ABSTRACT
In the middle of March 1945 the British deputy prime minister, Clement Attlee, returned from a tour of liberated Europe. The message he brought back was not comforting. The Economist noted how ‘gradually realisation is spreading that the plight of Europe is grave beyond words, and that a new attitude to its problems is absolutely necessary’. In the same days the shrewd American journalist Anne O'Hare McCormick wrote in the New York Times:
The human problem the war will leave behind it has not yet been imagined, much less faced by anybody. There has never been such destruction, such disintegration of the structure of life. … The liberated cannot be fed or put on the way of recovery. The sharp increase in the death rate and tuberculosis rate in France during the first winter of liberation … is typical. In Italy the relief sent from the United States, though considerable, is only a drop in an ocean of need. In Belgium the situation is politically critical; in Holland it is worse. 1
