Quotes from Rick Atkinson

the combat career of a new German pilot now lasted, on average, less than a month.

My country," Prince Bernhard observed, "can never again afford the luxury of another Montgomery success.

The Americans, the Scottish economist Adam Smith warned, "feel in themselves at this moment a degree of importance which, perhaps, the greatest subjects in Europe scarce feel.… [They] are employed in contriving a new form of government for an extensive empire, which, they flatter themselves will become, and which indeed seems very likely to become, one of the greatest and most formidable that ever was in the world.

A communiqué approved by the three leaders on Sunday morning affirmed their "sacred obligation" to maintain in peace the same Allied unity that had prevailed in war. A "declaration on liberated Europe" within the statement also endorsed "a world order under law" and "the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live.

To his brother Edgar he confided, "I suffer from the usual difficulty that besets the higher commander—things can be ordered and started, but actual execution at the front has to be turned over to someone else.

His animating principle, as the official history explained, was "that in order to destroy anything it is necessary to destroy everything." By the late fall of 1944, Harris claimed that forty-five of sixty listed German cities had been "virtually destroyed," at a rate of more than two each month, with a dwindling number awaiting evisceration.

I suffer from the usual difficulty that besets the higher commander—things can be ordered and started, but actual execution at the front has to be turned over to someone else.

Allied air forces flying from England lost twenty bombers a day in March; another three thousand Eighth Air Force bombers were damaged that month. Morale problems could be seen in the decision of nearly ninety U.S. crews in March and April to fly to neutral countries, usually Sweden or Switzerland, to be interned for the duration. The

Yalta can be seen as neither the portal to Roosevelt's "world of justice and equity" nor a disgraceful capitulation to red fascism but, rather, an intricate nexus of compromises by East and West. Roosevelt "largely followed through on earlier plans, and gained most of what he wished," the historian Robert Dallek concluded

Walpole sniffed, "to prostitute his character and authenticate his hypocrisy.

They were a borderland people, living on the far rim of empire, where in six or seven generations the American clay had grown sturdy and tall. They were patriots—if that term implied political affiliation rather than a moral state of grace—who were disputatious and litigious, given to violence on the frontier and in the street: a gentle people they were not. Their disgruntlement now approached despair, with seething resentments and a conviction that designing, corrupt men in

He looked as though he had just had a steam bath, a massage, a good breakfast and a letter from home," wrote one journalist.

As a battalion commander in France, it was said, he had once pulled a pistol on a hesitant junior officer and shot him in the buttocks. "There," Allen said. "You're out. You're wounded." Such gestures would be unnecessary here.

A single Sherman tank took three hundred man-hours to waterproof, occupying the five-man crew for a week.

carton of cigarettes would buy you a whole province here," an American officer reported, "and a suit of clothes would get you the whole island.

Some fired, others balked. Decanted onto a strange, dark shore, many men feared shooting their own. The hillsides hissed with the night's challenge and countersign: "Hi yo, Silver!" and "Awaaay!

Proverbially, no military plan survives contact with the enemy. That is never truer than when there is no plan to begin with.

On the day Rome fell, that great American Army numbered eight million soldiers, a fivefold increase since Pearl Harbor. It included twelve hundred generals and nearly 500,000 lieutenants. Half the Army had yet to deploy overseas, but the U.S. military already had demonstrated that it could wage global war in several far-flung theaters simultaneously, a notion that had "seemed outlandish in 1942," as the historian Eric Larrabee later wrote.

The 608-day campaign to liberate Italy would cost 312,000 Allied casualties, equivalent to 40 percent of Allied losses in the decisive campaign for northwest Europe that began at Normandy. Among the three-quarters of a million American troops to serve in Italy, total battle casualties would reach 120,000, including 23,501 killed.

Franklin concurred with Samuel Johnson that ship travel was like being in jail without the comforts of jail.

The U.S. War Department had even pondered tunneling beneath the seabed: a detailed study deemed the project "feasible," requiring one year and 15,000 men to excavate 55,000 tons of spoil. Wiser heads questioned "the strategic and functional" complexities, such as the inconvenience of the entire German Seventh Army waiting for the first tunneler to emerge. The study was shelved.

In a phone call one evening the corps commander grew incensed when Ward mentioned his good fortune in losing no officers in combat that day. "Goddammit, Ward, that's not fortunate. That's bad for the morale of the enlisted men," Patton snapped. "I want you to get more officers killed.

It was the indispensable institution, led by the indispensable man, and the coupling of a national army with its commander marked the transformation of a rebellion into a revolution. "Confusion and discord reigned in every department," Washington wrote in late July. "However we mend every day, and I flatter myself that in a little time we shall work up these raw materials into good stuff.

They believed that overpowering the feeble French meant something. They believed in the righteousness of their cause, the inevitability of their victory, and the immortality of their young souls. And as they wheeled around to the east and pulled out their Michelin maps of Tunisia, they believed they had actually been to war.