Quotes About War

In 1934, Churchill had predicted chaos when 'under the pressure of continuous attack upon London, three or four million people would be driven out into the open country around the metropolis'.3 In the event, three million people, the quarter of the city's population who were non-essential for the war effort, had already been calmly and safely evacuated all over the country, and there was no panic in the capital.

Churchill insisted that the Government stayed in Whitehall throughout the Blitz. 'Mr Churchill took the view', recorded Thompson, 'that it was essential that they took at least the same chances as the remainder of the population of London.

The whole world reveres / the Hero of France / He is the God of War / He is the Angel of Peace.'11

The movie Waterloo Bridge (1940), starring Vivien Leigh and Robert Taylor, was a stern defence of British decency and values.

He privately remarked that Boothby 'should join a bomb disposal squad as the best way of rehabilitating himself in the eyes of his fellow men. After all, the bombs might not go off.'133 It sounded cruel, but that is much what he himself had done in 1915, when the six-week average life-expectancy for new officers on the Western Front was not dissimilar to that of bomb-disposal squads in the Second World War.

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.

Fear and uncertainty accelerate the fall of empires: they are a thousand times more fatal than the dangers and losses of an ill-fated war.' Napoleon, statement in the Moniteur, December 1804

I am thankful in the circumstances we have not got Winston as a colleague. He is in his usual excited condition that comes on him when he smells war, and if he were in the Cabinet we should be spending all our time in holding him down instead of getting on with our business.

We don't let them rest,' said General Kurt Wallenius of the Finnish Northern Army; 'we don't let them sleep. This is a war of numbers against brains.

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.

total, around 43,000 officers were killed or imprisoned, although 20,000 were later released.

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

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).

It was a few minutes before the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month,' Churchill later wrote of the moment the Great War ended.

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.

As soon as the war ended, Churchill immediately set about writing The World Crisis. It was to be packed with lessons for the future. 'No war is so sanguinary as the war of exhaustion,' he wrote. 'No plan could be more unpromising than the plan of frontal attack. Yet on these two brutal expedients the military authorities of France and Britain consumed, during three successive years, the flower of their national manhood.

Napoleon knew that Alexander the Great had taken learned men and philosophers along on his campaigns in Egypt, Persia and India. As befitted a member of the Institut, he intended his expedition to be a cultural and scientific event and not merely a war of conquest.

have, myself, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once again able to defend our Island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone. Winston Churchill, House of Commons, 4 June 1940

No one, he said, 'outside a madhouse' would want to start another war, but 'There is a nation which has abandoned all its liberties in order to augment its collective might. There is a nation which with all its strength and virtues is in the grip of a group of ruthless men preaching a gospel of intolerance and racial pride, unrestrained by law, by Parliament or by public opinion

Remember Binasco; it brought me tranquillity in all of Italy, and spared shedding the blood of thousands. Nothing is more salutary than appropriately severe examples.'78 'If you make war,' he would say to General d'Hédouville in December 1799, 'wage it with energy and severity; it is the only means of making it shorter and consequently less deplorable for mankind.

The calm sea was the miracle of Dunkirk.

The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war', wrote the Irish literary essayist Robert Wilson Lynd, 'appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions.