Best 160 quotes in «world war ii quotes» category

She had an emptiness in her eyes like a ghost tired of haunting.

Sir Winston Churchill was born into the respected family of the Dukes of Marlborough. His mother Jeanette, was an attractive American-born British socialite and a member of the well known Spencer family. Winston had a military background, having graduated from Sandhurst, the British Royal Military Academy. Upon graduating he served in the Army between 1805 and 1900 and again between 1915 and 1916. As a British military officer, he saw action in India, the Anglo–Sudan War, and the Second South African Boer War. Leaving the army as a major in 1899, he became a war correspondent covering the Boer War in the Natal Colony, during which time he wrote books about his experiences. Churchill was captured and treated as a prisoner of war. Churchill had only been a prisoner for four weeks before he escaped, prying open some of the flooring he crawled out under the building and ran through some of the neighborhoods back alleys and streets. On the evening of December 12, 1899, he jumped over a wall to a neighboring property, made his way to railroad tracks and caught a freight train heading north to Lourenco Marques, the capital of Portuguese Mozambique, which is located on the Indian Ocean and freedom. For the following years, he held many political and cabinet positions including the First Lord of the Admiralty. During the First World War Churchill resumed his active army service, for a short period of time, as the commander of the 6th Battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers. After the war he returned to his political career as a Conservative Member of Parliament, serving as the Chancellor of the Exchequer where in 1925, he returned the pound sterling to the gold standard. This move was considered a factor to the deflationary pressure on the British Pound Sterling, during the depression. During the 1930’s Churchill was one of the first to warn about the increasing, ruthless strength of Nazi Germany and campaigned for a speedy military rearmament. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty for a second time, and in May of 1940, Churchill became the Prime Minister after Neville Chamberlain’s resignation. An inspirational leader during the difficult days of 1940–1941, he led Britain until victory had been secured. In 1955 Churchill suffered a serious of strokes. Stepping down as Prime Minister he however remained a Member of Parliament until 1964. In 1965, upon his death at ninety years of age, Queen Elizabeth II granted him a state funeral, which was one of the largest gatherings of representatives and statesmen in history.

Some read to remember the home they had left behind, others to forget the hell that surrounded them. Books uplifted their weary souls and energized their minds…books had the power to sooth an aching heart, renew hope for the future, and provide a respite when there was no other escape.

So much of the inexplicable about the Soviet experience—the hatred of the peasantry for example, the secrecy and paranoia, the murderous witch hunt of the Great Terror, the placing of the Party above family and life itself, the suspicion of the USSR’s own espionage that led to the success of Hitler’s 1941 surprise attack—was the result of the underground life, the konspiratsia of the Okhrana and the revolutionaries, and also the Caucasian values and style of Stalin. And not just of Stalin.

Superficially my war was a comfortable exercise in futility carried out in a grand Scottish hotel amongst the bridge players and swillers of easy-come-by whisky. My chest got me out of active service and into guilt, as I wrote two, or is it three of the novels for which I am now acclaimed.

Suppressed I Rise is for anyone interested in a very personal, human view of the history of World War II. A mother’s attempt to protect and raise her two young daughters in hostile NAZI Germany challenges her sensibilities and resourcefulness.

Stalin scribbled on an intelligence report predicting that Hitler would attack the Soviet Union in June 1941: 'You can send your "source" to his f*cking mother. This is disinformation.

That there is in this world neither brains, nor goodness, nor good sense, but only brute force. Bloodshed. Starvation. Death. That there was not the slightest hope not even a glimmer of hope, of justice being done. It would never happen. No one would ever do it. The world was just one big Babi Yar. And there two great forces had come up against each other and were striking against each other like hammer and anvil, and the wretched people were in between, with no way out; each individual wanted only to live and not be maltreated, to have something to eat, and yet they howled and screamed and in their fear they were grabbing at each other’s throats, while I, little blob of watery jelly, was sitting in the midst of this dark world. Why? What for? Who had done it all? There was nothing, after all, to hope for! Winter. Night.

The art of living. Isn't that a funny expression?

the battlecruiser HMS Hood, which at 860 feet was the pride of the fleet. While her eight 15-inch guns were the largest then afloat, her Achilles’ heel was her relatively thin armor, which made her more vulnerable than any battleship.

The autonomy this Paris command gave him was a new experience for von Choltitz. Until now, he had always been firmly locked inside Germany's impersonal military machine. His decisions, with the exception of minor tactical ones, had always been made for him. Now, at the very moment at which his visit to Rastenburg [where he met Hitler & was ordered to Paris] had jarred his confidence in the Third Reich and its leader, circumstances had placed von Choltitz in a command in which he had to make decisions. He preferred to postpone them. Nordling's suggestion offered him that chance. If, he told Nordling, the commanders at the Prefecture of Police could demonstrate in an hour's trial that they could control their men, he would agree to discuss a cease-fire for the city.

The casting of the brash United States Army Air Force officer Colonel Robert E. Hogan and the pompous German Luftwaffe officer Colonel Wilhelm Klink was inspired. For this series—a comedy with the serious backdrop of war—to succeed, the lead players had to be the perfect fit. The dynamic portrayal of this military odd couple had to be articulate, accurate, and precise. For the show to work, for the concept to be accepted, for one of the most outlandish premises in television history to be believed, the actors signed to play the two leading characters not only had to bring these extreme individuals to life with broad, fictional strokes, they had to make them real in the details.

The British government had become fearful of how its citizens would react to a wave of Jewish refugees from Germany, and had clamped down on immigration.

The compartment was now completely full. Looking out to the passageway through the inside window, I could see a German soldier standing in the crowded passageway. He had his back to the outside window and I could see his reflection and knew that he had field rations attached to his belt. As he glanced towards me, he could see how hungry and drawn I looked. I was grateful when he kindly offered to share his rations with me. Although many people became nasty and bitter because of the trials of war, there were still some kind and decent people left. There was no doubt but that this war had left an indelible imprint on everyone!

Socially, politically, economically, militarily, culturally, racially, sexually, demographically, even mythologically, World War II was the crucible that forged modern America. It was the transforming event that reshaped all who lived through it, and continues to affect those born after it. Only the American Revolution that created the new nation and the Civil War that preserved the Union rank with it in importance.

The days are numbered for those bums over in England." German Tank commander

The descent to barbarism had begun with Rotterdam. It ended with Dresden and then with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Whatever moral differences had existed when the war began were erased by its end. The victors had been morally conquered by the enemy.

The idea that you can somehow remain aloof from and superior to the struggle [World War II], while living on food which British sailors have to risk their lives to bring you, is a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security.

The "herrenvolk" [master race] are all around you, threading their way on their bicycles between the piles of rubble or rushing off with jugs and buckets to meet the water cart. It is queer to think that these are the people who once ruled Europe, from the Channel to the Caspian Sea and might have conquered our own island, if they had known how weak we were.

The cost of war is like an immeasurable tremor that knows no borders, its shockwaves reverberating across the world resulting in universal suffering.

The Hoboken waterfront was still familiar to me from earlier years when I walked this way to catch the trolley or the electrified Public Service bus home from the Lackawanna Ferry Terminal. Remembering the gray-hulled Liberty Ships being fitted out for the war at these dilapidated piers, was still very much embedded in my memory. Things had not changed all that much, except that the ships that were once here were now at the bottom of the ocean, sold, or nested at one of the “National Defense Reserve Fleets.” Many of them were moved to the Reserve fleet located on the western side of the Hudson River, south of the Bear Mountain Bridge. I vividly recall seeing these nested ships when I accompanied my parents to visit my Uncle Willie and Tante Martha at their home in Towners, New York.

The practice of lying is concerned with attempting to overlay a thin paper substitute atop the world that exists in order that it seem to suit your purposes. But the Swallow Man didn't need the world to suit him. He could make himself suit whatever world it pleased him to agree existed.

The only difference between a grown-up's mistake and a child's is the size of the consequence.

There have been ample opportunities since 1945 to show that material superiority in war is not enough if the will to fight is lacking. In Algeria, Vietnam and Afghanistan the balance of economic and military strength lay overwhelmingly on the side of France, the United States, and the Soviet Union, but the will to win was slowly eroded. Troops became demoralised and brutalised. Even a political solution was abandoned. In all three cases the greater power withdrew. The Second World War was an altogether different conflict, but the will to win was every bit as important - indeed it was more so. The contest was popularly perceived to be about issues of life and death of whole communities rather than for their fighting forces alone. They were issues, wrote one American observer in 1939, 'worth dying for'. If, he continued, 'the will-to-destruction triumphs, our resolution to preserve civilisation must become more implacable...our courage must mount'. Words like 'will' and 'courage' are difficult for historians to use as instruments of cold analysis. They cannot be quantified; they are elusive of definition; they are products of a moral language that is regarded sceptically today, even tainted by its association with fascist rhetoric. German and Japanese leaders believed that the spiritual strength of their soldiers and workers in some indefinable way compensate for their technical inferiority. When asked after the war why Japan lost, one senior naval officer replied that the Japanese 'were short on spirit, the military spirit was weak...' and put this explanation ahead of any material cause. Within Germany, belief that spiritual strength or willpower was worth more than generous supplies of weapons was not confined to Hitler by any means, though it was certainly a central element in the way he looked at the world. The irony was that Hitler's ambition to impose his will on others did perhaps more than anything to ensure that his enemies' will to win burned brighter still. The Allies were united by nothing so much as a fundamental desire to smash Hitlerism and Japanese militarism and to use any weapon to achieve it. The primal drive for victory at all costs nourished Allied fighting power and assuaged the thirst for vengeance. They fought not only because the sum of their resources added up to victory, but because they wanted to win and were certain that their cause was just. The Allies won the Second World War because they turned their economic strength into effective fighting power, and turned the moral energies of their people into an effective will to win. The mobilisation of national resources in this broad sense never worked perfectly, but worked well enough to prevail. Materially rich, but divided, demoralised, and poorly led, the Allied coalition would have lost the war, however exaggerated Axis ambitions, however flawed their moral outlook. The war made exceptional demands on the Allied peoples. Half a century later the level of cruelty, destruction and sacrifice that it engendered is hard to comprehend, let alone recapture. Fifty years of security and prosperity have opened up a gulf between our own age and the age of crisis and violence that propelled the world into war. Though from today's perspective Allied victory might seem somehow inevitable, the conflict was poised on a knife-edge in the middle years of the war. This period must surely rank as the most significant turning point in the history of the modern age.

The prospect of going home again scared them. They couldn't imagine how they could ever settle to it. How they could just walk around the streets and pretend to be normal, look women in the eye again after what they had done and seen, ride on trams, sit at a table with a white cloth, and control their hands and just slowly eat. It was the little things that scared them. The big things you could hide in. It was little ones that gave a man away.

There is nothing to be said except about the sheer waste and futility of it all. It is the war all over again, when one is rung up to be told that Rupert was dead, or that one's brother was killed, and one knew that it was only to produce the kind of world we are living in now. Horrible.

The sepia tone of November has become blood-soaked with paper poppies festooning the lapels of our politicians, newsreaders and business leaders … I will no longer allow my obligation as a veteran to remember those who died in the great wars to be co-opted by current or former politicians to justify our folly in Iraq, our morally dubious war on terror and our elimination of one’s right to privacy.

The tears are falling freely now, and I don't care if he sees them. They're tears of relief for my nephew, worry for my grandfather and my brother, and shame for my mistake. I figure I earned them.

The world is not static and the status quo is not sacred.

The world is wrong. I'm just doing my part to fix it.

They [442nd Regimental Combat Team] did more than defend America. They helped define America at its best...Rarely has a nation been so well served by a people it has so ill-treated.

They would never forget the war. The world wouldn’t let them, and neither would history.

This historic general election, which showed that the British are well able to distinguish between patriotism and Toryism, brought Clement Attlee to the prime ministership. In the succeeding five years, Labor inaugurated the National Health Service, the first and boldest experiment in socialized medicine. It took into public ownership all the vital (and bankrupted) utilities of the coal, gas, electricity and railway industries. It even nibbled at the fiefdoms and baronies of private steel, air transport and trucking. It negotiated the long overdue independence of India. It did all this, in a country bled white by the World War and subject to all manner of unpopular rationing and controls, without losing a single midterm by-election (a standard not equaled by any government of any party since). And it was returned to office at the end of a crowded term.

The noble old synagogue had been profaned and turned into a stable by the Nazis, and left open to the elements by the Communists, at least after they had briefly employed it as a 'furniture facility.' It had then been vandalized and perhaps accidentally set aflame by incurious and callous local 'youths.' Only the well-crafted walls really stood, though a recent grant from the European Union had allowed a makeshift roof and some wooden scaffolding to hold up and enclose the shell until further notice. Adjacent were the remains of a mikvah bath for the ritual purification of women, and a kosher abattoir for the ritual slaughter of beasts: I had to feel that it was grotesque that these obscurantist relics were the only ones to have survived. In a corner of the yard lay a pile of smashed stones on which appeared inscriptions in Hebrew and sometimes Yiddish. These were all that remained of the gravestones. There wasn't a Jew left in the town, and there hadn't been one, said Mr. Kichler, since 1945.

