Editing Other Losses (section)

=== Prisoner totals ===
According to ''Other Losses'', the U.S. Army employed a number of methods to reduce the number of prisoners officially on hand. One method was to accuse the Russians of taking far more prisoners than they reported.<ref>Bacque, Other Losses, p153</ref> Another was the "midnight shift", whereby the opening balance of a given week was less than the closing balance of the previous week.<ref>Bacque, Other Losses, p56</ref>

The book describes that a "Missing Million" prisoners exist in the difference in totals between two U.S. army reports (the last of the daily reports and the first of the weekly reports) issued on June 2, 1945.<ref name="bacque52">{{Harvnb|Bacque|1989|pp=52–3}}</ref> As a consequence of this, according to Quartermaster's reports the number of rations issued to the camps was reduced by 900,000.<ref>Bacque, Other Losses, p55</ref>

''Other Losses'' states that after visiting many of the camps in August 1945, Major General [[Robert McGowan Littlejohn|Robert M. Littlejohn]] (Quartermaster of the ETO) concluded that the U.S. Army was reporting 3.7 million prisoners while it actually possessed 5.2 million, thereby corroborating the conclusions made in a report three months earlier from Lieutenant General [[John C. H. Lee]] (in charge of logistics for the ETO), which he had sent to SHAEF headquarters.<ref>Bacque, Other Losses, p61</ref> ''Other Losses'' states that Littlejohn subsequently wrote in a report to Washington that because requisitions for supplies were based on these faulty numbers, 1.5 million prisoners were getting no food.<ref>Bacque, Other Losses, p166</ref>

''Other Losses'' states that, three years later, in 1948 the ICRC formally requested documents confirming the total number of prisoners in the U.S. Zone and was eventually told that 3.5 million were there, which omitted approximately 1.7 million from the actual number of 5,224,000.<ref>Bacque, Other Losses, p154</ref><ref>A June 1945 SHAEF document reproduced in Other Losses lists a total of 7.6 million prisoners, with 5.2 million of those in U.S. column.</ref>