Quotes from Rick Atkinson

We do not pray for victory, nor even for our individual safety. But we pray for help that none of us may let a comrade down - that each of us may do his duty to himself, his comrades and his country, and so be worthy of our American heritage.

I want to fight the champ," he said. "If you lose, you've lost to the champ and it's no disgrace. If you win, you're the new champ.

On October 14, Patton sent identical letters to all his senior commanders: "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.

Their attempt upon Three Rivers was founded in rashness and executed with timidity, two principles which compounded make a consummation of preposterous conduct," Burgoyne wrote Clinton with his usual magniloquence.

In Field Order No. 1, Patton had advised his commanders, "Attack both by day and night to the limit of human endurance and then continue to attack." For

generals rose early to do nothing all day, while diplomats rose late for the same purpose;

Also shipped to the Norman coast were ten miles of floating piers and pierheads, with telescoping legs to rise and subside with the tide. In all, two million tons of construction materials went into the Mulberries, including seventeen times more concrete than had been poured for Yankee Stadium in the 1920s.

Now we know too much. Now we know that the world we knew is a long time dead. We know there'll be troubles of every sort.

five seconds. At 9:30 a headquarters clerk scribbled in the

It was said that Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, spoke only four words of English: "Yes," "No," and "Second front.") Moscow

May the earth lie lightly on his bones.

Occasionally the ideals seemed more honored in the breach than in the observance, but in times of moral quandary a conscientious officer could anchor himself with a few simple questions: Is it good for the troops? Is it good for the country? Is it honorable?

At 11:10 A.M. an annoying growl from those same heavens grew louder. Ernest Hemingway heard it in his Dorchester Hotel suite, where he was making pancakes with buckwheat flour and bourbon; from the window he looked for the telltale "white-hot bunghole" of a jet engine. Pedestrians in Parliament Square heard it and fell flat, covering their heads.

Then they heard nothing—that most terrifying of all sounds—as the engine quit, the bunghole winked out, and the black cruciform fell. Through the chapel's reinforced concrete roof It plummeted before detonating in a white blast that blew out walls, blew down support pillars, and stripped the leaves from St. James's plane trees.

Yet the war and all that the war contained—nobility, villainy, immeasurable sorrow—is certain to live on even after the last old soldier has gone to his grave. May the earth lie lightly on his bones.

an infantry captain addressed his men: "We do not pray for victory, nor even for our individual safety. But we pray for help that none of us may let a comrade down—that each of us may do his duty to himself, his comrades, and his country, and so be worthy of our American heritage." Eisenhower's eyes welled with tears.

Secondary Attack Against Fortress Europe,'" n.d., NARA RG 319, OCMH, 2-3.7

The Arab soldier is interested in just three things: women, horses, and guns," a French officer told an American colonel, who replied, "The American soldier is the same, except that he doesn't care anything about horses and guns.

Allen left the academy, graduated from Catholic University, and took a commission in 1912. Wounded at Saint-Mihiel in 1918 and carried from the field on a stretcher, he regained consciousness, ripped off the first-aid tag, and dashed back to rally his men. The next bullet drilled him through the jaw, right to left, but not before he had broken his fist on a German machine-gunner's head.

Of 10,492 V-1s ultimately fired at Britain, about 4,000 were destroyed by fighters, balloons, and antiaircraft guns, while others veered off course or crashed prematurely. But about 2,400 hit greater London, killing 6,000 and badly injuring 18,000. (Not one struck Tower Bridge.) It was, an official British history concluded, "an ordeal perhaps as trying to Londoners as any they had endured throughout the war.

After realizing that Frenchman and Arab alike were mesmerized by the power of official stamps, the engineers fabricated their own rubber imprimatur and "just stamped the hell out of everything.

each general in First Army received a monthly consignment of a case of gin and half-cases of scotch and bourbon; lesser officers combined their allotments in a nightly ritual to make twelve quarts of martinis for the Hôtel Britannique mess

Few commanders in this war could function without arriving at a sensibility in which thousands of dead and wounded men could be waved away as "insignificant.

Mount up and continue," Patton told his armor crews. "Don't stop except for gas." Omar