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German bombers had flattened Rotterdam and gone on to destroy the industrial English city of Coventry. The Wehrmacht obliterated many smaller towns in their invasion routes through Poland and, later, Yugoslavia and the USSR. Whole districts of central London, notably in the poorer quarters around the docklands in the East End, had fallen victim to the Luftwaffe’s blitzkrieg in the course of the war.
    But the greatest material damage was done by the unprecedented bombing campaigns of the Western Allies in 1944 and 1945, and the relentless advance of the Red Army from Stalingrad to Prague. The French coastal towns of Royan, Le Havre and Caen were eviscerated by the US air force. Hamburg, Cologne, Dusseldorf, Dresden and dozens of other German cities were laid waste by carpet-bombing from British and American planes. In the east, 80 percent of the Byelorussian city of Minsk was destroyed by the end of the war; Kiev in the Ukraine was a smouldering ruin; while the Polish capital Warsaw was systematically torched and dynamited, house by house, street by street, by the retreating German army in the autumn of 1944. When the war in Europe ended—when Berlin fell to the Red Army in May 1945 after taking 40,000 tons of shells in the final fourteen days—much of the German capital was reduced to smoking hillocks of rubble and twisted metal. Seventy-five percent of its buildings were uninhabitable.
    Ruined cities were the most obvious—and photogenic—evidence of the devastation, and they came to serve as a universal visual shorthand for the pity of war. Because much of the damage had been done to houses and apartment buildings, and so many people were homeless as a result (an estimated 25 million people in the Soviet Union, a further 20 million in Germany—500,000 of them in Hamburg alone), the rubble-strewn urban landscape was the most immediate reminder of the war that had just ended. But it was not the only one. In Western Europe transport and communications were seriously disrupted: of 12,000 railway locomotives in pre-war France, only 2,800 were in service by the time of the German surrender. Many roads, rail tracks and bridges had been blown up—by the retreating Germans, the advancing Allies or the French Resistance. Two-thirds of the French merchant fleet had been sunk. In 1944-45 alone, France lost 500,000 dwellings.
    But the French—like the British, the Belgians, the Dutch (who lost 219,000 hectares of land flooded by the Germans and were reduced by 1945 to 40 percent of their pre-war rail, road and canal transport), the Danes, the Norwegians (who had lost 14 percent of the country’s pre-war capital in the course of the German occupation), and even the Italians—were comparatively fortunate, though they did not know it. The true horrors of war had been experienced further east. The Nazis treated western Europeans with some respect, if only the better to exploit them, and western Europeans returned the compliment by doing relatively little to disrupt or oppose the German war effort. In eastern and south-eastern Europe the occupying Germans were merciless, and not only because local partisans—in Greece, Yugoslavia and Ukraine especially—fought a relentless if hopeless battle against them.
    The material consequences in the East of the German occupation, the Soviet advance and the partisan struggles were thus of an altogether different order from the experience of war in the West. In the Soviet Union, 70,000 villages and 1,700 towns were destroyed in the course of the war, along with 32,000 factories and 40,000 miles of rail track. In Greece, two-thirds of the country’s vital merchant marine fleet was lost, one-third of its forests were ruined and a thousand villages were obliterated. Meanwhile the German policy of setting occupation-cost payments according to German military needs rather than the Greek capacity to pay generated hyperinflation.
    Yugoslavia lost 25 percent of its vineyards, 50 percent of all