Quotes About Warfare

Fifty of the Infantry tanks were at home in a battalion of the Royal Tank Regiment, and the remainder were in training-schools. Never has a great nation been so naked before her foes.

What combination of events could ever bring back again to France and Flanders the formidable Canadians of the Vimy Ridge; the glorious Australians of Villers-Bretonneux; the dauntless New Zealanders of the crater-fields of Passchendaele; the steadfast Indian Corps which in the cruel winter of

It was their own offensive, not ours, that consummated their ruin. They were worn down not by Joffre, Nivelle and Haig, but by Ludendorff. See

I had told Parliament on June 4: "The great French Army was very largely, for the time being, cast back and disturbed by the onrush of a few thousand armoured vehicles. May it not also be that the cause of civilisation itself will be defended by the skill and devotion of a few thousand airmen?

The Scots were unconquerable foes. It was not until 1305 that Wallace was captured, tried with full ceremonial in Westminster Hall, and hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn. But the Scottish war was one in which, as a chronicler said, "every winter undid every summer's work". Wallace was to pass the torch to Robert Bruce.

When they came to shore they would sweep together all the horses of the neighbourhood and move themselves and their plunder on horseback across the land. It was with no intention of fighting as cavalry that they collected the horses, but only for swift marching. The first mention of this practice in England comes in the year 866, when "a great heathen army came to the land of the East Angles, and there was the army a-horse".

The Germans met them in overwhelming strength, and furious fighting began. All but five of the landing party were killed or captured.

It is only in the twentieth century that this hateful conception of inducing nations to surrender by terrorising the helpless civil population by massacring the women and children has gained acceptance and countenance among men.

We shall not flag or fail! We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air. We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be! We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender!

Salutations and congratulations upon the victory of Bardia! If I may debase a golden phrase, "never has so much been surrendered by so many to so few". The

The Hun is always either at your throat or at your feet.

while here and there the bright flashes of the guns or the occasional whistle of a random bullet accompanied our path, the conviction came into my mind with absolute assurance that the simple soldiers and their regimental officers, armed with their cause, would by their virtues in the end retrieve the mistakes and ignorances of Staffs and Cabinets, of Admirals, Generals and politicians—

The Australians plunged through the apertures and slew or captured the defenders of the galleries.

London had heavy attacks on the sixteenth and seventeenth; over twenty-three hundred people were killed, more than three thousand seriously injured.

The climax came on May 1, when Liverpool and the Mersey were attacked for seven successive nights. Seventy-six thousand people were made homeless and three thousand killed or injured. Sixty-nine out of a hundred and forty-four berths were put out of action, and the tonnage landed for a while was cut to a quarter.

On October 31 the immunity of the Halifax convoys from attack was at last broken, and the American destroyer Reuben James was torpedoed and sunk with severe loss of life. This was the first loss suffered by the United States Navy in the still undeclared war.

a letter of the great Duke of Marlborough, in which he said: "To remove a General in the midst of a campaign—that is the mortal stroke.

Yes, you know damned well what you should have done if you sincerely desired their surrender. You could have dropped it [the atom bomb] on one of their mountains, even in the sea, anywhere they could see what would happen if they persisted in the war, but you chose instead to drop it on peopled cities. I know you, the white mentality: Japanese, Chinese, Africans, we are all subhuman. You would drop an atom bomb on Abeokuta or any of your colonies if it suited you!

Don't give them enough time to arrange a solid defense. We've got to appear against them like an uncontrollable nightmare of spears and battle-axes and flashing swords!

You know, I need hardly remind you, it is not numbers or strength that gives victory in war; but, heaven helping them, to one or other of two combatants it is given to dash with stouter hearts to meet the foe, and such onset, in nine cases out of ten, those others refuse to meet.

ANABASIS By Xenophon Translation by H. G. Dakyns

your game is to attack on whichever flank you can best conceal your advance, or, still better, on both flanks simultaneously;

But over and beyond all that can be written on the subject—inventiveness is a personal matter, beyond all formulas—the true general must be able to take in, deceive, decoy, delude his adversary at every turn, as the particular occasion demands. In fact, there is no instrument of war more cunning than chicanery;

Until now, we would say that the Greeks fight like heroes. From now on, we will say that heroes fight like Greeks. —WINSTON CHURCHILL, 1941