Unofficial Mercy

OCCUPATION

General Dwight Eisenhower added some definite details last week to the Allied Military Government's rule of occupied parts of Germany (TIME, Sept. 25):

P: The National Socialist Party and its appendages, its uniforms, its symbols--all were ordered abolished.

P: All the Nazi laws of racial discrimination were revoked.

P: For the crimes of spying, giving information to the Nazis, aiding them in any way, looting or pillaging, thieving from the Allies or deliberately misleading Allied forces, the penalty was death.

Allied leaders were prepared to be stern (see U.S. AT WAR), but there was less certainty that U.S. troops would or could be as tough. Pictures in London newspapers showing hungry Germans sitting down to a meal of Army rations while Yanks stood around with pleased smiles (see cut), touched off angry comments from people who had just been through the robot blitz. (A few robombs, apparently launched from planes, still landed in & around London last week.)

The reasons why troops found it hard to be tough were well put by the late C. E. Montague, British essayist, who wrote of the Allied occupation after World War I: "How can you hate the small boy who stands at the farm door visibly torn between dread of the invader and deep delight in all soldiers as soldiers? ... It is hopelessly bad for your Byronic hates if you sit through whole winter evenings in the abhorred foe's kitchen and the abhorred foe grants you the uncovenanted mercy of hot coffee and discusses without rancor the relative daily yields of the British and German milch cow. . . .

"When all the great and wise were making peace, as somebody said, with a vengeance, our command on the Rhone had to send a wire to say that unless something was done to feed the starving Germans it could not answer for discipline in its Army: the men were giving their rations away and no orders would stop them."

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