Quotes from Rick Atkinson

High-prowed fishing smacks bobbed at their moorings along the riverbank, nets draped over the gunwales to dry. Stork nests, intricately thatched and big as a queen's bed, crowned utility poles along the road.

blared "The Stars and Stripes Forever," clearly audible on the hillcrest, where a lieutenant who was immune to the prevailing confidence of his seniors murmured, "'Into the valley of death rode the six hundred.

I must pursue the shadows to some middle ground," wrote the pilot John Muirhead, "for I am strangely bound to all that happened to them.

In a note to a West Point classmate, Eisenhower wrote, "There is no use denying that at times discouragement has piled on top of discouragement.

A popular aphorism soon circulated among frontline troops: "Never were so few commanded by so many from so far." Asked why the Germans failed to bomb AFHQ headquarters, a cynical American major replied, "Because it's worth fifty divisions to them.

Old Ironsides, the only American tank division to see desert combat in World War II, was the only one to get no desert training. Hamilton H. Howze, the 1st Armored operations officer and a future four-star general, later asserted, "None of the division was worth a damn.

Men at War: Best War Stories of All Time.

firmly believe if heaven had not something very great in store for America, we should ere this have been a ruined people

Troops picked at their C rations, filled their canteens, and smoked last cigarettes. At dusk, each soldier tied a white cloth to the back of his helmet so the man behind could follow him in the dark. Engineers marked paths through enemy minefields with white tape or rocks wrapped in toilet paper.

There is nothing I dread so much," he said, "as these brave generals." Keenly aware of America's size and the temper of her people, he had advocated a strategy of naval blockade rather than a land war, again to no avail.

One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.

Amantium irae amoris integratio est.'" Lovers' quarrels are a part of love.

To make it perfectly clear to you: suppose you lose a hand or an ear is shot off, or perhaps a piece of your nose, and you think you should go back to get first aid. If I see you, it will be the last goddamn walk you'll ever take.

Described by his biographer as an "overweight, rheumatic, vain, pompous, gluttonous inebriate," he had run through several fortunes totaling almost £100,000 with his spendthrift ways and aristocratic pretensions, including expenditures for a heavily mortgaged, thousand-acre New Jersey estate with piazzas, a deer park, painted drawing rooms, a wardrobe holding thirty-one coats and fifty-eight vests, and carriages embossed with the coat of arms he claimed as his patrimony.

After passing four hundred Italian slave laborers swaddled in rags, Eric Sevareid took inventory of his own sentiments: "a kind of dull satisfaction, a weary incapacity for further stimulation, a desire to go home and not have to think about it anymore—and a vague wondering whether I could ever cease thinking about it as long as I lived.

Merde pour la guerre"—Shit on the war.

Known as Tiny to his troops, he had a skull the size of a medicine ball, with a pushbroom mustache and legs that extended like sycamore trunks from his khaki shorts.

Tank crews showed little sense of urgency—"Everybody appeared to treat the disabled tanks with the same kind of warm-hearted affection an old-time cavalryman might lavish on his horse," the Army's official history acknowledged. Not until 2:30 A.M. on Sunday, November 5, just before moonrise, were the stalled Shermans finally shoved over the brink into the gorge.

The journalist Edward R. Murrow, rarely at a loss for imagery, found that Buchenwald beggared the imagination. "The stink was beyond all description," he told his radio audience. "For most of it I have no words.… If I've offended you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald, I'm not in the least sorry.

September 1, 1939, was the first day of a war that would last for 2,174 days, and it brought the first dead in a war that would claim an average of 27,600 lives every day, or 1,150 an hour, or 19 a minute, or one death every 3 seconds. Within four weeks of the blitzkrieg attack on Poland by sixty German divisions, the lightning war had killed more than 100,000 Polish soldiers, and 25,000 civilians had perished in bombing attacks.

Tooey" Spaatz was an aviation pioneer who had shot down three German planes in World War I and helped set a world record for staying aloft in 1929 through innovative midair refueling

what became known as the "Falaise smell." Corruption even seeped into Spitfire cockpits at fifteen hundred feet. "Everything is dead," wrote Ernie Pyle, who had arrived on August 21. "The men, the machines, the animals—and you alone are left alive.

FIVE hundred and sixty road miles separated Algiers from Tunis, and the first Allied troops cantered eastward in the rollicking high spirits obligatory at the beginning of all military debacles. V

fractious, four-legged children of Satan