Quotes from Rick Atkinson

Discipline," Washington had written in 1757, "is the soul of an army." Certainly

The dawn was bright and blowing. Angels perched unseen on the shrouds and crosstrees. Young men, fated to survive and become old men dying abed half a century hence, would forever remember this hour, when an army at dawn made for the open sea in a cause none could yet comprehend. Ashore, as the great fleet glided past, dreams of them stepped, like men alive, into the rooms where their loved ones lay sleeping.

Voltaire had observed, history is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up.

A visit to the Tunisian battlefields tells a bit more. For more than half a century, time and weather have purified the ground at El Guettar and Kasserine and Longstop. But the slit trenches remain, and rusty C-ration cans, and shell fragments scattered like seed corn. The lay of the land also remains—the vulnerable low ground, the superior high ground: incessant reminders of how, in battle, topography is fate.

Tis worth the experiment. Audaces fortuna juvat"—fortune favors the bold—though he tempted fortune by adding, "Should we fail I don't see any fatal consequences which are likely to attend it.

Edward Rutledge, a prominent South Carolina politician, wrote in December that arming freed slaves tended "more effectually to work an eternal separation between Great Britain and the colonies than any other expedient which could possibly have been thought of.

Of all the king's officers who would die in battle during the long war against the Americans, more than one out of every eight had perished in four hours on a June afternoon above Charlestown.

Captain Evelyn Waugh of the British Army wrote of the Stuka, "Like all things German, it is very efficient and goes on much too long.

Clinton's version went on for eight pages in his tidy, nearly indecipherable hand, the runic words canting to the right as if into a headwind.

An officer who lost an eye or a limb would receive a year's pay and medical expenses; the widows of officers killed in action would also get a year's pay, plus another third for each child. Those who died of their wounds within six months were "deemed slain in battle." No bonuses were announced for enlisted men.

If you didn't play the plebe system as if it were a game, he thought, it could be a debilitating ordeal.

terrestrial innovation was the Red Ball Express, a cargo haulage service begun in late August. Soon seven thousand trucks carried four thousand tons or more each day

Roads deteriorated in the autumn rains, and a dearth of spark plugs, fan belts, and tools hampered mechanics; one company with forty-one trucks possessed a single pair of pliers and one crescent wrench.

True merit is like a river, the deeper it is, the less noise it makes.

Red Ball moved over 400,000 tons in three months, and eventually was supplemented by other routes with names like White Ball, Red Lion, and Green Diamond. But as one major general in Paris lamented, "It was the greatest killer of trucks that I could imagine.

Gunners sloshed cans of water to cool their glowing barrels while others struggled from the rear with ninety-six-pound rounds on their shoulders.

The myth of violated innocence meant that the rebel stockpiling of war supplies in recent months must remain obscure, along with details about the colony's deft, robust call to arms. A narrative congealed, and with it a brilliant propaganda stratagem: Gage was the aggressor; redcoats fired first; helpless civilians had been slaughtered.

Matthew Ridgway to command the XVIII Airborne Corps, Gavin had taken over the 82nd in mid-August. At thirty-seven he would be not only the youngest major general in the U.S. Army during World War II, but also the youngest division commander since the Civil War. That achievement was all the more remarkable given his start in life. Gavin was an orphan (he later concluded that his mother had been

nothing is more difficult in war than to adhere to a single strategic plan" and to resist the "constant temptation to desert the chosen line of action in favor of another one.

Cornelius Ryan, whose A Bridge Too Far remains the classic narrative of the battle, put total Allied losses at 17,000 in nine days.

But "goin' fratin'" became epidemic, often with cigarettes or chocolate as "frau bait." "To frat" was a synonym for intercourse; non-fraternization was referred to as "non-fertilization." GIs argued that "copulation without conversation is not fraternization," and Patton advised, "Tell the men of Third Army that so long as they keep their helmets on they are not fraternizing

Even Colonel Lang, watching the Americans from the other side of Djebel Naemia, had been surprised by their timid initial approach to the Maknassy heights; a more forceful attack, he concluded, could have shortened the Tunisian campaign by weeks. In his view, the Americans appeared reluctant to risk heavy casualties in a decisive battle, preferring to crush their foes with material superiority even if that meant extending the fight. There was truth in that assessment too.

It seems to me [he wrote in early April] that in no other war in history has the issue been so distinctly drawn between the forces of arbitrary oppression on the one side and, on the other, those conceptions of individual liberty, freedom, and dignity, under which we have been raised in our great Democracy….

The 28th had regained full strength but only with many replacements untrained as infantrymen, under officers and sergeants plucked from antiaircraft units and even the Army Air Forces. Hemingway, who for several weeks would live in a fieldstone house south of Stolberg, suggested that it would "save everybody a lot of trouble if they just shot them as soon as they got out of the trucks.