Quotes About Military

As required by the unwritten rules of military calamity, the initial attack went well.

the combat career of a new German pilot now lasted, on average, less than a month.

To his brother Edgar he confided, "I suffer from the usual difficulty that besets the higher commander—things can be ordered and started, but actual execution at the front has to be turned over to someone else.

I suffer from the usual difficulty that besets the higher commander—things can be ordered and started, but actual execution at the front has to be turned over to someone else.

As a battalion commander in France, it was said, he had once pulled a pistol on a hesitant junior officer and shot him in the buttocks. "There," Allen said. "You're out. You're wounded." Such gestures would be unnecessary here.

A single Sherman tank took three hundred man-hours to waterproof, occupying the five-man crew for a week.

In a phone call one evening the corps commander grew incensed when Ward mentioned his good fortune in losing no officers in combat that day. "Goddammit, Ward, that's not fortunate. That's bad for the morale of the enlisted men," Patton snapped. "I want you to get more officers killed.

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.

An officer who lost an eye or a limb would receive a year's pay and medical expenses; the widows of officers killed in action would also get a year's pay, plus another third for each child. Those who died of their wounds within six months were "deemed slain in battle." No bonuses were announced for enlisted men.

Red Ball moved over 400,000 tons in three months, and eventually was supplemented by other routes with names like White Ball, Red Lion, and Green Diamond. But as one major general in Paris lamented, "It was the greatest killer of trucks that I could imagine.

Matthew Ridgway to command the XVIII Airborne Corps, Gavin had taken over the 82nd in mid-August. At thirty-seven he would be not only the youngest major general in the U.S. Army during World War II, but also the youngest division commander since the Civil War. That achievement was all the more remarkable given his start in life. Gavin was an orphan (he later concluded that his mother had been

Known as Tiny to his troops, he had a skull the size of a medicine ball, with a pushbroom mustache and legs that extended like sycamore trunks from his khaki shorts.

FIVE hundred and sixty road miles separated Algiers from Tunis, and the first Allied troops cantered eastward in the rollicking high spirits obligatory at the beginning of all military debacles. V

He entertained what one adviser termed "pet ideas" of building strategic military bases around the globe controlled by what he called the "United Nations"; the U.N. would keep the United States committed to the wider world after the war, and offer a forum for Soviet engagement with the West. An elite security council within the organization would give smaller nations a voice while providing the great powers with a veto.

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

The rates of venereal disease soared and the 82nd Airborne opened a medically certified brothel in Trapani under a supervising officer soon known as the Madam;

the first Allied troops cantered eastward in the rollicking high spirits obligatory at the beginning of all military debacles.

The cardinal principle of concentrating military force had been abandoned by George and his ministers; so, too, had the pursuit of clear strategic goals while avoiding diversionary sideshows.

Ernie Pyle, who was with them as usual, wrote: "They were dead weary, as a person could tell even when looking at them from behind. Every line and sag of their bodies spoke their inhuman exhaustion…. They were young men, but the grime and whiskers and exhaustion made them look middle-aged." A sergeant wrote to his family in Iowa: "It'll soon be five months that a pup tent has been our home. Five months since I've even so much as sat at a table while eating.

soon enough, the day would come when new recruits claimed the Army no longer examined eyes, just counted them. A conscript had to stand at least five feet tall and weigh 105 pounds; possess twelve or more of his natural thirty-two teeth; and be free of flat feet, venereal disease, and hernias. More than forty of every hundred men were rejected, a grim testament to the toll taken on the nation's health by the Great Depression.

And into the holds went: a platoon of carrier pigeons, six flyswatters and sixty rolls of fly-paper for each 1,000 soldiers, plus five pounds of rat poison per company.

There are apparently two types of successful soldiers," Patton had recently written his son. "Those who get on by being unobtrusive and those who get on by being obtrusive. I am of the latter type." True enough

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