The Long Road Home: The Aftermath of the Second World War
Author(s): Ben Shephard
The epic story of the aftermath of World War Two and the repatriation of over fifteen million people across a devastated Europe.
After the Great War, the millions killed on the battlefields were eclipsed by the millions more civilians carried off by disease and starvation when the conflict was over. Haunted by memories, the Allies were determined that the end of the Second World War would not be followed by a similar disaster, and they began to lay plans long before victory was assured. Confronted by an entire continent starving and uprooted, Allied planners devised strategies to help all 'displaced persons', and repatriate the fifteen million people who had been deprived of their homes and in many cases forced to work for the Germans. But over a million Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians and Yugoslavs refused to go home. This book offers a radical reassessment of the aftermath of World War II. Unlike most recent writing about the 1940s, it assesses the events and personalities of that decade in terms of contemporary standards and values. This the true and epic story of how millions ultimately found relief, reconciliation and a place to call home.
General Information
- :
- : Vintage
- : Vintage
- : 0.351
- : 31 March 2011
- : United Kingdom
- : 01 June 2011
- : books
Other Specifications
- : Ben Shephard
- : Paperback
- : 1104
- : 940.5308691
- : 496
More About The Product
"This is an epic book, beautifully written and astonishingly well-researched." - The Wall Street Journal
"Thoughtful and sobering." - New York Journal of Books
"Masterful...With its thorough and compassionate depiction of the DP era as a whole, The Long Road Home establishes beyond question the period's pivotal importance...[It] should be required reading for anyone who seeks to obtain insight into the capacity of ordinary individuals to confront and, for the most part, overcome the consequences of persecution and dire devastation." - The Washington Post
Ben Shephard read History at Oxford University. He was a Producer on the television series The World at War and The Nuclear Age and has made numerous historical and scientific documentaries for the BBC and Channel Four. He is the author of the critically acclaimed A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists 1914-1994 and After Daybreak: The Liberation of Belsen, 1945. He lives in Bristol.
