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Beware the "compression" of memory.

Six months before, the world had cheered as the statues of the dictator came crashing down. The Americans had seemed heroic.

But now things were going very badly. The occupation was chaotic, the American soldiers were hated and they were facing threats from the surviving supporters of the dictator, whose whereabouts were uncertain.

Washington seemed unwilling to pay the enormous bill for reconstruction, and the president didn't appear to have any kind of workable plan to manage the transition to democracy. European allies, distrustful of the arrogant American outlook, were wary of co-operating. To many, it looked like the victory had been betrayed, since the American values of democracy, equality and well-being seemed unlikely ever to emerge.

That's how it looked in Germany in November, 1945.

In our memories, history tends to become compressed: There was V-E Day, then the American soldiers were cheered by the people of Berlin, then the president announced that hundreds of millions would be spent on the Marshall Plan, then Germany became the prosperous and democratic place it is today.

That is not how things unfolded...

Six months after V-E Day, The New York Times reported that Germany was awash in "unrest and lawlessness." More than a million "displaced persons" roamed the country, many of them subsisting on criminal activities. The heavy-handed presence of American soldiers was deeply resented by many Germans, especially young men, who had come to believe that the G.I.s were stealing their women.

There were still a lot of rogue Nazis causing trouble. It took months for British investigators to determine that Adolf Hitler had killed himself, and many thought his hand could be detected behind the crime and violence. Worse, the attacks on soldiers, General Dwight D. Eisenhower warned, revealed a deeper resentment of the occupation...

Nobody in the army had expected to be thrust into the position of running a country, certainly not for months after the war ended. The army is "ill-fitted by training, experience and organization for civil government," wrote The New York Times, describing "confusion and chaos" in the leadership. Berlin still didn't have even its most rudimentary infrastructure running in its American-occupied quarter.

Meanwhile, the world was outraged by the scenes of suffering and disorder coming from Germany. The people were going hungry: A report conducted in November,1945, indicated that 60 per cent of them weren't getting the bare ration of 1,550 calories per day (2,000 calories is generally considered a healthy minimum). The world waited for the president of the United States to announce a plan.

The wait would be long. The Marshall Plan, in which the United States spent the equivalent of 100 billion of today's dollars rebuilding Europe, was not passed until late in 1947, more than two years after the war's end, and did not deliver a penny to Germany until 1949. It faced harsh political opposition from Republicans in the United States. The other great instrument of postwar reconstruction, the World Bank, did not begin handing out money until 1947 either.

Read it all.

(via Instapundit)