“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
“Daily life in combat units resolved itself into noise, filth, isolation, confusion, fatigue, and mortality; everything else seemed extraneous. Soldiers distrusted the gung ho, the cocksure, and anyone less miserable than themselves. ‘We learned to live as perhaps once we were long ago, as simply as animals without hope for ourselves or pity for another,’ wrote John Muirhead, a B-17 crewman. The conceits of fate, destiny, and God comforted some, but believers and nonbelievers alike rubbed their crucifixes and lucky coins and St. Christopher medals with a suspicion, as Muirhead said, that ‘one is never saved for long.’ They saw things that seared them forever: butchered friends, sobbing children, butchered children, sobbing friends.” – Rick Atkinson, The Day of Battle
“At 3:30 p.m. on February 7 [1944], a Luftwaffe bomber chased by a Spitfire jettisoned five antipersonnel bombs over the 95th Evacuation Hospital, where four hundred patients lay in ward tents. Newly wounded soldiers had just arrived by ambulance, and operating rooms were jammed when flame and steel swept the compound. . . . Twenty-eight died, including three nurses, two doctors, and six patients; another sixty-four were wounded, and the blasts shredded twenty-nine ward tents. . . . ‘God help us,’ a 1st Armored Division mess sergeant prayed after the hospital bombing. ‘You come yourself. Don’t send Jesus. This is no place for children.’ ” – Rick Atkinson, The Day of Battle
“Ninety percent of the trouble with Negro troops was the fault of the whites.” – Lieutenant General Ira C. Eaker, Commander-in-Chief, Mediterranean Allied Air Forces, 1944 (quoted by Rick Atkinson in The Day of Battle)
“Under pressure from black civic leaders and a crying need for fighters, three black Army divisions had been created: the 2nd Cavalry, which arrived in North Africa only to be disbanded to provide service troops; the 93rd Infantry, shipped to the Pacific; and the 92nd Infantry, which would arrive in Italy in late summer 1944 as the only African-American division to see combat in Europe. Officered above the platoon level almost exclusively by whites, the 92nd would endure trials by fire that only partly involved the Germans. Training was halted for two months to teach the men to read, since illiteracy in the division exceeded 60 percent. A black veteran later described ‘an intangible, elusive undercurrent of resentment, bitterness, even despair and hopelessness among black officers and enlisted men in the division.’ ” – Rick Atkinson, The Day of Battle
“Among the prevalent stereotypes was a belief that blacks were too dumb, too lazy, or too apathetic to serve as combat troops. An Army study decried their ‘lack of education and mechanical skill,’ as well as ‘a venereal rate eight to ten times that of white troops, a tendency to abuse equipment, lack of interest in the war, and particularly among northern troops a concern for racial ‘rights,’ which often culminated in rioting.’ In the summer of 1943, only 17 percent of black soldiers were high school graduates, compared with 41 percent of whites. In Army tests that measured educational achievement rather than native intelligence, more than four in five blacks scored in the lowest two categories compared to fewer than one in three whites.” – Rick Atkinson, The Day of Battle
“The 1940 Draft Act banned racial discrimination, but only 250 blacks sat on the nation’s 6,400 draft boards; most southern states forbade any African-American board members. White America’s treatment of the hundreds of thousands of black volunteers and draftees ranged from unfortunate to despicable. The Mississippi congressional delegation asked the War Department to keep all black officers out of the state for the duration. Discrimination and segregation remained the rule in military barracks, churches, swimming pools, libraries, and service clubs. German and Italian prisoner trustees could use the post exchange at Fort Benning, Georgia; black U.S. Army soldiers could not.” – Rick Atkinson, The Day of Battle (emphasis in original)
“The brightest news awaiting [General] Clark at Anzio was not on the beachhead but a mile above it. On January 27 and 28 [1944], an obscure fighter unit, known formally as the 99th Fighter Squadron (Separate), made its first significant mark in combat with guns blazing, shooting down twelve German aircraft. . . . [T]he contributions of a couple dozen black pilots—known collectively as the Tuskegee airmen, after the Alabama field where they had learned to fly—would resonate beyond the beachhead, beyond Italy, and beyond the war.” – Rick Atkinson, The Day of Battle
