I always liked Eisenhower when I was a kid. My Dad was is the service and we were stationed in Germany during the 1958-1961 period of the Cold War. I always thought my Dad looked a little like Eisenhower. The Germans I knew were all real nice people, and I never saw any anti-American actions or words by them, with the exception of getting beat up by a German teen-ager. The French on the other hand were very upset with the US, and pulled out of NATO about this time. I remember Viva De Gaul graffiti. As a 10 year old kid you don't really understand much about politics.
Later I learned it had to do with Britain, France, and Israel attacking and seizing the Suez Canal from Egypt in 1956, against the wishes of the United States. I understand that Eisenhower told them to pull out, or they would be using their money, politely rephrased, as toilet paper. We owned so much of their currencies, that we could crash their economies by dumping their money. They all pulled out. The French pulled out of NATO, and the Israelis and Brits just bit their tongues and waited. How many people even know about this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_CrisisYears later I found out that Eisenhower was also one of the officers in charge of burning the camps of the Bonus Army when the WW1 vets walked to Washington DC to demand the bonuses promised to them. Not Ike! Yes he was there. I'll let the interested find their own Google links on this.
Years later I found out that the Allies were not always the guys in shining armor. I read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago" and found out what happened to all the Soviet troops and citizens that were captured by the Germans, and kept alive through the war. It's not a happy story. Yes, the 'Good Guys' sent about 5 million back to the Soviets. Sometimes they were shot within hearing range of the people who returned them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_KeelhaulThen we come to the German POWs who were captured by the Allies. These are men (and women?) who fought honorably, and had not been accused of any other crime, other than being on the losing side. You would expect them to be identified, fingerprinted and photographed and then released. What you wouldn't expect is for them to be put in brutal outdoor camps, with no shelter, and starved to death. The numbers are in question, but the numbers of dead are in the hundreds of thousands to the millions. This was done after the war, not as the necessity of battle, or due to wartime shortages.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_Losseshttp://www.the7thfire.com/Politics%20and%20History/us_war_crimes/Eisenhowers_death_camps.htmSo while we are patting Ike on the back for the great job he's done, let's look at the deaths of millions that he had a direct hand in. Let's look at ourselves too, and ask if our actions in WW2 were any better than the Germans? How much of our own history do we really know? We should all realize that the winners write the history, but is it the whole story? When I hear about one group complaining about them being picked on in the war, I really wonder if they see the big picture. There was enough injustice to go around.
