Ike's Revenge?

Along the Rhine in 1945, barbed-wire fences enclosed tightly packed masses of German prisoners of war. Without tents, they dug crude foxholes and hoarded scraps of cardboard against the bitter spring weather. Without food or water, some resorted to eating grass and drinking their urine. Many died of dysentery, pneumonia, exhaustion, brought on by the cruel neglect of their American captors.

So alleges Toronto author James Bacque in Other Losses (Stoddart Publishing), a controversial Canadian best seller that claims at least 960,000 German soldiers died in U.S. and French army camps in the final months of World War II and afterward. They were victims of deliberate neglect, says Bacque, because Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower withheld sustenance from a despised enemy.

The U.S. Army Center of Military History has issued a terse statement that it "does not accept" this interpretation, although historians at the center have read only excerpts. The Army has not commented.

Bacque, 60, whose past works have all been novels, points to a March 10, 1945, message from Eisenhower proposing that German prisoners be deemed "disarmed enemy forces" rather than prisoners of war, since providing the level of rations assured for POWs by the Geneva Convention "would prove far beyond the capacity of the Allies." Ike's request was granted, and adequate food, water and shelter were withheld from the prisoners. Alone among the Western Allies, the U.S. refused to permit Red Cross inspections of its 200 camps.

Bacque's recounting of those policy decisions may hold up to historical scrutiny better than his statistics. His evidence on the death toll in American camps comes from fragmentary, often contradictory Army records. Says historian Arthur L. Smith of California State University, Los Angeles, who has written about German soldiers in the postwar years: "How do you get rid of a million bodies?" Eisenhower biographer Stephen Ambrose also disagrees with Bacque on several key points. Nevertheless, he says, "we as Americans can't duck the fact that terrible things happened. And they happened at the end of a war we fought for decency and freedom, and they are not excusable."