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Quotes About Warfare

telephones. At 05.37 hours the 726th Grenadier-Regiment reported, 'Off Asnelles [Gold beach]
~ Antony Beevor
Radfahrbeweglichemarschgruppe
~ Antony Beevor
The brigade fought to the end with great courage, winning the admiration of the Germans. But the continuing failure of British commanders to counter-attack in force from the west was one of the least impressive examples of generalship in the war.
~ Antony Beevor
The surgeon-general of the US Army estimated that American front-line forces suffered a 10 per cent rate of psychiatric breakdown.
~ Antony Beevor
The smell of roasted flesh permeated the air for hours afterwards with the stench of oily-black smoke from the blazing vehicles . Gräbner's body was never identified among all the other carbonized corpses.
~ Antony Beevor
Operation Typhoon.
~ Antony Beevor
A Dutchman stepped out of his house and asked two British Soldiers if they would like a cup of tea. A little further back along the route they had come, the bodies of British paratroopers lay 'everywhere, many of them behind trees or poles', Albert Horstman of the Arnhem underground recorded. He then saw 'a man about middle-aged, who wore a hat. This man went to every dead soldier, lifted his hat and stood in silence for a few seconds.
~ Antony Beevor
The panzergrenadiers were very nonchalant and 'elegant'. They asked their prisoners what they would like to drink, milk or wine.
~ Antony Beevor
Meanwhile the 7th Armoured Division had charged ahead to cut off Tobruk. Two Australian brigades hurried on from Bardia to complete the siege. Tobruk also surrendered, offering up another 25,000 prisoners, 208 guns, eighty-seven armoured vehicles and fourteen Italian army prostitutes who were sent back to a convent in Alexandria where they languished miserably for the rest of the war.
~ Antony Beevor
Waffen-SS prisoners were conspicuous by their rarity, either because of their determination to go down fighting, or from being shot on sight by their captors. One
~ Antony Beevor
You cannot reason with a rifle bullet fired from across the battlefield. You cannot negotiate with an artillery shell lobbed from over the horizon. You cannot compromise with a nuclear warhead screaming in from half a world away. The only answer to the gun, the only defense for the gun, has been more guns.
~ Arthur C. Clarke
What, my friends, is the conquest of one nation by another? It is meaningless. Each produces the same result. But those fierce fights, when in the dawn of the ages the cave-dwellers held their own against the tier folk, or the elephants first found that they had a master, those were the real conquests - the victories that count.
~ Arthur Conan Doyle
One thing I still remembered from my war days was how to move in shrubbery.
~ Sherwood Smith
But generals who warm themselves by the fire in a tent should not reproach the soldiers that are taken prisoner
~ Shusaku Endo
Pyrrhus invaded Italy at the start of the campaigning season in 280 BC. In two brutal and bloody battles he successfully defeated the Romans. The Greek king, though, having seen so many of his soldiers slaughtered in achieving this success, was said to have remarked, 'With another victory like this, we will be finished!' (Hence our modern phrase 'pyrrhic victory'.)
~ Simon Baker
Truly, Macro thought, the most effective weapons in Rome's arsenal were the picks and shovels wielded by her soldiers.
~ Simon Scarrow
had the cipher machines been used properly—without repeated message keys, without cillies, without restrictions on plugboard settings and scrambler arrangements, and without stereotypical messages which resulted in cribs—it is quite possible that they might never have been broken at all.
~ Simon Singh
the Germans therefore took the clever step of using the day key settings to transmit a new message key for each message.
~ Simon Singh
the First World War was the chemists' war, because mustard gas and chlorine were employed for the first time
~ Simon Singh
the Third World War would be the mathematicians' war, because mathematicians will have control over the next great weapon of war—information. Mathematicians have been responsible for developing the codes that are currently used to protect military information.
~ Simon Singh
When Hermann Göring visited Warsaw in 1934, he was totally unaware of the fact that his communications were being intercepted and deciphered. As he and other German dignitaries laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier next to the offices of the Biuro Szyfrów, Rejewski could stare down at them from his window, content in the knowledge that he could read their most secret communications.
~ Simon Singh
It has been said that the First World War was the chemists' war, because mustard gas and chlorine were employed for the first time, and that the Second World War was the physicists' war, because the atom bomb was detonated. Similarly, it has been argued that the Third World War would be the mathematicians' war, because mathematicians will have control over the next great weapon of war—information.
~ Simon Singh
You can't win because of the guns, said Adam with a sigh. Machine guns, mortars, field guns, howitzers: it doesn't matter how much courage soldiers have, how much will; flesh and blood can't pass through bullets and shells, or at least not in sufficient numbers to have any effect. The guns win in the end and they always will. Not us, not the Germans - the guns.
~ Simon Tolkien
Si un estudiante no se desmoronaba cuando tenía que matar a los suyos, no tendría escrúpulo moral para exterminar miles de Untermenschen. El estudiante que no lo resistía, era enviado al frente, donde sus superiores lo destinaban a un Himmetfahrtskommando, escuadrón suicida
~ Simon Wiesenthal