Cheap Other Losses (Book) (James Bacque) Price

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My Uncle also confirms this.
But my uncle was a German. In his diaries he confirms that the treatment of unarmed surrendered soldiers was as described in this book, further a relative from the same village that he grew up in has had the same experience, It's hypocrisy at it's most cynical to think that we conducted war crime trials at the same time this atrocity was being perpetrated. Every American should have at the very least a sizeable footnote in the standard issue history book refering to these crimes. If your skeptical and even if your not you owe it to yourself to read this book and draw your own conclusions.

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Americans do not walk on water
Americans like to justify themselves by believing in the Hollywood notion that they can simply do no wrong. That is, of course, a self-deception. James Bacque has given a well-documented and superbly supported reason for Americans to ask themselves if they truly know what their military and government did in the so-called "Good War." If you are interested in learning some disturbing facts about the U.S. Army of Occupation in Germany, by all means read "Other Losses."

And as for the flak put up by the Establishment's court historians, most notably Stephen Ambrose, consider the words of Dr. Ernest F. Fisher, Jr., former historian at the Center of Military History United States Army, in the book's foreword: "Eisenhower's hatred, passed through the lens of a compliant military bureaucracy, produced the horror of death camps unequaled by anything in American military history. In the face of the catastrophic consequences of this hatred, the casual indifference expressed by the SHAEF officers is the most painful aspect of the U.S. Army's involvement." These words, obviously an expression of regret and not accusation, from a career U.S. Army officer carry far more weight than the pseudo-indignant cries of "Foul!" from an academic at LSU with an agenda to pursue.

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What to Believe?
The controversy over claims of American mistreatment of German prisoners at the end of World War II had completely escaped my attention until last week. There was a Reuter's wire story (July 7, 2004) about how the Abu Ghraib photos brought back painful memories to some German survivors of American camps. The story seemed fantastic -- mass starvation of prisoners of the American Army, but the reporter quoted witnesses, cited documents, and interviewed historians. Why hadn't I heard of this before?

I did an internet search and found only a few references to the American prison camps in Germany at all. Some of the sites were conspiracy-fueled drivel. Many of the references to the camps could be traced back to the same University of Hawaii professor. And some of the claims in the news story were questionable. One former prisoner claimed his weight fell from 176 lb. to 110 lb. in one month. Is that even possible?

James Bacque's book, Other Losses, seemed to be the only book that had been written on the subject. I found it and read it. Bacque is a Canadian writer and has done an impressive amount of research, both by digging into documents and interviewing people who were there. He scoured the records of the U.S. Army, of the French government (which received German prisoners for use as slave labor from the American Army), and of the German towns where prison camps were located. He questioned former Army officers, journalists, German prisoners, and French witnesses.

What Bacque claims is not unbelievable. Abu Ghraib, the carpet bombing of Southeast Asia, and Andersonville are part of our history. Other Losses has not convinced me though. How could the deaths of a million prisoners have been hidden for so many years? There would have been more evidence, witnesses, survivors. The reasons Bacque gives for the lack of more evidence doesn't stand up: that the Germans themselves felt so collectively guilty over their own war crimes that they kept quiet; that the records were destroyed; that American journalists were spoon-fed Army propaganda. Not completely convincing.

There is enough evidence here to convince me that the American camps for German prisoners in Germany were criminally substandard. That there was a certain amount of hatred for Germans seems likely. Americans, from enlisted guards to Eisenhower himself, may well have decided to exact a bit of revenge. After all, Eisenhower decided the prisoners did not need to be accorded the status of prisoners of war, and therefore did not merit Geneva Convention treatment. But it seems unlikely that the death count was anywhere near a million.

That the number of deaths in Other Losses seems exaggerated unfortunately takes away from what is still a pretty remarkable chapter in history. If Bacque had resisted extrapolating the figures and had gone with a more conservative estimate, the story would have been just as alarming, and might well have been received as a more credible story. Instead, critics can discredit Bacque's story on the basis of incredible numbers and ignore what is actually a mostly believable and tragic blot on the "greatest generation."