Quotes About War

If British planes appear, we duck. If American planes come over, everyone ducks. And if the Luftwaffe appears, nobody ducks.

French forces remained under SHAEF command as a result of Eisenhower's compromise, but headaches in dealing with the French authorities persisted. Eisenhower subsequently complained that the French 'next to the weather . . . have caused me more trouble in this war than any other single factor'. SHAEF

It was a young man's war. Even a thirty-one-year-old pilot was nicknamed 'Grandpa'.

Lydia Ruslanova

Another important lesson from the time was that mass self-deception is simply a sedative prescribed by leaders who cannot face reality themselves. And as the Spanish Civil War proved, the first casualty of war is not truth, but its source: the conscience and integrity of the individual.

He did not want headlines round the world proclaiming that a ship called 'Germany' had been sunk.

The ubiquitous initials LSR for Luftschutzraum, or air-raid shelter, were said to stand for 'Lernt schnell Russisc': 'Learn Russian quickly'.

The newly landed 2nd Infantry

In that one month of January 1945, Wehrmacht losses rose to 451,742 killed, roughly the equivalent of all American deaths in the whole of the Second World War.

La Operación Market Garden, iniciada el 17 de septiembre, no solo era ambiciosa. Estuvo además sorprendentemente mal planificada, sus oportunidades de éxito eran mínimas y no debió intentarse nunca.

Everything he said was right,' the lieutenant replied. 'But don't forget one thing. When a war of two world outlooks is going on, it is impossible to persuade enemy soldiers by throwing words across the front lines.

Napoleon had said on the eve of his invasion in 1812: 'Avant deux mois, la Russie me demandera la paix.

evidently heard about a young mother. She was being raped continuously in a farm shed. Her relatives came to the shed and asked the soldiers to allow her a break to breast-feed the baby because it would not stop crying. All this was taking place next to a headquarters

Its first major task had been the liquidation of over 4,000 Polish officers in the forest at Katyn.

I saw then that he had lost touch with reality. He lived in a fantasy world of maps and flags.' For Behr, who had been an enthusiastic and 'nationalistic young German officer', the revelation came as a shock. 'It was the end of all my illusions about Hitler. I was convinced that we would now lose the war.

Antony Beevor

It should not be forgotten that 600 Soviet prisoners of war were gassed in Auschwitz on 3 September 1941. This was the first experiment there with Zyklon B.

All too often guilt was a matter of timing. Y. S., who ran away when her village was bombed, was sentenced to six months' labour camp 'for deserting her place of work', while A. S., who refused to leave her home when the Germans were approaching, was condemned in absentia as a 'traitor to the Motherland'. A minimum of ten years in a Gulag labour camp awaited her.

A small girl among those being evacuated to Sorinnes had lost her shoes, so an American soldier from the 82nd Reconnaissance Battalion forced a German prisoner at gunpoint to take off his boots and give them to her. They were much too large, but she was just able to walk, while the German soldier faced frostbitten feet.

Sometimes it seems that for nineteenth-century Russian writers, food was what landscape (or maybe class?) was for the English. Or war for the Germans, love for the French - a subject encompassing the great themes of comedy, tragedy, ecstasy, and doom.

But even in this perilous situation, the popular leader Cleophon managed to persuade the Athenians to reject the chance of a negotiated peace offered by Sparta after Arginusae, so that it is hardly surprising that the Athenians responded so warmly to the parabasis of Frogs, where the Chorus aptly upbraids them for choosing as leaders and fighters not the best men but the worst, just as they have traded their gold and silver coinage for base metal (686-705, 717-37).

This is the first of the series of three Comedies—'The Acharnians,' 'Peace' and 'Lysistrata'—produced at intervals of years, the sixth, tenth and twenty-first of the Peloponnesian War, and impressing on the Athenian people the miseries and disasters due to it and to the scoundrels who by their selfish and reckless policy had provoked it, the consequent ruin of industry and, above all, agriculture, and the urgency of asking Peace.

We make war that we may live in peace.

We give up leisure in order that we may have leisure, just as we go to war in order that we may have peace.