“We are only specks of dust that have settled in the night on the map of the world.” – Winston Churchill (quoted by Rick Atkinson in The Day of Battle)
“You can’t believe men will do to each other the things they do. I suppose I’m soft, but I’ve got to say, God forgive us all.” – Unidentified U.S. Army artillery forward observer (quoted by Rick Atkinson in The Day of Battle)
“The longer I live the more I think of the quality of fortitude—men who fall, pick themselves up and stumble on, fall again, and are trying to get up when they die.” – Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. (quoted by Rick Atkinson in The Day of Battle)
“Fate, not the Germans or Italians, was our undiscriminating enemy. With the same callousness as Army orders, without fairness or judgment, ‘You and you—dead. The rest of you, on the truck.’ ” – Unidentified Corporal, Royal Engineers, quoted by Rick Atkinson in The Day of Battle
“I could not, with a clear conscience, ask God to take me safely through this war, but I can ask Him for strength and courage to do my job.” – First Sergeant Randall Harris, United States Army Rangers (quoted by Rick Atkinson in The Day of Battle)
“Much had been learned through hard experience in Tunisia about caring for casualties, and the fleet was provisioned on the assumption that the assault force would suffer 15 percent wounded and sick in the first week. A chart distributed to medics helped assess what proportion of a man’s body surface had been burned—4.5 percent if both hands were burned, 13.5 percent for both arms, and so forth; 500 cc of blood plasma would be administered for each 10 percent. For those beyond such ministrations, the convoys carried six tons of grave markers, as well as stamp pads to fingerprint the dead. A thirteen-page ‘graves registration directive’ showed how to build a cemetery—‘care should be taken so that graves are in line with one another, both laterally and longitudinally.’ A memo on the disposition of a dead soldier’s effects advised, ‘Removal should be made of any article that would prove embarrassing to his family.’ ” – Rick Atkinson, The Day of Battle
“The 45th was a National Guard division, among eighteen that had been federalized early in the war. Some Regular Army officers sneered that ‘NG’ stood for ‘no good,’ and most of the Guard’s senior officers had been purged by the War Department for age or incompetence. But the Pentagon considered the 45th—known as the Thunderbirds—‘better prepared than any division that had left our control to date.’ They were westerners, with one regiment derived from Colorado mining camp militias like the Wolftown Guards and the Queen’s Emerald Rifles. Two other regiments hailed from Oklahoma, and their ranks included nearly two thousand Indians from fifty-two tribes, including Cherokee, Apache, Kiowa, Comanche, and Navajo.” – Rick Atkinson, The Day of Battle
“A single crude acronym that captured the soldier’s lowered expectations—SNAFU, for ‘situation normal, all fucked up’—had expanded into a vocabulary of GI cynicism: SUSFU (situation unchanged, still fucked up); SAFU (self-adjusting fuck-up); TARFU (things are really fucked up); FUMTU (fucked up more than usual); JANFU (joint Army-Navy fuck-up); JAAFU (joint Anglo-American fuck-up); FUAFUP (fucked up and fucked up proper); and FUBAR (fucked up beyond all recognition).” – Rick Atkinson, The Day of Battle
“The [Second World W]ar infiltrated every kitchen, every closet, every medicine cabinet. Sugar, tires, and gasoline had been rationed first, followed by nearly everything else, from shoes to coffee. ‘Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without’ became a consumer mantra. Plastic buttons replaced brass; zinc pennies supplanted copper. To save fifty million tons of wool annually, the government outlawed vests, cuffs, patch pockets, and wide lapels.” – Rick Atkinson, The Day of Battle
“I want to fight the champ. If you lose, you’ve lost to the champ and it’s no disgrace. If you win, you’re the new champ.” – General George S. Patton, Jr., USA (quoted by Rick Atkinson in An Army at Dawn)
“Tongues had begun to wag about Eisenhower and his willowy driver, Kay Summersby. Nicknamed Skibereen after her Irish hometown, Summersby had worked in England as a model and movie extra before enlisting as a military driver in London; she had been assigned to Eisenhower the previous summer, joining him in Algiers in mid-January after surviving the U-boat sinking of her transport ship off the African coast. At thirty-four, discreet, divorced, and comely, she served not only as the commander-in-chief’s ‘chauffeuse,’ but also as his bridge partner and riding companion. . . . One drollery circulating in North Africa had the commander-in-chief’s sedan stalling on a lonely road. Summersby tinkers under the hood until Eisenhower appears with the toolbox from the trunk. ‘Screwdriver?’ he supposedly asks, to which she supposedly replies, ‘We might as well. I can’t get the goddam motor fixed.’ ” – Rick Atkinson, An Army at Dawn
