Newsday
Nassau, NY
1/7/93

As screenwriters of the documentary film LIBERATORS: FIGHTING ON TWO FRONTS IN WWII, we were deeply offended by Christopher Ruddy's spiteful and uninformed attack on the film. Not since Jesse Helms took to the stump have we read so crude and intemperate an assault on the integrity of public television. Ruddy manages to combine an impressive degree of malice with just the right touch of abysmal ignorance in an absurd attempt to dismiss LIBERATORS as a media "hoax". He portrays the film's producers as a cabal of greedy hucksters who have somehow contrived to make money out of a concocted pseudo-history. He writes of wasted "taxpayer dollars", crass "inducements of money" and "media manipulation" on a grand scale. He even goes so far as to compare LIBERATORS to Nazi propaganda films. And this is just the preamble to Ruddy's lurid catalog of the film's sins!

He contends that African-American soldiers of the U.S. 761st tank battalion took no part in the liberation of Buchenwald or Dachau. According to Ruddy, on the day of Buchenwald's liberation the battalion was "locked in fierce combat 60 miles away". He has this on the authority of the unit's "commanding officers" (who he doesn't bother to name) and two former GI's named Milt and Mel. Why should they be considered trustworthy while the eyewitnesses in our film are described as "confused" or worse?

Is Ruddy aware that among the many Dachau and Buchenwald survivors who remember black liberators are the chief rabbi of Tel Aviv and Nobel-laureate Elie Weisel? Could either of them be remotely described as "groupies of the media elite", as Ruddy puts it in one of his lamer cliches? Does he know that survivor Samuel Pisar remembers being pulled inside the tank of a black rescuer during a firefight on a road outside Dachau? Pisar described the encounter in his book BLOOD AND HOPE (published in 1982), adding that he had since identified his rescuer as Bill Ellington of the 761st.

How is it possible for so many witnesses to be wrong? Ruddy's insinuations on this score range all the way from "confusion" to outright fraudulence and bribery, but he ignores the more likely possibility that the witnesses are telling the truth, and that the only person attempting trying to rewrite the history of the 761st is Christopher Ruddy.

As for Milt and Mel, the two white veterans who apparantly encountered no black soldiers when they helped liberate Buchenwald (and whose "outrage" at our film Ruddy applauds), it is difficult to see how their recollections can be said to prove Ruddy's case. So what if they didn't see black soldiers? Ben Bender, Elie Weisel, Rabbi Lau, Samuel Pisar and hundreds-- can never forget them. To call so many eyewitnesses "confused" or else paid liars is surely the height of arrogance and bad taste.

For the record, the film does not claim that every member of the 761st entered the camps, nor does it claim that black troops were the first to reach all or even most prisoners. The narration simply states that "elements" of the battalion (which is to say individual tank companies) entered the camps alongside white infantry units (at Buchenwald this was the 103rd Infantry Regiment.)

Finally, Ruddy's contention that the 761st was "locked in combat" some 60 miles from Buchenwald on the day of liberation isn't true, since the unit had ceased to fight as a battalion after the battle of the "bulge" more than three months earlier. Instead the unit's tank crews and armored vehicles were assigned to different infantry regiments belonging to several divisions fighting on different sectors of the front. Sometimes these "elements" amounted to no more than one or two platoons or companies of tanks. In this way the "black panthers" covered a lot of ground, supported many infantry units and saw more than their share of armored combat. It's also how "elements" of their battalion came to be at Buchenwald and Dachau in April, 1945, where they, along with other American soldiers "gave the gift of life", as one survivor put it, to thousands of prisoners of Nazi terror.

Christopher Ruddy's scurrilous attack dishonors them all.

Sincerely,

Daniel Allentuck
Lou Potter

Screenwriters:
LIBERATORS: FIGHTING ON TWO
FRONTS IN WWII