Quotes from Joseph E. Persico

the millions of shells, rather than destroying German defenses, had churned the ground between the attackers and the defenders into a boot-sucking bog.

On December 18, he asked each side to set forth its terms for ending the war. The Allies demanded conditions certain to be unacceptable: withdrawal from all occupied territory and virtual dismemberment of the German and Austrian empires. The Germans wanted the iron ore fields in Lorraine, economic control over Belgium, and the Belgian Congo and Poland as German protectorates. Both sides told Wilson, in effect, no thank you, since each expected to win the war.

The problem had been evident from the moment the first Tommy tried to pull himself out of the trench by gripping a rotted sandbag and had fallen back to the bottom. The rain collapsed the sides of trenches, and men had to be heaved over the parapet bodily. Tanks sank, their treads unable to gain traction. As the men finally advanced, they were sucked into mud-filled craters, where many drowned.

MacArthur strode before his men, armed only with a riding crop, a cigarette holder clamped jauntily between his teeth, without the slightest suggestion in bearing or movement that he was under fire.

Thus the total Armistice Day casualties were nearly 10 percent higher than those on D-Day.

No one's exploits in the division had glowed more incandescently than those of Douglas MacArthur. He was that rarity, a courageous exhibitionist, a fearless showoff, a man who had done it all and wanted the world to know.

Pétain's mission was to quell the rebellion and continue prosecution of the war.

A great many of the Army officers were very fine in the way that they took care of their men. But there were certain very glaring instances of the opposite condition, and especially among these theorists, these men who were looking upon this whole thing as, perhaps, one looks upon a game of chess, or a game of football, and who were removed from actual contact with the troops.

The initial conclusion of the subcommittee was that "needless slaughter" took place on November 11, 1918. However, this finding was beaten back by vocal House members as a slur upon the nation's wartime leadership. The report that was finally approved found no one culpable for the Armistice Day bloodshed. Throughout

Our government seemed to expect the same of them as of white men. Poor Negroes! They are hopelessly inferior. . . . If you need combat soldiers, and especially if you need them in a hurry, don't put your time upon Negroes.

Had Marshal Foch accepted Matthias Erzberger's plea to stop the fighting on November 8 while negotiations were under way, likely, 6,750 lives would have been spared and nearly 15,000 maimed, crippled, burned, blinded, and otherwise injured men would instead have gone home whole. All this sacrifice was made over scraps of land that the Germans, under the armistice, were compelled to surrender within two weeks.

Passchendaele ended in breathtaking losses. More than 310,000 British, 85,000 Frenchmen, and 260,000 Germans, a total of 655,000, had fallen in a battle fought over a field five miles wide.

Country boys turned out to be the fittest, producing 4.8 percent more able-bodied draftees per 100,000 than city boys. Whites were 1.2 percent more physically qualified than blacks and native-born Americans 3.5 percent more than those foreign-born.

The ground over which the bulk of the battles raged was only about eighty-five miles wide, a relatively modest battleground but a rather large cemetery, considering the 3,258,610 killed there and the 7,745,920 wounded, for total losses of 11,004,530 men.

Revel in the fulsome flattery, dear fool! It does not stop war from being a filthy trick.

The New York Herald reported that a German soldier had been seen carrying a bagful of ears. Another newspaper accused Germany of melting down the enemy dead to manufacture soap.

The key was to exploit contradictory British and French objectives. The BEF's priority was to hold on to the French ports through which its manpower and resupply flowed. The French saw Paris as the keystone holding up their nation. In effect, the two Allies' priorities pointed in opposite directions, one toward the sea, the other toward the French heartland.

No comparable mortality had been experienced since the bubonic plague nearly five hundred years before, and modern medical science stood impotent before the pestilence.

In France, the war created 600,000 widows and left nearly one million children fatherless. In England three men were killed in World War I for every man killed in World War II.

artillery pieces were lined up, only more of them, 4,000 in all, a gun every six yards stretching for fifteen miles. The enemy would be pounded with shells, only more of them, 4.5 million this time.

Before them stood a small, erect man who fixed them with a withering gaze, Marshal Ferdinand Foch. After cool introductions, Foch opened the proceedings with a question that left the Germans agape. "Ask these gentlemen what they want," he said to his interpreter. When the Germans had recovered, Erzberger answered that they understood they had been sent to discuss armistice terms. Foch stunned them again: "Tell these gentlemen that I have no proposals to make.

tens of thousands of women to spinsterhood. In the American Expeditionary Forces, the 26,000 men killed in the Meuse-Argonne represented the greatest loss in a single battle to that point in the nation's history.

The railroad car stood in the midst of French villages that the war had effaced from the earth. The Germans were confronting an Allied leader who had learned of the death in battle of his only son and his daughter's husband in a single day. Foch remained cold to all entreaties, reflecting not only his own fixedness but orders from his equally unforgiving superior, Prime Minister Clemenceau.

Knowing that masks donned in time could protect against gas, they began loading shells with sneezing powder, which seeped through the masks' filters.