Eisenhower and the German POWs: Facts Against Falsehood ed. by Gunter Bischof, Stephen E. Ambrose (review)

BookReviews 247 asentence,' prays Mr Thoreau bravely, 'Which no intelligence can understand !'-and we think that the kind gods have nodded .... We think it must be this taste that makes him so fond of the Hindoo philosophy, which would seem admirably suited to men, if men were only oysters" (357). This review should be contrasted to Lowell's posthumous partial apology to Thoreau, in 1865,three years after his death, for having misjudged him. What would have completed the circle, but is not included here nor mentioned, is Eugene Benson 's "Reply to Lowell," published in Galaxy in 1866, which slammed Lowell for having allowed himself to be used by conservative philistines to the detriment of the high-minded thinker. This review did much to injure Lowell's own reputation and position with the Atlantic Monthly, leading to his retirement and replacement by Howells. Nonscholars will need more than here presented to fill in these gaps in the selections and the introduction. But for those interested in the cultural hist01y of the period, this collection, perhaps because of its weaker reviews, does represent fairly the mind of the audience which Emerson and Thoreau had to contend with. This audience was obsessed with the question of getting a "national literature" whose reputation would justify the nation's social and political postures, and it responded slowlyto the interconnections of language and European ideas that allowed Emerson to formulate the integrity of American literature within a universal concept of literature. Given this audience, it becomes clear how the writings of Emerson and Thoreau were essential in changing the literacy taste of the times, and secured for them a lasting place in the canon of American literature. John Stephen Martin Universityof Calgary •••••• Gunter Bischof and Stephen E. Ambrose, eds. Eisenhower and the German POWs: FactsAgainst Falsehood. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1992.Pp. xvii + 258. In late 1989, Canadian novelist James Bacque published Other Losses: An Investigation into the Mass Deaths of German Prisoners at the Hands of the French and Americans After World War II. In the book, Bacque claimed, in essence, that he had uncovered a monstrous crime committed by Dwight D. Eisenhower at the close of the war. That crime was the deliberate murder by starvation of about one million 248 CanadianReviewof American Studies Gennan prisoners of war (POWs). Eisenhower did that, Bacque claimed, because of his burning hatred of the Gennans. Tqe heinous deed was done by bypassing the Geneva Convention's stipulations that POWs be fed rations equal to those provided Allied soldiers. That was accomplished by designating the hundreds of thousands of capitulating Gennans "Disanned Enemy Forces" instead of POWs. Bacque also claimed that the stoiy had been covered up since the war by the Americans, the French, and the Gennans. Bacque's book became an overnight sensation and bas been published around the globe and in several major languages. In December 1990, Ambrose, Bischof, and other scholars met at the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans to answer Bacque's charges. This book is the result of that conference. In eight closely reasoned, well documented, and hard hitting essays historians Ambrose, Bischof, Brian Loring Villa, Albert E. Cowdrey, James F. Tent, Rudiger Overmans, Rolf Steininger, and Thomas M. Barker take Bacque on. They acknowledge that one of Bacque's charges is correct-hundreds of thousands of Gennan POWs who surrendered during the closing weeks of the war suffered great privation for a short time and several thousand did die-but they point out that this storyhas long been known to historians. As for the rest of Bacque's book, they demolish it brick by brick. In Eishenhower and the German POWs, virtually eveiy one of Bacque's allegations is exposed as false. His use of evidence is proved to have been selective. His understanding of the evidence he did use is shown to have been woefully incomplete. In fact, there is much evidence that he cooked evidence, especially oral evidence. Bacque's knowledge of the Europe of 1945 and the immediate postwar world food situation is also demonstrated to have been minimal. If Bacque had ever raised doubts in the minds of...