Quotes About Warfare

A visit to the Tunisian battlefields tells a bit more. For more than half a century, time and weather have purified the ground at El Guettar and Kasserine and Longstop. But the slit trenches remain, and rusty C-ration cans, and shell fragments scattered like seed corn. The lay of the land also remains—the vulnerable low ground, the superior high ground: incessant reminders of how, in battle, topography is fate.

Captain Evelyn Waugh of the British Army wrote of the Stuka, "Like all things German, it is very efficient and goes on much too long.

Gunners sloshed cans of water to cool their glowing barrels while others struggled from the rear with ninety-six-pound rounds on their shoulders.

Even Colonel Lang, watching the Americans from the other side of Djebel Naemia, had been surprised by their timid initial approach to the Maknassy heights; a more forceful attack, he concluded, could have shortened the Tunisian campaign by weeks. In his view, the Americans appeared reluctant to risk heavy casualties in a decisive battle, preferring to crush their foes with material superiority even if that meant extending the fight. There was truth in that assessment too.

The 28th had regained full strength but only with many replacements untrained as infantrymen, under officers and sergeants plucked from antiaircraft units and even the Army Air Forces. Hemingway, who for several weeks would live in a fieldstone house south of Stolberg, suggested that it would "save everybody a lot of trouble if they just shot them as soon as they got out of the trucks.

blared "The Stars and Stripes Forever," clearly audible on the hillcrest, where a lieutenant who was immune to the prevailing confidence of his seniors murmured, "'Into the valley of death rode the six hundred.

To make it perfectly clear to you: suppose you lose a hand or an ear is shot off, or perhaps a piece of your nose, and you think you should go back to get first aid. If I see you, it will be the last goddamn walk you'll ever take.

what became known as the "Falaise smell." Corruption even seeped into Spitfire cockpits at fifteen hundred feet. "Everything is dead," wrote Ernie Pyle, who had arrived on August 21. "The men, the machines, the animals—and you alone are left alive.

They're not shooting at us, they're not shooting at us," one infantry commander insisted, even as French artillery plastered his battalion.

Charles B. MacDonald, the author of the Army's official account, described the retreat:

Allied bombers would ultimately drop eighty million incendiary sticks, twenty-two-inch hexagonal rods with a magnesium-zinc case that burned for eight minutes at two thousand degrees Fahrenheit. The firestorm that incinerated Hamburg in the summer of 1943, killing 41,000 and "de-housing" nearly a million, "simulated the atmosphere of another planet," a German writer recorded, "one incompatible with life.

inconsequential M-3 Stuart caused one American general to muse that "the only way to hurt a Kraut with a 37mm is to catch him and give him an enema with it" the half-track mounted with a 75mm gun was already known as a "Purple Heart box." American tanks were so flammable they were dubbed Ronsons, after a popular cigarette lighter advertised with the slogan "They light every time.

German general who had fought in both world wars now described the Normandy struggle as "a monstrous blood-mill, the likes of which I have not seen in eleven years of war." Omar Bradley lamented, "I can't afford to stay here. I lose all my best boys. They're the ones who stick their heads through hedges and then have them blown off.

Rick Atkinson

The largest contingent of invaders—drawn from the U.S. 1st Infantry and 1st Armored divisions aboard thirty-four transport ships—would storm ashore at Beach Z near Arzew, a fishing town sixteen miles east of Oran. Two

Secondary Attack Against Fortress Europe,'" n.d., NARA RG 319, OCMH, 2-3.7

Of 10,492 V-1s ultimately fired at Britain, about 4,000 were destroyed by fighters, balloons, and antiaircraft guns, while others veered off course or crashed prematurely. But about 2,400 hit greater London, killing 6,000 and badly injuring 18,000. (Not one struck Tower Bridge.) It was, an official British history concluded, "an ordeal perhaps as trying to Londoners as any they had endured throughout the war.

Montgomery professed to spend one-third of his day "making sure I'm not sacked" and another third inspiriting the troops, which "leaves one-third of my time to defeat the enemy.

Senior officers in First Army would spend the rest of their lives trying to explain the tactical logic behind the Hürtgen battle plan. "All we could do was sit back and pray to God that nothing would happen," General Thorson, the operations officer, later lamented. "It was a horrible business, the forest.… We had the bear by the tail, and we just couldn't turn loose.

Mortar fragments caused 70 percent of the battle casualties among four U.S. infantry divisions in Normandy;

In battle, topography is fate.

In the first half of 1944, battle casualty rates for every 1,000 bomber crewmen serving six months in combat included 712 killed or missing and 175 wounded: 89 percent. By one calculation, barely one in four U.S. airmen completed twenty-five missions over Germany, a minimum quota that was soon raised to thirty and then thirty-five on the assumption that the liberation of France and Belgium and the attenuation of German airpower made flying less lethal.

Unlike most European wars of the eighteenth century, this one would not be fought by professional armies on flat, open terrain with reasonable roads, in daylight and good weather. And though it was fought in the age of reason, infused with Enlightenment ideals, this war, this civil war, would spiral into savagery, with sanguinary cruelty, casual killing, and atrocity.

A soldier would snake his way painfully through rocks and rubble to set up a light machine gun, raise his head cautiously to aim, and find a dozen natives clustered solemnly around him. Street