Unz Throws Gauntlet, Fails

Despite my being banned from participating on his website's comments section, I do return every now and then to lurk and see what the bottom rung of humanity has to say about things. Today, I found that Unz, in the comments thread for a denial article by John Wear on T4, wrote:

(1) If we believe that the Nazis exterminated around 6 million Jews, substantially in gas chambers, that would certainly have been the most astonishing, industrial-scale massacre of civilians in world history, and would have represented a pretty significant fraction of all the WWII dead in the European theater. Obviously, a very, VERY big deal.
Yet the massive post-war memoirs of Eisenhower, Churchill, and De Gaulle, which total some 7,000 pages, supposedly contain virtually no indications of those gigantic events, which seems utterly inexplicable, since they obviously would have constituted the strongest possible justification for the war that had been fought.

After marveling for a moment over how a person as purportedly intelligent as Unz would find this a compelling argument, I took a look at the memoirs for the first time in a while. In the following, I am using the following texts:

• Charles de Gaulle, The Complete War Memoirs of Charles de Gaulle, translated by Jonathan Griffin and Richard Howard (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1998).
• Winston S. Churchill, Memoirs of the Second World War: an Abridgement of the Six Volumes of the Second World War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991).
• Dwight D. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997).

De Gaulle writes the following on page 496 of the cited text: "During the same period, the shameful horrors of the persecution of Jews were unleashed." It's actually the third place in the book where he specifically references actions undertaken against Jews, having done so on pages 346 and 403. Why doesn't he mention the death camps? It's a memoir -- he didn't go to Germany or points further east where the "main event" was unfolding.

Here's Churchill on Nazi crimes on page 12 of his memoir: "The wholesale massacre by systematised processes of six or seven millions of men, women, and children in the German execution camps exceeds in horror the rough-and-ready butcheries of Genghis Khan, and in scale reduces them to pigmy proportions." There are no other mentions in this abridged version, although the unabridged memoirs contain lines such as the following (on page 264 of volume 5): "cold-blooded mass-executions which are being perpetrated by the Hitlerite forces in the many countries they have overrun and from which they are now being steadily expelled."

Saving the best for last, Eisenhower describes touring a liberated camp near Gotha on pages 408-409 of his memoir. He writes, "I visited every nook and cranny of the camp because I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that 'the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda.'"

Say what, Ike?

Now, lest we take the bait that these are only passing references, indeed, they are. However, what do these three men have to say about a major event during the war that was also a major event in human history, i.e., the atomic bombing of Hiroshima?

De Gaulle mentions Hiroshima once -- on page 926 of his memoir. Churchill mentions it twice: on the same page cited above on which he cites extermination in camps; and on pages 982-983. Eisenhower mentions it once, on page 456.

Ron, if you happen to read this, maybe you quit while you're behind. Alternately, you can always allow me back into your den of iniquity, and you can tell me why I'm wrong directly.