Quotes from Rick Atkinson

If I've vividly laid out the narrative, the reader will come to his own conclusions.

Hitler had a police state of the first order. And those who showed any sign of being weak-kneed faced prison or often summary execution. That prevented a lot of people who knew that the war was not going to turn out well for Germany from giving up.

I think the Bush Administration had basically inherited a policy toward Iraq from the Reagan/Bush Administration that saw Iraq as a kind of fire wall against Iranian fundamentalism. And as it developed over the 1980s, it became a real political run-a-muck... even though the Iraqis were known to be harboring Palestinian terrorists.

I was with the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq, really in the middle of nowhere, about 80 miles south of Baghdad. And it was almost midnight, and I got a computer message from the home office of the Washington Post asking me to call them. I did call them and was told that I'd won the Pulitzer Prize.

It's my belief that by demonizing Saddam, by raising the stakes in this war to the point where we're talking about a great moral crusade, that Bush in fact planted the seeds of discontent in the country, because this was fundamentally a limited war with limited objectives and with limited gains.

American audiences tend to underappreciate the British, but 240 years ago they were us: They were the most powerful nation on Earth. Their mercantile empire spanned the planet. They had the most potent and experienced army and navy the world had ever seen.

Once again, airborne forces appeared to be coins burning a hole in the pockets of Allied commanders, coins that simply had to be spent. Soldiers soon mocked the operation as VARSITY BLUNDER, and burial squads with pruning saws and ladders took two days to cut down all the dead.

Power," as John Adams had written, "always thinks it has a great soul.

the hardest of war's hard truths—that for a new nation to live, young men must die, often alone, usually in pain, and sometimes to no obvious purpose. He, more than anyone, would be responsible for ordering those men to their deaths.

Never before in the history of warfare have so few been commanded by so many.

MARKET GARDEN proved "an epic cock-up," as a British major averred, a poor plan with deficient intelligence, haphazard execution, and indifferent generalship

After killing hundreds of American and British soldiers during TORCH, the French had failed to so much as scratch a single German invader.

If you don't succeed, I don't want to see you alive," he advised. "I see no point in surviving defeat, and I am sure that if all of you enter into battle with equal resolution, we shall conquer, and live long, and gain more glory.

Brooke's deputy, General Sir John Kennedy, observed of Churchill: "He is difficult enough when things are going badly, more difficult when nothing is happening, and quite unmanageable when all is going well.

and it was said that the soldiers "all had the same expression because they had no expression at all.

Had the generals seen the battlefield clearly, reclaiming Schmidt would have been the least of their concerns.

Men were forced to discard their overcoats because they lacked the strength to wear them," a staff officer noted. "Their hands are so numb that they have to help one another on with their equipment." Riflemen

In the end the war was of a piece with all wars: unpredictable, cruel, and violent, damning the innocent and guilty alike.

A soldier in the 5th Division wrote home, "They say cleanliness is next to Godliness. I say it's next to impossible.… If I am killed and go to hell it can't be any worse than infantry combat.

War happens inside a man," Eric Sevareid concluded. "It happens to one man alone. It can never be communicated.… A million martyred lives leave an empty place at only one family table.

One of the first lessons that battle impresses upon one," he later observed, "is that no matter how large the force engaged, every battle is made up of small actions by individuals and small units.

In one typical battalion, of forty-one officers who had landed on Sicily in July, only nine remained, and six of them had been wounded, according

Thomas Paine, who had a shrewd eye for military matters, was closer to the mark in a public letter to Admiral Howe published in early 1777. "In all the wars which you have formerly been concerned in, you had only armies to contend with," Paine observed. "In this case, you have both an army and a country to combat.

As required by the unwritten rules of military calamity, the initial attack went well.