Quotes from Max Hastings

But the collective contribution of U.S. and British cryptanalysts to the war effort was greater than that of any other such small body of men in history. Their operations provided the supreme example of the Western Allies' imaginative integration into the war effort of their cleverest civilian intellects.

Bliss in that age was it to be alive.' (He says) 'Why do people regard a period like this as years lost out of our lives when beyond question it is the most interesting period of them? Why do we regard history as of the past and forget we are making it?

William Slim, a shrewd, rugged Gurkha officer who would eventually show himself to be Britain's ablest general of the

Though these had been used earlier in the Spanish Civil War, it was in Finland that the soubriquet "Molotov breadbasket," then "Molotov cocktail," first entered the military lexicon.

The Soviet Union suffered 65 percent of all Allied military deaths, China 23 percent, Yugoslavia 3 percent, the United States and Britain 2 percent each, France and Poland 1 percent each.

of Yugoslavs, 4 percent of Greeks, 1.35 percent of French, 3.78 percent of Japanese, 0.94 percent of British and 0.32 percent of Americans. Within the armed forces, 30.9 percent of Germans conscripted into the Wehrmacht died, 17.35 percent of the Luftwaffe (including paratroopers and ground personnel), 34.9 percent of the Waffen SS.

One Russian soldier in four died, against one in twenty British Commonwealth combatants and one in thirty-four American servicemen.

If you live on the brink of death yourself, it is as if those who have gone have merely caught an earlier train to the same destination, and whatever that destination is, you will be sharing it soon, since you will almost certainly be catching the next one.

which transcended anything they had ever known.

Too many of Britain's bravest soldiers spent the war conducting irregular and self-indulgent activities of questionable strategic value.

Adolf Hitler had led one of the most educated and cultured societies on earth to a moral, political and military abyss. He now sought to ensure that as many as possible of his own people accompanied him over the brink.

plunged abruptly into a world of coarse, ill-bred men and women, where language was foul and bluer than the bluest sky, was an experience Ã¢â'¬Â¦ harsh and unreal.

Contrary to widely accepted myth, the German war economy was a shambles. It is frightening to contemplate the consequences had it been otherwise.

The immediate moment is all that exists for them; everything must serve it, no matter whether what they ruin in the process is something they will be in dire need of the next minute.

It seems flippant to suggest that Hitler determined to invade Russia because he could not think what else to do, but there is something in this

To put the matter bluntly, U.S. soldiers on Bataan and Corregidor showed themselves more stalwart than British imperial forces in Malaya and at Singapore, albeit likewise in a doomed cause. Brigadier

Nella Last groped movingly towards an expression of her compatriots' hopes when she wrote that summer of 1940: "Sometimes I get caught up in a kind of puzzled wonder at things and think of all the work and effort and unlimited money that is used today to 'destroy' and not so long ago there was no money or work and it seems so wrong somehow Ã¢â'¬Â¦ [that] money and effort could always be found to pull down and destroy rather than build up.

He adopted it. The child became one of just 949 known survivors of the greatest maritime disaster in history, its 7,000 dead far outstripping those of the Titanic, Lusitania, Laconia. Yet, amid global tragedy on the scale of 1945, the horrors of the Wilhelm Gustloff remain known only to some Germans and a few historians.

Both Britain's most distinguished earlier war leaders, Pitt the Elder and Younger, were responsible for graver strategic follies than himself.

In the Second World War, twenty-two generals were executed by Hitler. Another 963 died or were posted missing on active service. An astonishing 110 killed themselves.

Near a large inn, the 'Roter Krug,' stood a barn and to each of its two doors a naked woman was nailed through the hands, in a crucified posture.

During a July 1942 visit to Portugal and Spain, Schellenberg conducted negotiations with a Brazilian exile, Plínio Salgado, who promised great things for the German cause, but delivered nothing. The

In reality, there were as many disgruntled reservists and brassed-off regulars on Gloucester Hill as in any other unit of 29 Brigade. It was this that made their fate and their performance the more moving: they were a typical, perhaps a little above average county battalion, who showed for the thousandth time in the history of the British Army what ordinary men, decently led, can achieve in a situation which demands, above all, a willingness for sacrifice.

Winston Churchill, the towering personality of the forces of light.