An extraordinary book. It tells two of the most extraordinary stories of the 20th century simultaneously. Neither has been told before. One is the story of a great hero - Herbert Hoover, not J. Edgar the FBI boss, but a multimillionaire humanitarian whose courage, outspokenness, persistence and dedication saved literally tens of millions of people from starvation after the first world war and then after the second. And it's the story of why we never hear about this. General Eisenhower, war "hero" and later US president, of whom we have all heard, persued a deliberate policy of preventing available food aid into Germany between 1945-49. Laws preventing immigration turned the country into a prison. As Bacque revealed in earlier book OTHER LOSSES, millions of disarmed soldiers died in prison camps; further more, Bacque tells the story of the suffering of civilians, dying from starvation. It is a part of living memory that times were extraordinarily hard, but Bacque's research has enabled an estimate of the scale for the first time: at least 9 million. He has found the documents which trace the decisions leading to this second holocaust, leading back to Eisenhower and his advisors. It is a courageous act for a man aged more than 70 accuse a war hero and president of being commiting atrocities. Bacques thoughts on collective are thought provocing. It's a sign of the times that a book like this is out of print. By it before it becomes a historical document in itself. Read it and tell people. It's relevant to today.

Exelent book for joung people!to learn something about the great United States and their crimes.My family and I lived through it, in Bad-Kreuznach Rhld.Pfalz.Germany.

This is a first rate book, well researched, well documented and well indexed (which is often the best proof of godo research).

The USA, as part of our policy, starved 1M German POWs and 10M German civilians after WWII. But Truman reversed the policies of FDR and Morgenthau. So, by 1946, the USA, under Hoover (yes, the former president and the one who lead the food aid to the Beligans during WWI), was attempting to reverse the horrors of FDR and Ike's policies.

The numbers are sound. Backed up by our own occupation government census numbers.

Americans did object. Ambassador Murphy, a number of senators. As was pointed out by one US officer: "the only difference between the US and the Nazis was the color of the uniform."

How many GIs will admit today what they did? Have you heard one?

James Bacque's "Other Losses" is an authoritative account of the awful conditions in which the Americans and French kept their former prisoners of war after world war II. The book is well researched and footnoted and provides much in the way of new information. The author convincingly argues that shocking crimes were comitted. The author comes to the very controversial conclusion that Eisenhower willfuly maltreated the former POWs after WWII resulting in mass deaths. It is shocking that there is so little evidence one way or the other about such a recent event. However James Bacque presents the data available for anyone to form their own conclusions.

James Bacque deals with a topic most historians (especially Eisenhower apologists like Stephen Ambrose) want to avoid. It is the frightening account of how Allied forces, at the end of World War II, systematically used, abused and starved millions of German POWs in what Gen. George Patton described as "Gestapo tactics." As an historian, Army veteran, and grandson of a German army officer during that war, it's high time this story was told. So much is written about German atrocities during the war (Malmedy, Trois Ponts, etc). But little is discussed about such issues as this (another being "Operation Keelhaul"... forced 'repatriation' of Russians who served in the German Army). Bacque's evidence is convincing, thorough, and hard to avoid. Too bad so-called "historians" like Ambrose can't see this for himself. Must reading for any serious student of World War II history.

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.

I read about half the book, I have a hunch the author is indeed telling the plain truth, nothing more or less. While stationed in the US Army in West Germany in the mid-80's, I learned enough German to talk to (among others) some older men who had been POWs. I was mildly baffled then by their differing accounts: one who surrendered in North Africa was profuse with praise and gratitude for his captors. A couple who were rounded up at the end of the war around the Main river were glad that West Germany had turned out so well under U.S. control, but made no bones about how hard their captivity had been. I thought "must be sour grapes, because we Americans always treat the captured enemy to cream cakes and chocolate" and so on. However, my commanding officer, an avid historian himself, also mentioned he'd heard of a lot of German POW's dying at the end of the war. To make a long story short, there was a sort of whispered "oral tradition" in the US Army in Germany of stories passed from the old timers to the new guys about something pretty bad happening to the POWs in the Rhein-Main (confluence of two rivers) area. My father was the one who recommended the book to me. It is difficult going, because of so much attention to detail, etc., but the main thing is, it unfortunately corroborates with what I have heard from both German and U.S. sources. What to do? I think this episode is like that of slavery in the 19th century. We can't undo what's been done, but we can try to make sure we do better. And mostly we have, not one of the old Germans I talked to would have traded places with those who were captured by the Soviets.

I remember being shocked to see on a town memorial marker that one of my WWII-casualty great-uncles on my German side (my father is Irish, mother from Germany), had actually died in October 1946, a full year and a half after the end of the war. I was then informed this one, Willi Kurz, had starved to death in a camp in France (after surviving years of hellish war), survived by his wife and young daughter.

So to suddenly stumble across this book was incredibly saddening & maddening, and to see that children suffered similarly long after the war was supposedly over was even worse. But it is true, and "the truth will out." And it is almost unknown. And it shatters the myth that only the "other" side's government is capable of mass murder. And now, I dislike Ike.

James Bacque came across this topic while writing a biography of a wounderful Frenchman, Raoul Laporterie, who had saved 1600 Jews during WW II. Discovering that Raoul had also saved two German POWs from slave labor, he got into this topic and, with the assistance of a U.S. Army Col./historian, researched this book. It examines the treatment of POWs and the employment of slave labor by the western Allies. Recently he has published "Crimes and Mercies"; using newly available sources and expanding the topic to the massacres of German civilians in the East and what he believes was a process of deliberate starvation of German civilians for two years after the war. The tolls he computes: 1.1M POWs killed; 2M forced laborers employed in the west; of 900K forced laborers held by the French (mostly POWs but also civilians), 300K dead; 2.1 to 6 M civilians massacred in the East, and "excess" deaths of 5.7 M civilians from 1945 to 1950. Is this possible? (This is important, these books have been attacked as fantasy or worse.) I believe that it is. A principal corroberative source I have is the experiences of relatives and family friends. My cousin Siegfried was captured at the end of the war. The day the war ended the treatment of the POWs went from correct to brutal. He was then sent to France as a forced laborer, and only survived because the major commanding his last camp told the men that he had been a POW for 5 years and had been treated correctly, and what was being done to them was a terrible crime, and that he would do everything to see that they survived. A family friend, formerly a Ford (US) executive and then with VW, was kidnapped out of his office and sent to France as a slave; his family had no idea what happened to him. He luckily got out a year later. Other relatives died in the camps. Secondly, both these books are carefully documented, with hundreds of precise footnotes covering every assertion and dozens of pages of appendices, bibliographies, etc., the vast majority Allies documents and sources. I have never seen a critic call Bacque on his sources, attributions, etc. There seems to be two schools of denial. One, the name-calling school, calls Bacque a "revisionist", although he does not write about either the topic or the period of the Holocaust, and seems to have a conventional view of the Holocaust. Supposedly such a label, used without a single factual assertion or rebuttal, automatically negates years of research. The second I call the "Where's the beef!" school, who states no bodies, no crime. In fact many mass graves have been found ig Germany, and the government literally and figuratively covers them up, and, if necessary, the police threaten investigators. In summary, this is a very important area of history that has been covered up too long. Bacque's two books (and "Just Raoul" about Mr. Laporterie) deserve reading and contemplation.