Quotes About Warfare

the wrong people do the fighting

The soldier is on friendlier terms than other men with his stomach and intestines. Three-quarters of his vocabulary is derived from these regions, and they give an intimate flavour to expressions of his greatest joy as well as of his deepest indignation.

We have become wild beasts. We do not fight, we defend ourselves against annihilation. It is not against men that we fling our bombs, what do we know of men in this moment when Death is hunting us down - now for the first time in three days we can see his face, now for the first time in three days we can oppose him . . . No longer do we lie helpless . . . we can destroy and kill, to save ourselves, to save ourselves and to be revenged.

We became hard, suspicious, pitiless, vicious, tough-- and that was good; for these attributes were just what we lacked. Had we gone into the trenches without this period of training most of us would certainly have gone mad. Only thus were we prepared for what awaited us.

I tell you it is the vilest baseness to use horses in the war.

Sonra da yerimizi deÄŸiÅŸtiriyor ve ka??t oynamak üzere bir baÅŸka yere postu seriyoruz. Çünkü yapabileceÄŸimiz üç iÅŸ var: Ka??t oynamak, küfretmek ve savaÅŸmak. Yirmi yaÅŸ için pek fazla say?lmaz. Ya da pek fazla...

Aber niemand hat uns in der Schule beigebracht, wie man bei Regen und Sturm eine Zigarette anzündet, wie man ein Feuer aus nassem Holz machen kann - oder dass man ein Bajonett am besten in den Bauch stösst, weil es da nicht festklemmt wie bei den Rippen.

Even now certain of its formations were being moved off to the west, where the French and British, much to our surprise, had looked idly on as their Polish ally was being annihilated.

Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.

As before, Dodd believed Hitler was "perfectly sincere" about wanting peace. Now, however, the ambassador had realized, as had Messersmith before him, that Hitler's real purpose was to buy time to allow Germany to rearm. Hitler wanted peace only to prepare for war. "In the back of his mind," Dodd wrote, "is the old German idea of dominating Europe through warfare.

Off the southeast tip of Italy a young Austrian U-boat commander named Georg von Trapp, later to gain eternal renown when played by Christopher Plummer in the film The Sound of Music, fired two torpedoes into a large French cruiser, the Leon Gambetta. The ship sank in nine minutes, killing 684 sailors.

German forces in Belgium entered quiet towns and villages, took civilian hostages, and executed them to discourage resistance. In the town of Dinant, German soldiers shot 612 men, women, and children. The American press called such atrocities acts of "frightfulness," the word then used to describe what later generations would call terrorism. On

would have breached a fundamental maritime code, the cruiser rules, or prize law, established in the nineteenth century to govern warfare against civilian shipping. Obeyed ever since by all seagoing powers, the rules held that a warship could stop a merchant vessel and search it but had to keep its crew safe and bring the ship to a nearby port, where a "prize court" would determine its fate. The rules forbade attacks against passenger vessels.

Where in May 1915 the navy had only thirty U-boats, by 1917 it had more than one hundred, many larger and more powerful than Schwieger's U-20 and carrying more torpedoes.

Britain had more than twice as many submarines as Germany but used them mainly for coastal defense, not to stop merchant ships.)

U-boats in fact traveled underwater as little as possible, typically only in extreme weather or when attacking ships or dodging destroyers.

THE SUBMARINE as a weapon had come a long way by this time, certainly to the point where it killed its own crews only rarely.

So every night," he said, "I slept with a torpedo and a puppy.

she suppressed a revolt led by the board's executive secretary that had caused open warfare between factions of elegantly coiffed and dressed women.

A single German submarine, Unterseeboot-9—U-9, for short—commanded by Kptlt. Otto Weddigen, had sunk all three ships, killing 1,459 British sailors, many of them young men in their teens.

The only effective defense lay in offense, he said, "which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves.

to say that their mental health is not being undermined by bombing is to talk nonsense.

German U-boats were sinking ships at such a high rate that Admiralty officials secretly predicted Britain would be forced to capitulate by November 1, 1917. During the worst month, April, any ship leaving Britain had a one-in-four chance of being sunk. In

One immense German bomb, a thirteen-foot, four-thousand-pounder named Satan, could destroy an entire city block.