful campaign to recapture Burma. This was irrelevant to the outcome of the war – as both Slim and Churchill anticipated from the outset – because the United States Navy had already established a stranglehold on Japan in the Pacific. But it did something to restore the battered confidence and fallen prestige of the British Empire, and laid bare Japan’s vulnerability. Churchill had sought to avoid a thousand-mile overland advance through some of the worst terrain in the world, preferring an amphibious assault on Rangoon from the south. But the Americans insisted on an attack through north Burma, to fulfil the only strategic purpose they valued in the region – reopening the overland route to China.

Slim’s army, dominated by Indian troops and including three divisions recruited from Britain’s African colonies, was much stronger than that of the Japanese – 530,000 men to 400,000 – and supported by powerful armoured and air forces. Its chief problem was to supply an advance across mountainous and densely vegetated country almost bereft of roads. Air dropping, made possible by a