Quotes from Max Hastings

Stalin's policies had driven millions more to starvation and even cannibalism.

It is incontrovertible that the First World War was a catastrophe for Europe. It remains hard to see, however, by what means its statesmen could have extracted themselves from the struggle once it began, in advance of a decision on the battlefield.

Polish women and children were used as human shields for the advance of German troops.

Pearl Harbor, together with racism soon fuelled by tidings of Japanese savagery, ensured that Americans found it easy to hate their Asian enemy. But from beginning to end, few felt anything like the animosity towards the Germans that came readily to Europeans; it proved hard even to rouse American anger about Hitler's reported persecution of the Jews.

Trying to maintain good relations814 with a communist is like wooing a crocodile, you do not know whether to tickle it under the chin or beat it on the head. When it opens its mouth you cannot tell whether it is trying to smile, or preparing to eat you up.

The record suggests that official secrecy does more to protect intelligence agencies from domestic accountability for their own follies than to shield them from enemy penetration.

Meanwhile in the East, within weeks of abandoning their harvest fields, shops and lathes, newly mobilised Russian, Austrian and German soldiers met in huge clashes; tiny Serbia inflicted a succession of defeats on the Austrians which left the Hapsburg Empire reeling, having by Christmas suffered 1.27 million casualties at Serb and Russian hands, amounting to one in three of its soldiers mobilised.

everything seemed strange, ominous and unreal, like the yellow glare which precedes a storm. There were moments when I felt as if I had died, and woken up in an unknown world. And so I had.

What the Red Army did in Germany was the darkest stain on its record in the war.

All men who participate in wars find themselves obliged to do things which, if they are decent people, they afterwards regret.

Many more Nazi battlefield triumphs lay ahead, but some generals privy to their Führer's intentions already understood the Third Reich's fundamental difficulty: anything less than hemispheric domination threatened disaster; yet Germany's military and economic capability to achieve this remained questionable.

Optimism is the elixir of life for the weak.

In the course of the war, some 70,000 French people were killed by Allied bombs: "collateral damage" in France thus included almost one-third more civilians accidentally killed than the British suffered from the Luftwaffe's deliberate assault on their island. Bombing played a critical role in slowing the German buildup after D-Day, but the price was high.

The U.S. ambassador in London, Joseph Kennedy, shrugged and said to his Polish counterpart: "Where on earth can the Allies fight the Germans and beat them?" Though Kennedy was a shameless anglophobe, appeaser and defeatist, his question was valid, and the Allied governments had no good answer to it.

If Franco had joined the war, the inevitable fall of Gibraltar would have doomed Malta. It would have been much harder—perhaps impossible—for the British to hold the Middle East.

Soldiers may accept a need to be the first to die in a war, but there is often an unseemly scramble to avoid becoming the last.

Between 20 and 23 August, 40,000 French soldiers died. By 29 August, total French casualties since the war began reached 260,000, including 75,000 dead.

Relative American openness, contrasted with the communist commitment to secrecy, in my view constitutes a claim upon a fragment of moral high ground. The egregious error committed by US statesmen and commanders was not that of lying to the world, but rather that of lying to themselves.

There was a contemptuous joke in Nazi Party circles of Hitler's lackey Wilhelm Keitel reporting, "My Führer, Italy has entered the war!" Hitler answers, "Send two divisions. That should be enough to finish them." Keitel says, "No, my Führer, not against us, but with us." Hitler says, "That's different. Send ten divisions.

repeated Anglo-American failures to destroy Hitler's armies, despite successes in displacing them from occupied territory, meant that the Red Army remained until 1945, as it had been since 1941, the main engine of Nazism's destruction.

The American and British armies in the Second World War paid a high price for the privilege of the profoundly anti-militaristic ethos of their nations.

Diplomacy without politics is ultimately impotent.

Soviet conduct could be deemed less barbaric than that of the Nazis only because it embraced no single enormity to match the Holocaust.

Yet they persevered because a lethal cocktail of pride, fatalism, stupidity, and moral weakness prevented them from acknowledging their blunder.