Monday, February 2, 2009
Piers Anthony Has Favorably Mentioned My Book
In his Feblueberry 2009 newsletter now posted on his website, fantasy and science fiction writer Piers Anthony has favorably mentioned my book, "The Myth of Natural Rights and Other Essays." Those of you who are involved in writing or publishing might find his newsletter interesting reading even if you don't read far enough to see what he said about my book. Revisionist history fans, and others, who read what Anthony says about my book will learn that he agrees with James Bacque's claim, in the book "Other Losses," that a million or more World War Two German POWs were allowed to starve to death by their American captors. As for my book, Anthony concludes, "...Rollins' book made me think, and it is worth reading by anyone else who likes to think. You don't have to agree; just consider."
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4 comments:
What do you think about Bacque's claim?
TGGP: I haven't spent much time trying to ascertain the accuracy of Bacque's book. But there might be something to what he said, although I don't know about the numbers involved. Several months ago, while rereading "America's Second Crusade," William Henry Chamberlin's early-1950s WW-II-revisionist book, I noticed that he had material concerning US treatment of German POWs that reminded me of Bacque.
TGGP: It doesn't fully corroborate Bacque, but Robert Murphy's book "Diplomat Among Warriors,"
published in the 1960s, I think, included a story about one young American officer in Occupied Germany who was intentionally starving his German prisoners. As I recall, Murphy gave the impression that this was an unusual case.
TGGP: In his 2006 book, "The War of The World," Niall Ferguson, on page 552, alludes to James Bacque's "Other Losses": "Although it has been alleged that as many as726,000 who fell into American hands died of starvation or disease, these calculations almost certainly exaggerate both the number of prisoners the Americans took abd their mortality. The most that can be said is that those Germans who preferred to surrender to American rather than to British forces made a miscalculation, since the mortality rate for German PoWs in American hands was more than four times higher than the rate for Germans who surrendered to the British (o.15 per cent to 0.03 per cent)." Ferguson , in a note on page 709, cites two articles in support of his criticism of Bacque, 'On the Other Losses Debate', by S. P. Mackenzie, in "International History Review," 14, 4 (1992), and'German Histriography, the War Losses and the Prisoners of War', by Ruediger Overmans, in "Eisenhower and the German POWs: Facts against Falsehood," edited by G. Bischof and S. Ambrose (1992).
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