Quotes About War

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

They believed that overpowering the feeble French meant something. They believed in the righteousness of their cause, the inevitability of their victory, and the immortality of their young souls. And as they wheeled around to the east and pulled out their Michelin maps of Tunisia, they believed they had actually been to war.

Of all the king's officers who would die in battle during the long war against the Americans, more than one out of every eight had perished in four hours on a June afternoon above Charlestown.

The myth of violated innocence meant that the rebel stockpiling of war supplies in recent months must remain obscure, along with details about the colony's deft, robust call to arms. A narrative congealed, and with it a brilliant propaganda stratagem: Gage was the aggressor; redcoats fired first; helpless civilians had been slaughtered.

nothing is more difficult in war than to adhere to a single strategic plan" and to resist the "constant temptation to desert the chosen line of action in favor of another one.

It seems to me [he wrote in early April] that in no other war in history has the issue been so distinctly drawn between the forces of arbitrary oppression on the one side and, on the other, those conceptions of individual liberty, freedom, and dignity, under which we have been raised in our great Democracy….

There is nothing I dread so much," he said, "as these brave generals." Keenly aware of America's size and the temper of her people, he had advocated a strategy of naval blockade rather than a land war, again to no avail.

After passing four hundred Italian slave laborers swaddled in rags, Eric Sevareid took inventory of his own sentiments: "a kind of dull satisfaction, a weary incapacity for further stimulation, a desire to go home and not have to think about it anymore—and a vague wondering whether I could ever cease thinking about it as long as I lived.

September 1, 1939, was the first day of a war that would last for 2,174 days, and it brought the first dead in a war that would claim an average of 27,600 lives every day, or 1,150 an hour, or 19 a minute, or one death every 3 seconds. Within four weeks of the blitzkrieg attack on Poland by sixty German divisions, the lightning war had killed more than 100,000 Polish soldiers, and 25,000 civilians had perished in bombing attacks.

The 28th Division situation is going from bad to worse," First Army's war diary noted on Tuesday. Cota could only agree.

Into that malevolent place they walked, emerging with pathetic little bundles: a coat, a cap, perhaps a frayed pair of trousers. In the seam of a soiled shirt, one family found a hidden note. "I dream of the hills around Siena, and of my love whom I shall never see again," the doomed man had written. "I shall become one gaping wound—like the winds, nothing.

A German pilot came out of his plane, drew his legs into a ball, his head down. Papers flew out of his pockets. He did a triple somesault through our formation. No chute.

stirring of epitaphs, "Mort pour la liberté." After viewing a military cemetery near Ste.-Mère-Église, a soldier on August 28 scribbled lines from A. E. Housman in his diary: "The saviors come not home tonight: Themselves they could not save.

Congress also seemed to be moving toward a proclamation of independence. That would give Washington a clear strategic objective, an American definition of victory: formal separation from Britain and the creation of a new nation. Such clarity in war was invaluable. If the country was asked to sacrifice, the purpose would now be evident. If men were asked to die, they would know why.

merchantman sunk in the Atlantic, the 500th U.S. ship lost to U-boats since Pearl Harbor. The domestic news was also war-related, if less febrile: the first meatless Tuesday had gone well in New York; penitentiary inmates with only one felony conviction were urged to apply for parole so they could serve in the Army; and a survey of department stores in Washington revealed that "there aren't any nylon stockings to be had for love or money.

Sergeant Samuel Allen, Jr., a former college student who had led his own swing band in the palmy days of peace, tried to explain in a letter home the flinty nihilism that made young men at war seem so old when they contemplated the dead. "We have found that it is best to forget about those friends, not to talk about them," he wrote. "They don't even exist.

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.

the firm proved deft at sheltering Jews by insisting they were irreplaceable specialists, and several hundred Jewish workers would survive the war. Now

A priest anointed the body with oil. Slovik would be buried outside a World War I cemetery at Oise-Aisne, near Soissons, in row three of Plot E—a hidden, unsanctified tract reserved for the dishonorable dead. 'Tis bitter cold, and I am sick at heart.

The balance of the campaign—indeed, the balance of the war—would require learning not only how to fight but how to rule.

They believed they had been blooded. They believed that overpowering the feeble French meant something. They believed in the righteousness of their cause, the inevitability of their victory, and the immortality of their young souls. And as they wheeled around to the east and pulled out their Michelin maps of Tunisia, they believed they had actually been to war.

Night would end, the tide would turn, and on that turning tide an army would wash ashore in Africa, ready to right a world gone wrong.

Things are always confusing and mysterious in war," Pyle wrote. "I squatted there, just a bewildered guy in brown, part of a thin line of other bewildered guys.

Yet the war and all that the war contained—nobility, villainy, immeasurable sorrow—is certain to live on even after the last old soldier has gone to his grave. May the earth lie lightly on his bones.