“German soldiers streamed toward the German frontier through Picardy and Belgium, Lorraine and the Ardennes, bellowing, ‘The Americans will be here in twenty minutes!’. . . . In what the OB West war diary called an ‘ignominious rout,’ Germans unable to find white flags surrendered by waving chickens.” – Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light
“A dignified American woman with close-cropped gray hair, whose living room in Culoz was dominated by a large portrait of her painted by Picasso, sent a note to Seventh Army headquarters along with a fruitcake baked by her companion, Alice B. Toklas. ‘We have waited for you all so long and here you are,’ wrote Gertrude Stein. ‘I cannot tell you enough what it means to see you to hear you to have you here with us.’ (Of Stein’s prose, an American officer wrote: ‘I understand that she puts together a lot of repetitions which have significance only to those whose minds are in a higher sphere than mine.’)” – Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light
“Warm summer rain drenched the motley legions of liberation at dawn on Thursday, August 24 [1944], as three columns from the French 2nd Armored Division made ready for battle twenty miles southwest of Paris. Village women scurried through the bivouacs carrying urns of coffee and platters heaped with fried eggs and breakfast rolls. Soldiers finished shaving with ritualistic precision, then shouldered their weapons and swaggered into formation, ‘booming like bitterns throughout the wood,’ as an American colonel later wrote, ‘pounding their chests and screaming, “En avant!” ’ Tricolor pennants flew from three thousand vehicles named for Napoleonic triumphs or for French towns now unshackled, like Caen and Cherbourg. Each tank and scout car bore a white silhouette of France with the cross of Lorraine superimposed. The twelve thousand troops comprised not only French regulars, but sailors far from the sea, Lebanese Christian engineers, and Senegalese riflemen who until three weeks earlier had never set foot on European France. Also in the ranks could be found Spanish Republicans, Gaullists, monarchists, Jews, Muslims, Catholic reactionaries, animists, anarchists, antipapists, communists, socialists, freethinkers, and militant Quakers.” – Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light
“On they marched, south, east, and west: past stone barns and mules hauling milk in copper urns, past shops that still peddled perfume and silk scarves, past collaborators with crude swastikas swabbed onto their shaved heads. When the trucks halted for a moment and GIs tumbled out to urinate in squirming echelons on the road shoulders, civilians rushed up to plead for cigarettes with two fingers pressed to the lips, a gesture described by Forrest Pogue as the French national salute. Others offered tricolor nosegays made from blue hydrangeas, red roses, and white asters. ‘Heep, heep, whoo-ray!’ the Frenchmen yelled, repeating phrases learned from doughboys a generation earlier. ‘I speeg Engless. Jees-Christ, cot-damn!’ Soldiers replied in schoolboy French or with handy phrases published in Stars and Stripes, among which was the French for ‘My wife doesn’t understand me.’ ” – Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light
“In the Guards Chapel at Wellington Barracks on Birdcage Walk, across from the former pig meadow and leper colony currently known as St. James’s Park, a full-throated congregation belted out the ‘Te Deum’ and prepared to take communion from the bishop of Maidstone. ‘To Thee all angels cry aloud,’ they sang, ‘the heavens and all the powers therein.’ At 11:10 a.m. [June 18, 1944] an annoying growl from those same heavens grew louder. Ernest Hemingway heard it in his Dorchester Hotel suite, where he was making pancakes with buckwheat flour and bourbon; from the window he looked for the telltale ‘white-hot bunghole’ of a jet engine. Pedestrians in Parliament Square heard it and fell flat, covering their heads. Clementine Churchill, the prime minister’s wife, heard it in Hyde Park, where she was visiting the gun battery in which her daughter Mary volunteered. The Guards Chapel congregation heard it and kept singing. Then they heard nothing—that most terrifying of all sounds—as the engine quit, the bunghole winked out, and the black cruciform [V-1 missile] fell. Through the chapel’s reinforced concrete roof it plummeted before detonating in a white blast that blew out walls, blew down support pillars, and stripped the leaves from St. James’s plane trees. A funnel of smoke curled fifteen hundred feet above the wrecked nave; rubble ten feet deep buried the pews even as six candles still guttered on the altar and the bishop stood unharmed. One hundred and twenty-one others were dead and as many more injured. Two thousand memorial plaques accumulated by Guards regiments during eons of war lay pulverized, although a mosaic donated by Queen Victoria remained intact: ‘Be thou faithful unto death and I will give thee a crown of life.’ ” – Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light
“Terror is broken by terror. Everything else is nonsense.” – Adolph Hitler (quoted by Rick Atkinson in The Guns at Last Light)
“The Führer and his entourage flew from Berchtesgaden in four Focke-Wulf Condors to Metz, then drove 175 miles in armored cars to Margival. . . . This was Hitler’s first return to France since 1940, and he looked like a man who was losing a world war: eyes bloodshot and puffy from insomnia, skin sallow, the toothbrush mustache a bit bedraggled. Aides reported that even his passion for music had waned. ‘It is tragic that the Führer has so cut himself off from life and is leading an excessively unhealthy life,’ wrote his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. Often he checked his own pulse, as if fingering mortality; a quack dubbed the Reich Injection Minister frequently administered sedatives or shots of a glandular concoction. He shunned bright lights and wore a cap with an enlarged visor to shield his eyes. ‘I always have the feeling of tipping to the right,’ he complained. He spoke of retirement, of a life devoted to reading, or meditating, or running a museum.” – Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light
