Quotes from Joseph E. Persico

The imperative of war is to kill, and thus all wars are exercises in sanctioned murder.

The last day of the war provided chilling closure. The ending, in its ferocity, bloodiness, and uselessness, contained the entire war in microcosm. The fighting went on for the hollowest of reasons: no one knew how to stop it.

the human nature whose strong quality it brings out and reveals. To attribute any nobility to war itself is as much a confusion of thought as to attribute nobility to cancer or leprosy, because of the skill, devotion and self-sacrifice of those who give up their lives to its cure.

Compounding the horror, German officials committed an act of staggering insensitivity: they struck a commemorative medal with a depiction of the sinking ship on one side and on the other a smiling skeleton under the inscription "Business above all.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Henry Cabot Lodge. Wilson rejected even reasonable compromises, and Lodge refused to budge. Hence, the United States failed to enter the League. Wilson suffered an incapacitating stroke in 1919

Black Jack did not object to sending his men into the French and British lines under American command, but he did not want them dispersed.

One last unexploded mine remains, its exact location unknown and its hidden potency serving as something of a symbol of the Great War's underlying power to influence events down to the present day.

The artillery officer had mastered the technique of firing accurately in the dark by registering the guns beforehand, that is, determining the variance in each gun for barometric pressure, wind speed, and direction. The artillery could thus fire unceasingly both day and night prior to an attack.

The American casualties continued to be staggering, in no small part because among the AEF's junior officers enthusiasm generally outran their experience.

the western front on armistice morning, the commanders of seven judged the war essentially over upon receiving word of the signing and stopped; but the commanders of nine divisions decided that the war must go on until the last minute, with predictable results to the lives entrusted to them.

Mustard gas was stubborn, clinging to the ground as long as three days. Heavier than air, it settled into craters and trenches where men had taken refuge. It ruined food supplies.

the Germans had built redoubts both sturdy and comfortable, homes away from home. Behind the lines, German soldiers cultivated gardens of fresh vegetables and kept dairy cows. Some had started second families, fathering children with Frenchwomen.

France is fighting for 'La Patrie'; England is fighting for commerce; Italy is fighting to get a slice of Austria, and America is fighting for souvenirs.

Hitler would later claim that his evacuation from the front had ended the happiest chapter of his life. In the trenches he had escaped from an aimless existence.

The Germans had more men killed and wounded at Verdun, 325,000, than all the 230,000 men deployed in the field at Stalingrad twenty-six years later.

maintain overseas cemeteries, Pershing became the first chairman of the American Battle Monuments Commission, serving from 1923 until his death in 1948.

constant companions throughout the project: Stanley Weintraub's A Stillness Heard Round the World, A. J. P. Taylor's The First World War, John Keegan's The First World War, and Malcolm Brown's The Western Front.

Wilhelm was bombastic, overbearing, and contemptuous of what he perceived as softness in others. He described Czar Nicholas as "fit only to live in a country house and grow turnips.

Waving his arm over the carnage, the German remarked that the American attack that morning had been a "foolish affair." He himself had known for weeks that the war was coming to an end and had taken no unnecessary risks with the lives of his men.

General Pershing now had what he wanted: proof that the AEF was the equal of its allies and the enemy. British generals, however, were less than awed by the American success at Saint-Mihiel. Since the Germans had intended to abandon the salient anyway, the Yanks, as one Briton put it, had not so much defeated the Germans as relieved them.

On weekends his idea of rest was to read military history aloud to his daughters.

It became impossible for me to sit still one minute more," Hitler recalled. "Again everything went black before my eyes; I tottered and groped my way back to the dormitory, threw myself on my bunk, and dug my burning head into my blankets and pillow." The shock of defeat had blinded him again. A Berlin psychiatrist who treated Hitler, Dr. Edmund Forster, concluded that his blindness had returned because the patient was "a psychopath with hysterical symptoms.

The last deaths of the Great War on the western front occurred at midnight on the twelfth in Hamont, a Belgian town near the Dutch border. Retreating German troops, believing they were the last to leave the city, mined the Hamont railroad station. But one final train filled with German soldiers arrived from Antwerp. The mine went off with a roar that flung railway cars into the air like matchboxes. Hundreds of German soldiers thus died thirteen hours after the armistice went into effect.

Turkey, fearing attack by Russia, took Germany's side and declared war against the czar by bombarding the port of Odessa.