Quotes About Military

Then there was an exchange that's been seared into my memory. Joe Biden said he had argued for a different approach and was ready to move forward, but the military "should consider the president's decision as an order." "I am giving an order," Obama

I do not know how the Third World War will be fought, but I can tell you what they will use in

Those single-track military minds never think to ask their cleaning staff for help in giant lethal marauding creature matters.

In all the odium the British generals have attracted, it should be noticed that it was the British, not the French or the Germans, who created the tank and brought it into action and in so doing changed the face of war.

the British infantry assault on the German positions north of the Somme began at 0730 hrs on 1 July 1916. A force of some 120,000 British soldiers of Fourth and Third Armies assaulted the German line between Maricourt and Gommecourt. Their attack was pressed home with great resolution - and at considerable cost. By the end of that day, 19,240 men had been killed outright and the total casualty figure, including the missing and those taken prisoner-of-war, amounted to 57,470 men.

A 'front-line position' was, in fact, a complex, painfully constructed and carefully integrated defensive zone, largely composed of trenches dug in a zigzag pattern. For example, although the Western Front only extended for something over 400 miles, from the coast to the Swiss frontier, the Germans dug some 1,400 miles of trenches to defend it, in the first front line alone.

The fate of Sir John French, who had failed in the previous September at Loos - but had not lost anything like so many men in the process - cannot have passed unnoticed by General Haig in the autumn of 1916.

Total casualties on the Somme, killed, wounded and missing, come to some 1,300,000 men, British, French and German. The British share in this total includes the losses incurred by the Empire and Commonwealth troops, from Australia, Canada, India, South Africa and New Zealand, and amounts to some 400,000 men. The French lost 200,000 men on the Somme, to add to the more serious losses of Verdun. German losses on the Somme came to more than 600,000 men, killed

The French, and especially the French generals, would not accept the British as equal partners in the war. The fact that without the help of Britain and her Empire they would already have lost the war and what remained of their national territory did not alter their belief in their own military superiority, or lead them into any feelings of gratitude towards their Anglo-Saxon allies.

To supply Fourth Army's basic needs it was estimated that 31 trains must reach the front every day, bringing the day-to-day supplies as well as massive amounts of ammunition, food, water and trench stores that must be gathered for the main offensive. More than 3,000,000 shells were stockpiled close to the artillery batteries, ready to open the bombardment on 24 June.

By the turn of the century, all-out attacks by hosts of valiant French infantry, rather on the style employed by the Imperial Guard at Waterloo, were the received wisdom in French military circles, and would remain so until the losses of the Great War killed off its adherents and a million or so brave young men.

The 72nd Division, which had opened the battle with 12,000 men, had lost nearly 10,000 men in three days; this is as many as all the Allied armies, navies and air forces lost on D-Day 1944 - and the French losses came from a single division.

1,627,824 shells were fired in the preliminary bombardment on the Somme

As time went by, matters improved; the armies, especially the British and French Armies, became better at staying alive while killing larger numbers of the enemy which, though hardly a matter for satisfaction in human terms, is what well-trained armies are supposed to do.

the credit for developing the basic idea into what became the first tank must go to Winston Churchill

Warfare is now an interlocking system of actions—political, economic, psychological, military—that aims at the overthrow of the established authority in a country and its replacement by another regime.

Reconstruction was a fine but ultimately doomed experiment in American life. The tragedy of this intractable issue was that there was finally no way for blacks to enjoy their rights without a prolonged military presence, and that became politically impossible.

As a West Point graduate, Grant had enjoyed an insider's knowledge of military personnel during the war, but as a Washington outsider, he needed the valuable advice of seasoned professionals about appointments.

Had Napoleon been thoroughly unselfish, Grant suggested, he would have been the greatest man in history, such was his military genius. When a young woman on board asked Grant to name the two figures he detested most in history, he shot back, "Napoleon and Robespierre."114

To deal with the legions of dead, Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs proposed the creation of a national military cemetery, surrounding the former Lee mansion at Arlington, and Stanton approved the measure the same day.

Many observers were disturbed by all the uniformed men striding the White House corridors. In a broad-brush indictment, Charles Sumner disapproved of the way the White House "assumed the character of military head-quarters. To the dishonor of the civil service and in total disregard of precedent, the President surrounded himself with officers of the army, and substituted military forms for those of civil life.

Democratic army would stage a military raid on Washington and declare Tilden the winner. To guard against this menace, Grant and Sherman redeployed troops from the interior to Washington and secured the federal arsenal along with three critical bridges leading to the capital.

With a presidential election in the offing, Grant was drawn into a controversy over whether soldiers in the field should be allowed to cast ballots.

Two people seemed to coexist inside George Washington's breast. One was the political militant who mouthed republican slogans; this Washington thought his troops would fight better if motivated by patriotic ideals. The other, schooled in the British military system, believed devoutly in top-down discipline and rank as necessary to a well-run army. This Washington was also the Virginia planter who felt little in common with the scruffy plebeians around him.