Quotes from Max Hastings

On December 24, a young French royalist burst into Darlan's office at the Summer Palace and shot him dead. Responsibility for the assassination remains one of the last significant mysteries of the Second World War. The immediate perpetrator, one Fernand Bonnier de la Chapelle, was hurried before a firing squad two days later.

Here was another manifestation of Churchill's "three-inch pipe" theory about human emotions. Amid a surfeit of drama and peril, many people took refuge in the sufficient cares of their own daily lives, and allowed a torrent of world news, good and ill, to flow past them to the sea.

Stalin would ultimately prove the most successful warlord of the conflict, yet no more than Hitler

Churchill or Roosevelt was he qualified to direct vast military operations. Ignorant of the concept of defence in depth, he rejected strategic retreat.

Nations are fortunate to have such leaders in time of conflict, but there are also advantages in leaders who avoid conflict in the first place.

It was impossible for most German civilians credibly to deny knowledge of the concentration camps or the slave-labour system:

Arguments for war based on the principle of 'setting the world an example' are always dangerous. They can be used to justify quite disproportionate responses, as occurred in South-east Asia in the 1960s and 1970s. They tend to be selective: why for instance did Britain not use force in 1965 to uphold the concept of majority self-determination in Rhodesia?

At 50 Squadron, there was another verse for the intelligence officer's long epic verse, set to the tune of Noel Coward's "Mad Dogs and Englishmen": When the sirens moan to awake Cologne They shiver in their shoes; In the Berlin street they're white as sheets With a tinge of Prussian blues;

The cost in men and ships Ã¢â'¬Â¦ ran up a score which Irish eyes a-smiling on the day of Allied victory were not going to cancel

Intelligent men found that among the hardest parts of war was the need to accept orders from stupid ones.

Possession of armed might can be corrupting: it feeds an itch among those exercising political authority to put it to practical use. Successive Washington administrations have been seduced by the readiness with which they can order a deployment, and see this promptly executed. It is much easier to commit armed forces, especially air power, in pursuit of an objective than to grapple the complexities of social and cultural engagement with an alien people.

From start to finish, he grasped the fact that the Anglo-Americans needed Russia's vast human sacrifice more than Russia needed Western supplies.

Shikata ga nai: it could not be helped. If this was a monumentally inadequate excuse for condemning millions to death without hope of securing any redemptive compensation, it is a constant of history that nations which start wars find it very hard to stop them.

As George Orwell wisely observed a generation later, the only way swiftly to end a war is to lose it.

In Soviet thinking the concept of economy of force has little place. Whereas to an Englishman the taking of a sledgehammer to crack a nut is a wrong decision and a sign of mental immaturity...in Russian eyes the cracking of nuts is clearly what sledgehammers are for.

The quirky little melodrama that unfolded in Bosnia on 28 June 1914 played the same role in the history of the world as might a wasp sting on a chronically ailing man who is maddened into abandoning a sickbed to devote his waning days to destroying the nest

Germany's highest commander succumbed to a disease common among senior soldiers of many nationalities and eras: he wished to demonstrate to his government and people that their vastly expensive armed forces could fulfil their fantasies.

Machiavelli observed that 'wars begin when you will, but do not end when you please'.

We are readying ourselves to enter a long tunnel full of blood and darkness (Andre Gide, 28 July 1914)

Sir Edward Grey belongs to the class which, through heredity and tradition, expects to find a place on the magisterial bench to sit in judgement upon and above their fellow men, before they ever have any opportunity to make themselves acquainted with the tasks and trials of mankind.

it is a constant of history that nations which start wars find it very hard to stop them.

Haw! Haw! Inconceivable stupidity is just what you're going to get! (Brigadier-General Henry Wilson, on being challenged in 1910 about the likelihood of a European war)

The merits of rival causes are never absolute. Even in the Second World War, the Western allied struggle against fascism was compromised by its reliance upon the tyranny of Stalin to pay most of the blood price for destroying the tyranny of Hitler. Only simpletons of the political Right and Left dare to suggest that in Vietnam either side possessed a monopoly of virtue.

It is not only more bloody and more murderous than any previous wars but also more cruel, more relentless, more pitiless … It discards all the parameters to which we defer in times of peace and which we called the rights of man. It does not recognise the privileges of the wounded man or of the doctor and it does not distinguish between non-combatants and the fighting part of the population.