“How can one be expected to govern a country that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?” – Charles De Gaulle (quoted by Rick Atkinson in The Guns at Last Light)
“As long as fifty-one percent of your decisions are right, you’ll succeed.” – Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery (quoted by Rick Atkinson in The Guns at Last Light)
“The way to fame is a hard one. You must suffer and be the butt of jealousy and ill-informed criticism. It is a lonely matter.” – Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery (quoted by Rick Atkinson in The Guns at Last Light)
“Despite War Department assurances that ‘men who refrain from sexual acts are frequently stronger, owing to their conservation of energy,’ so many GIs impregnated British women that the U.S. government agreed to give local courts jurisdiction in ‘bastardy proceedings’; child support was fixed at £1 per week until the little Anglo-American turned thirteen, and 5 to 20 shillings weekly for teenagers. Road signs cautioned, ‘To all GIs: please drive carefully, that child may be yours.’ ” – Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light
“In April 1944, the War Department decreed that inductees need have only a ‘reasonable chance’ of adjusting to military life, although psychiatric examiners were advised to watch for two dozen ‘personality deviations,’ including silly laughter, sulkiness, resentfulness of discipline, and other traits that would seemingly disqualify every teenager in the United States. In addition, the Army began drafting ‘moderate’ obsessive-compulsives, as well as stutterers. Men with malignant tumors, leprosy, or certifiable psychosis still were deemed ‘nonacceptable,’ but by early 1944, twelve thousand venereal disease patients, most of them syphilitic, were inducted each month and rendered fit for service with a new miracle drug called penicillin.” – Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light
“The typical soldier stood five feet eight inches tall and weighed 144 pounds, but physical standards had been lowered to accept defects that once would have kept many young men out of uniform. A man with 20/400 vision could now be conscripted if his sight was correctable to at least 20/40 in one eye; toward that end, the armed forces would make 2.3 million pairs of eyeglasses for the troops. The old jest that the Army no longer examined eyes but just counted them had come true. A man could be drafted if he had only one eye, or was completely deaf in one ear, or had lost both external ears, or was missing a thumb or three fingers on either hand, including a trigger finger. Earlier in the war, a draftee had to possess at least twelve of his original thirty-two teeth, but now he could be utterly toothless.” – Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light
“The average GI was twenty-six, born the year that the war to end all wars had ended, but manpower demands in this global struggle meant the force was growing younger: henceforth nearly half of all American troops arriving to fight in Europe in 1944 would be teenagers. One in three GIs had only a grade school education, one in four held a high school diploma, and slightly more than one in ten had attended college for at least a semester.” – Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light
“Down the gangplanks they tromped, names checked from a clipboard, each soldier wearing his helmet, his field jacket, and a large celluloid button color-coded by the section of the ship to which he had been confined during the passage. Troops carried four blankets apiece to save cargo space, while deluded officers could be seen lugging folding chairs, pillow-cases, and tennis rackets. A brass band and Highland Pipers greeted them on the dock; Scottish children raised their arms in a V for Victory. Combat pilots who had fulfilled their mission quotas, and were waiting to board ship for the return voyage, bellowed, ‘Go back before it’s too late!’ or ‘What’s your wife’s telephone number?’ ” – Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light
“It is quite pleasant to be famous. Probably bad for the soul.” – General George S. Patton, Jr. (quoted by Rick Atkinson in The Guns at Last Light)
“Writing a book is usually a humdrum affair. You read a lot of other books and articles in your field, produce a draft, polish it, send it out, wait anxiously for reviews, gnash your teeth over the reviews (or the lack of reviews), compulsively check the book’s Amazon ranking for a month or so, and finally sink back into oblivion and despair, vowing never to write another one.” – George Scialabba
“Great minds discuss ideas, average ones discuss events, and small minds discuss people.” – Eleanor Roosevelt
“The working of democracy is boring, most of the time, and dull compared with other systems, but that is a small price to pay for so great a thing.” – Eric Sevareid, Not So Wild a Dream
“Nothing is so beautiful, marvelous, ever new, ever surprising, so full of sweet and continual delight, as the good. Nothing is so barren and dismal, monotonous and boring as evil. That is the way with real good and evil. Fictional good and evil are quite the opposite, though. Fictional good is boring and flat. Fictional evil is varied, interesting, attractive, profound, and seductive. This is because in reality, there is a necessity, like gravity, governing us that is missing in fiction.” – Simone Weil, “Literature and Morals”