The rest of that summer in Normandy was wet. They fought their way from hedgerow to hedgerow from Caumont to St.-Lo. By the time they walked through the rubble that was left there were only four of them from the original squad, Jack, Saul, Casey, and Victor Sanchez. During August the battle for Normandy was over and a few days later Paris was liberated but the Bloody First was already heading towards Belgium and the Siegfried Line.

There was a big number over the door of the building. The number was five. Before the Americans could go inside, their only English-speaking guard told them to memorize their simple address, in case they got lost in the big city. Their address was this: 'Schlachthof-fünf.' Schlachthof means slaughterhouse. Fünf was good old five.

There was no feeling of dedication because it was absolutely involuntary. I do not doubt that if the Marines had asked for volunteers for an impossible campaign such as Guadalcanal, almost everyone now fighting would have stepped forward. But that is sacrifice; that is voluntary. Being expended robs you of the exultation, the self-abnegation, the absolute freedom of self-sacrifice. Being puts one in the role of victim rather than sacrificer, and there is always something begrudging in this. I doubt if Isaac would have accepted the knife of his father, Abraham, entirely without reproach; yet, for the same master, he would have gladly gone to his death a thousand times. The world is full of the sacrifice of heroes and martyrs, but there was only one Victim.

There was no need to discuss racial prejudice. Hadn't we all, black and white, just snatched the remaining Jews from the hell of concentration camps? Race prejudice was dead. A mistake made by a young country. Something to be forgiven as an unpleasant act committed by an intoxicated friend.

The ultimate question for a responsible man to ask is not how he is to extricate himself heroically from the affair, but how the coming generation is going to live.

The use of the blockade against Germany to starve large numbers of people to death broke through the moral barrier against the mass killing of civilians. It was the precedent for the 'conventional' bombing of civilians in the Second World War and then for the use of the atomic bomb.

The war was, very obviously, beginning to turn against Germany as the French soldiers gained ground and started to push the retreating Nazi troops in our direction. The news was that if things got worse, the German Army would be pushed over the Vosges Mountains and back into Alsace-Lorraine. We were issued instructions from the local Nazi administration to be prepared to help these retreating soldiers and were expected to billet, feed and, if necessary, nurse those wounded back to health. “Oh my,” I thought. We had so little but it was still more than we had in Mannheim. One village woman told us, “They are our soldiers and we can jolly well care for them.” Adolph agreed with this and told me that it would be my duty to look after any German soldier that was quartered under his roof. I thought that I fully understood what he meant by this! Since I was using the entire upstairs portion of the house, I would have to make room. Looking forward to helping them, I told the girls that we were to be kind to whoever came to us. “Imagine if it was your father.” It seemed the least we could do, and I hoped that I wasn’t expected to go beyond this. Instead of improving, things just got worse. To everyone’s astonishment the school was ordered closed and we were told to attend a meeting in the Village Center. Outside of the center, amidst much commotion, a uniformed Gestapo officer standing on the back of an open truck announced that German troops would be entering our village. Soon Military vehicles and German troops seemed to be everywhere. The Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, marked a critical turning point in the European theater of World War II and we were beginning to feel the effects.

They made a mess of 1914. They came a cropper in 1940. And now they're working up for it again.

They were our enemies. Yet in those young men of Italy I'd seen something centuries old. An American is only as old as his years. A long line of something was hidden behind the bright eyes of those Italians. And then and there I decided to learn something of the modern world. There was something abroad which we Americans couldn't or wouldn't understand. But unless we made some attempt to realize that everyone in the world isn't American, and that not everything American is good, we'll all perish together, and in this twentieth century....

