A Letter from Ike

General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower, surveying the carnage east of the Rhine, noting the enemy’s policy of divide and resist, dictated a letter to his Commander in Chief:

“The further this campaign progresses the more probable it appears that there will never be a clean-cut military surrender of the forces on the Western Front. . . . This . . . will likely mean that a V-E day will come about only by a proclamation on our part rather than by any definite and decisive collapse or surrender of German resistance. . . .

“It is, of course, always possible that there might be in Germany a sudden upsurge of popular resentment against the war, which would lead to a much easier pacification. . . [but] we should be prepared for the eventuality described.”

General Ike’s statement contained nothing which had not been copiously speculated on by military observers. But his letter, released by the White House without comment, gave the observation an official tone. Now the U.S. people had it straight from their top commander in Europe: hundreds of thousands of their soldiers might have to spend the summer and the fall and perhaps longer, rooting the Germans out of military pockets, just as the Japs had to be burned out of their caves on Iwo.

Coming in the greatest week of the war —when the Jap Cabinet fell, the Russians denounced their neutrality pact with the Japanese, the remnants of the Jap fleet were almost put out of business; when U.S. spearheads cut to within 128 miles of Berlin, and General Patton stumbled on the fabulous Nazi gold hoard—Eisenhower’s letter had a sobering effect.

More sobering yet were the stories and pictures from Europe of what had happened to U.S. prisoners in Germany. The stories came from the now liberated prison camps at Bad Orb and Limburg, where U.S. soldiers, captured in the Battle of the Bulge but four months ago, were left to starve into illness and death. The pictures from Limburg (see cuts) spoke for themselves. They were stark testimony of the barbarous state into which the once correct, highly professional Wehrmacht had fallen. More than that, they were the final proof, if any was still needed, that Germany would have to be flattened into complete submission.