“More than anything else, what makes totalitarianism possible is a people’s submissiveness to authority: its slowness to perceive and unwillingness to resist injustices committed not by distant villains and official enemies but at home, by those with the power to make resistance dangerous.” – George Scialabba, “An Enemy of the State”
“Emphasis, omission, and distortion rather than outright lying are the tools of the war propagandists.” – I. F. Stone, The Hidden History of the Korean War
“It is simply good intellectual hygiene to reject politically-motivated demands to devalue art or arguments by citing the real or alleged failings of their author.” – George Scialabba, “An Enemy of the State”
“Artistic originality emerges only after a lengthy assimilation of many traditions. The artist surrenders his individuality, and it is returned to him enriched. The tradition too is enriched.” – George Scialabba, “The Critic As Radical”
“Don’t come to work just for the paycheck. You want to be challenged, you want to learn, and you want to grow. Break out of your comfort zone and keep an open mind. As long as you’re in a position where you’re expanding your mind and learning new things, you’re going to be fulfilled.” – Nicole Guyer McMurrian, E-Discovery Project Manager
“[Colonel] Howze at twilight led a tank company toward the central rail station to find boulevards empty and windows shuttered. Then a sash flew open, a voice shrieked ‘Americano!,’ and Romans by the thousands swept into the streets despite the occasional ping from a sniper round. Delirious citizens flung themselves on to Howze’s jeep and ‘kissed me until I threatened to shoot some of them,’ he reported. ‘Vino offered in glasses, in pitchers, in bottles, and even in kegs,’ the 88th Division noted. “Kisses were freely bestowed by both male and female citizens and suffered or enjoyed by the recipients accordingly.’ Signoras offered plates of spaghetti and bowls of hot shaving water. Italian men with ancient rifles and red sashes clapped their liberators on the back, then stalked off in search of Germans and fascists. Communists and Blackshirts traded potshots, and the pop of pistol fire near the colosseum signaled another summary execution.” – Rick Atkinson, The Day of Battle (emphasis in original)
“All troops were at risk, but none more than infantrymen, who accounted for 14 percent of the Army’s overseas strength and sustained 70 percent of the casualties. A study of four infantry divisions in Italy found that a soldier typically no longer wondered ‘whether he will be hit, but when and how bad.’ The army surgeon general concluded that ‘practically all men in rifle battalions who were not otherwise disabled ultimately became psychiatric casualties,’ typically after 200 to 240 cumulative days in combat. ‘There aren’t any iron men,’ wrote Brigadier General William C. Menninger, a prominent psychiatrist. ‘The strongest personality, subjected to sufficient stress a sufficient length of time, is going to disintegrate.’ ” – Rick Atkinson, The Day of Battle (emphasis in original)
“Everything is in the hands of the fates, and many of the boys have met theirs already. I badly want to get home to my wife and son. I want to be able to enjoy something of the beauty of life again. Here we have nothing but terror and horror, death and damnation.” Unidentified German machine gunner (quoted by Rick Atkinson in The Day of Battle)
“The Guards’ command post occupied the crypt beneath a Catholic church, entered only on hands and knees through a hole scratched in the rubble. A decomposing German soldier lay near the entrance and those passing in and out would subsequently bow to him for luck, whispering, ‘Good evening, Hans.’ Shell fire and bombs had sliced open the burial vaults in the upper walls, scattering skeletons about the nave, and Tommies hung flypaper in a losing battle against insects. Pickets occupied three forward outposts, known as Jan, Helen, and Mary, in wrecked buildings barely a hundred yards from the German line. Sentries cradled their Bren guns beneath cockeyed wall prints of the Virgin, whose eyes remained fixed on heaven.” – Rick Atkinson, The Day of Battle
“Berlin had always considered Mussolini to be weak-kneed on the Jewish question, and on September 24, 1943, with the Duce reduced to a pathetic puppet, the Reichsführer-SS, Heinrich Himmler, secretly ordered the Gestapo chief in Rome, Lieutenant Colonel Herbert Kappler, to arrest all Jews in the city. The thirty-five-year-old Kappler, gray-eyed son of a Stuttgart chauffeur, had lived in Rome since 1939. He was described as ‘intolerant, cold, vengeful, unhappily married and with interests in Etruscan vases, roses, and photography’; when he grew annoyed, the dueling scar on his cheek reddened. Two days later, Kappler gave Jewish community leaders thirty-six hours to deliver fifty kilograms of gold or face the deportation of two hundred men. On September 28, a convoy of taxis and private cars pulled up to the Gestapo headquarters at Via Tasso 155 with the ransom, which was laid on a scale pan amid much haggling over the last gram. Three weeks later, at dawn on Saturday, October 16, storm troopers swept through the Roman ghetto anyway, seizing twelve hundred Jews; sixteen of them survived the war. Most were promptly shipped to Auschwitz and gassed, including an infant born after the roundup. Mussolini on December 1 ordered the arrest of ‘all Jews living in the national territory.’ Italians showed admirable pluck in sheltering Jewish compatriots: nearly five thousand hid in Roman convents, monasteries, and the Vatican. More than forty thousand Jews in Italy would survive the war; nearly eight thousand perished.” – Rick Atkinson, The Day of Battle