Quotes About War

Polish women and children were used as human shields for the advance of German troops.

What the Red Army did in Germany was the darkest stain on its record in the war.

All men who participate in wars find themselves obliged to do things which, if they are decent people, they afterwards regret.

In the course of the war, some 70,000 French people were killed by Allied bombs: "collateral damage" in France thus included almost one-third more civilians accidentally killed than the British suffered from the Luftwaffe's deliberate assault on their island. Bombing played a critical role in slowing the German buildup after D-Day, but the price was high.

If Franco had joined the war, the inevitable fall of Gibraltar would have doomed Malta. It would have been much harder—perhaps impossible—for the British to hold the Middle East.

Between 20 and 23 August, 40,000 French soldiers died. By 29 August, total French casualties since the war began reached 260,000, including 75,000 dead.

There was a contemptuous joke in Nazi Party circles of Hitler's lackey Wilhelm Keitel reporting, "My Führer, Italy has entered the war!" Hitler answers, "Send two divisions. That should be enough to finish them." Keitel says, "No, my Führer, not against us, but with us." Hitler says, "That's different. Send ten divisions.

But the collective contribution of U.S. and British cryptanalysts to the war effort was greater than that of any other such small body of men in history. Their operations provided the supreme example of the Western Allies' imaginative integration into the war effort of their cleverest civilian intellects.

Though these had been used earlier in the Spanish Civil War, it was in Finland that the soubriquet "Molotov breadbasket," then "Molotov cocktail," first entered the military lexicon.

One Russian soldier in four died, against one in twenty British Commonwealth combatants and one in thirty-four American servicemen.

Too many of Britain's bravest soldiers spent the war conducting irregular and self-indulgent activities of questionable strategic value.

Contrary to widely accepted myth, the German war economy was a shambles. It is frightening to contemplate the consequences had it been otherwise.

Nella Last groped movingly towards an expression of her compatriots' hopes when she wrote that summer of 1940: "Sometimes I get caught up in a kind of puzzled wonder at things and think of all the work and effort and unlimited money that is used today to 'destroy' and not so long ago there was no money or work and it seems so wrong somehow Ã¢â'¬Â¦ [that] money and effort could always be found to pull down and destroy rather than build up.

In the Second World War, twenty-two generals were executed by Hitler. Another 963 died or were posted missing on active service. An astonishing 110 killed themselves.

Winston Churchill, the towering personality of the forces of light.

David Rees' Korea: The Limited War

The archbishop of Canterbury declared that Christians were allowed to pray for victory, but the archbishop of York disagreed. While the war was a righteous one, he said, it was not a holy one: "We must avoid praying each other down.

Some Americans responded brutally to such docility: in two separate incidents on 14 July, an officer and an NCO of the U.S. 45th Division murdered large groups of Italians in cold blood. One, Sgt. Horace West, who killed thirty-seven with a Thompson submachine gun, was convicted by a court-martial, but later granted clemency. The other, Capt. John Compton, assembled a firing squad which massacred thirty-six Italian prisoners.

War is full of clichés, because only clichés can match the drama of the moment.

While 17,000 American combat casualties lost limbs, during the war years 100,000 workers at home became amputees as a result of industrial accidents.

It is known that 610,000 ethnic Germans were killed in Rumania, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.

Nations are fortunate to have such leaders in time of conflict, but there are also advantages in leaders who avoid conflict in the first place.

Arguments for war based on the principle of 'setting the world an example' are always dangerous. They can be used to justify quite disproportionate responses, as occurred in South-east Asia in the 1960s and 1970s. They tend to be selective: why for instance did Britain not use force in 1965 to uphold the concept of majority self-determination in Rhodesia?

Shikata ga nai: it could not be helped. If this was a monumentally inadequate excuse for condemning millions to death without hope of securing any redemptive compensation, it is a constant of history that nations which start wars find it very hard to stop them.