Quotes About History

Andrew Roberts

For every American who died, the Japanese lost 6 people, the Germans 11, and the Russians 92.

It was the Russians who provided the oceans of blood necessary to defeat Germany, and it cannot be reiterated enough that out of every five Germans killed in combat – that is, on the battlefield rather than in aerial bombing or through other means – four died on the Eastern Front.

Shortly after 8 a.m. on Sunday, 24 January 1965, the noble heart of Sir Winston Spencer-Churchill beat its last.

It turned out to be fortunate that Churchill did not meet Hitler, as the encounter proved an embarrassment to several of those Britons, such as Lloyd George, the Duke of Windsor and Churchill's cousin Lord Londonderry, who did.

Andrew Roberts

We were always taught as historians, or at least I was at university, never to use the word 'inevitable', because nothing is inevitable in history. And that's true, except for German counterattack.

By the outbreak of the Second World War, Churchill had made about 1,700 speeches and travelled about 82,000 miles – over three times the circumference of the earth – to deliver them. It was an extraordinary display of energy, far more than normal politicians even of the front rank. He had become a vastly experienced and assured public speaker, capable of gauging any audience in an instant.

In the calendar year 1943, when 70,000 Western servicemen, including bomber crews, died fighting Germany, two million Russian soldiers were killed, nearly thirty times the number.

Napoleón dijo en una ocasión que «para entender a un hombre hay que observar cómo era el mundo a sus veinte años».

Above all, he was the first significant political figure to spot the twin totalitarian dangers of Communism and Nazism, and to point out the best ways of dealing with both.

Hitler in particular believed he learnt lessons about the performance of the Red Army that were to affect his decision to invade Russia the following year. Yet they were substantially the wrong ones.

THE STORM OF WAR A NEW HISTORY OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR

Alan Turing installed something known as a bombe machine, an electro-mechanical device which made hundreds

The reason the public trusted and soon came to love him in 1940 was not because they believed he had been right in the past, but because they believed he had been consistently true to his beliefs, in a way many other, self-serving politicians who had held office throughout the 1930s had not been.

As the Potsdam Conference opened, Truman was able to tell Stalin officially about the existence of the Bomb. Stalin showed the requisite amount of surprise, not revealing that his spies had kept him fully informed and that he was already trying to build his own.

There is something rather wonderful about the fact that, at a particularly perilous point in a war for the continued independent existence of the nation, the British Prime Minister could be upbraided by his wife for being short tempered; we can be fairly certain that no one was saying this to Churchill's opposite number in the Reich Chancellery.

Stalin did not trust Churchill, because he did not trust anyone (except, for two years, Adolf Hitler). Yet Churchill could not discover Stalin's true views about him because after June 1941 Britain's intelligence services were ordered not to spy on Britain's new Soviet ally, a mistaken policy that was certainly not reciprocated.

The next month Mussolini and Hitler signed a ten-year alliance, known as the Pact of Steel.

My own experience of the First World War, and my readings in history,' he was later to write, 'had convinced me that the Prime Minister should be a man who knew what war meant, in terms of the personal suffering of the man in the line, in terms of high strategy, and in terms of that crucial issue – how the generals got on with their civilian bosses.

The public trusted him in 1940 not because they believed he had always, or even generally, been right – all too clearly he had not – but because they knew he had fought bravely for what he believed in, while many other, more self-serving politicians had not.

Churchill had an extraordinary capacity for alcohol and it rarely affected his judgement.

After Hitler had viewed the granite memorial to the 1918 Armistice near the railway carriage, he ordered it to be destroyed. Spears was right to think that the French initially had 'a conception of the old days of royalty when you just exchanged a couple of provinces, paid a certain amount of millions and then called it a day and started off the next time hoping you would be more lucky', but they were soon to be vigorously disabused.

The calm sea was the miracle of Dunkirk.