This magnificent city that I only knew from photographs had been devastated. The infamous submarine bunkers had been bombed, and the bunkers that survived were later dynamited. I could understand this, but why civilian houses had also been leveled and set afire by incendiary bombs was beyond me. Each British Lancaster bomber delivered up to 8,000 pounds of bomb loads each night, with as many as 1,000 bombers over the target on a given night. During these raids, this great port city was set alight like a Roman candle! American B-17 and B 24 bombers also came during the daytime. Operation Gomorrah was conducted day and night causing a howling noise as the Feuersturm firestorm sucked the air out of the city to feed itself. With surface temperatures reaching 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit, asphalt streets actually melted, leaving people trapped in the black molten gunk. Winds of 150 miles per hour fanned flames that reached an altitude of over 15,000 feet! I lost an aunt, who was a beautiful young woman in her twenties, along with her husband and baby. Her older sister also perished in the flames. They all now lie buried in a mass gravesite, which I visited in the Ohlsdorf Cemetery. The stories I heard from people who could still talk about them, without totally choking up, were unbelievable. It was said that over 50 miles of street frontage were set ablaze and totally reduced to ashes during the raids, and another 133 miles were severely damaged. An estimated 1,500 people were killed on the first night of the raids and many more were wounded. Those who survived were suddenly homeless and without possessions. The total casualties were estimated at approximately 45,000 people. At the end of it, Hitler refused to come to the city and sent Hermann Göring instead! This was never forgotten or forgiven by das volk, the people. What is it with us? Why do we as human beings have to experience war after war? It seems that we never learn and so perhaps we will have to witness even worse in the future.

Towards the end of the Second World War, when I was sixteen years old, I was taken out of school and forced into the army. After a brief period of training at a base in Wüzburg, I arrived at the front, which by that time had already crossed the Rhine into Germany. There were well over a hundred in my company, all of whom were very young. One evening the company commander sent me with a message to battalion headquarters. I wandered all night long through destroyed, burning villages and farms, and when in the morning I returned to my company I found only the dead, nothing but dead, overrun by a combined bomber and tank assault. I could see only dead and empty faces, where the day before I had shared childhood fears and youthful laughter. I remember nothing but a wordless cry. Thus I see myself to this very day, and behind this memory all my childhood dreams crumble away.

Treating Abuse Today (Tat), 3(4), pp. 26-33 Freyd: I see what you're saying but people in psychology don't have a uniform agreement on this issue of the depth of -- I guess the term that was used at the conference was -- "robust repression." TAT: Well, Pamela, there's a whole lot of evidence that people dissociate traumatic things. What's interesting to me is how the concept of "dissociation" is side-stepped in favor of "repression." I don't think it's as much about repression as it is about traumatic amnesia and dissociation. That has been documented in a variety of trauma survivors. Army psychiatrists in the Second World War, for instance, documented that following battles, many soldiers had amnesia for the battles. Often, the memories wouldn't break through until much later when they were in psychotherapy. Freyd: But I think I mentioned Dr. Loren Pankratz. He is a psychologist who was studying veterans for post-traumatic stress in a Veterans Administration Hospital in Portland. They found some people who were admitted to Veteran's hospitals for postrraumatic stress in Vietnam who didn't serve in Vietnam. They found at least one patient who was being treated who wasn't even a veteran. Without external validation, we just can't know -- TAT: -- Well, we have external validation in some of our cases. Freyd: In this field you're going to find people who have all levels of belief, understanding, experience with the area of repression. As I said before it's not an area in which there's any kind of uniform agreement in the field. The full notion of repression has a meaning within a psychoanalytic framework and it's got a meaning to people in everyday use and everyday language. What there is evidence for is that any kind of memory is reconstructed and reinterpreted. It has not been shown to be anything else. Memories are reconstructed and reinterpreted from fragments. Some memories are true and some memories are confabulated and some are downright false. TAT: It is certainly possible for in offender to dissociate a memory. It's possible that some of the people who call you could have done or witnessed some of the things they've been accused of -- maybe in an alcoholic black-out or in a dissociative state -- and truly not remember. I think that's very possible. Freyd: I would say that virtually anything is possible. But when the stories include murdering babies and breeding babies and some of the rather bizarre things that come up, it's mighty puzzling. TAT: I've treated adults with dissociative disorders who were both victimized and victimizers. I've seen previously repressed memories of my clients' earlier sexual offenses coming back to them in therapy. You guys seem to be saying, be skeptical if the person claims to have forgotten previously, especially if it is about something horrible. Should we be equally skeptical if someone says "I'm remembering that I perpetrated and I didn't remember before. It's been repressed for years and now it's surfacing because of therapy." I ask you, should we have the same degree of skepticism for this type of delayed-memory that you have for the other kind? Freyd: Does that happen? TAT: Oh, yes. A lot.

Unlike other dictators, Stalin and his satraps never made the mistake of believing themselves beloved -- on the contrary they saw plots under every stone.

Vengeance is pointless, but certain men did not have a place in the world we sought to construct

Vengeance is pointless, but certain men do not have a place in the world we sought to construct

War is a cauldron that softens bureaucracy and expedites the formation of formidable reputations.