(BUFDRVR) wrote in message ...

The book reference I posted a few days ago I picked up from another article
on-line, but that book did mention U.S. fatalities as averaging 42 a month from
V-E Day till an unspecified time. How many were accidents, the results of
criminal activity or fatalities from a German resistance movement wasn't
detailed in the article.

I've taken a look at Alexander Biddiscombe's book _Werwolf! : the
history of the National Socialist guerrilla movement, 1944-1946_.
Looks like a useful examination of the topic. One thing to note is
that this is essentially a history of partisan activity as a whole,
not merely of the groups formally constituted as Werewolf: one point
the author makes is that the relations between Werewolf and other
partisans were complicated and often chaotic, so they have to be
treated together. As such, it examines an analogue to the situation in
Iraq.

Another point he makes is that the historical data on this are hard to
pull together. For that reason, there are no collected tables of, for
example, casualties -- which would've made my search easier. However,
information on the 1945-1946 period is collected in Cahpters 5-8, and
I looked over those, attemtping to distinguish pre-armistice from
post-armistice incidents. Finally, it's difficult to distinguish the
results of attacks: when one person is said to be 'shot' and others
'killed', does that mean that the former was merely wounded?

Those caveats aside... there appear by Biddiscombe's account to be
fewer than five deaths identified among all American occupation
personnel in the post-war period, as a result of partisan activity,
not merely in Germany but in all of occupied Western Europe. The best
candidates are probably two soldiers who were founded garotted and in
a river (in Wurtemburg, IIRC) in mid-1945... but even there, there is
no explicit link to partisans. There were more deaths due to partisan
activity before Germany surrendered; more American soldiers were
wounded due to partisan activity during the post-surrender period;
other Allied troops were killed by partisans post-surrender (mostly
Soviets).

However, the picture that Biddiscombe paints is of a pretty
ineffectual and chaotic resistance after the end of the war, with
almost no American deaths incurred. It is I think compatible with the
conclusions of that RAND study that I quoted a couple of days ago.

Scott