“September 1, 1939, was the first day of a war that would last for 2,174 days, and it brought the first dead in a war that would claim an average of 27,600 lives every day, or 1,150 an hour, or 19 a minute, or one death every three seconds.” – Rick Atkinson, An Army at Dawn
“Twenty-seven acres of headstones fill the American military cemetery at Carthage, Tunisia. There are no obelisks, no tombs, no ostentatious monuments, just 2,841 bone-white marble markers, two feet high and arrayed in ranks as straight as gunshots. Only the chiseled names and dates of death suggest singularity. Four sets of brothers lie side by side. Some 240 stones are inscribed with thirteen of the saddest words in our language: ‘Here rests in honored glory a comrade in arms known but to God.’ A long limestone wall contains the names of another 3,724 men still missing, and a benediction: ‘Into Thy hands, O Lord.’ This is an ancient place, built on the ruins of Roman Carthage and a stone’s throw from the even older Punic city. It is incomparably serene. The scents of eucalyptus and of the briny Mediterranean barely two miles away carry on the morning air, and the African light is flat and shimmering, as if worked by a silversmith.” – Rick Atkinson, An Army at Dawn
“That morning Private Bain had climbed to Roumana past the bodies of Seaforth Highlanders, ‘scattered like big broken dolls’, on the hillside. . . . As the living began to strip them of their few possessions he shouldered his rifle and began walking steadily back down the hill. No one accosted him. There seemed to be no straggler line, no stop line. In a couple of days he reached Tripoli where he was arrested. ‘I found the whole business of being in the ranks and in the infantry a brutalising business,’ he explained years later. The battle had been, ‘one almighty confusion and shambles’, in which the ordinary soldier, as usual, had no idea of what was going on. Reaching the end of his personal resources he deserted.” – David Rolf, The Bloody Road to Tunis
“To the very end of the war, few Germans sensed the depths of their Führer’s alienation from them, his indifference to their suffering, his deranged determination to drag them with him to Wagnerian cataclysm.” – Max Hastings, Bomber Command
“The experienced had little pity to spare for the newcomers in the mess. Statistically, seven or fourteen or twenty-one of us have to die tonight, so please God, let it be the nervous young face in the corner whom I do not know, rather than Harry, Bill or Jack laughing at the bar, who are my friends. Thus their jokes . . . . It was part of their defenses against their own fear, of the schoolboy immaturity that was always close to the surface among so many young men of eighteen, nineteen and twenty, who still thought it the greatest sport in the world to pull somebody’s trousers off after dinner. It was this same feather-light tread of youth that enabled so many thousands of their generation to fly for Bomber Command through six years of war, amidst the terrible reality that, statistically, most of them were dead men.” – Max Hastings, Bomber Command
“The crew of a stricken aircraft had a one-in-five chance of escaping alive. Fighting the G-forces of a diving or spiraling, uncontrollable descent, they had to ditch the hatches, reach their parachutes and somehow struggle clear before the bomber struck the ground. They tried desperately to avoid baling out in the immediate target area, for they had heard too many stories of bomber crews killed by enraged civilians or soldiers, a fate not unknown to Luftwaffe airmen in the London blitz.” – Max Hastings, Bomber Command
“The wartime bombing of cities remains a bitterly controversial issue in the twenty-first century. More than a few writers, not all of them German or Japanese, claim that it represents an Allied war crime. . . . I believe that we should never for a moment waver in our conviction that the Allied cause in World War II, even granted the embarrassment of the association of the United States and Britain with Stalin’s tyranny, remains immeasurably morally superior to that of the Axis. I am highly critical of many aspects of the bomber offensive, especially in its last 1945 phase, when it contributed more to punishing the Germans than to defeating them. But it was undertaken with the military purpose of achieving or hastening the defeat of Germany, and later Japan. Those powers were responsible for initiating the bombing of civilians and had no possible legitimate grounds for complaint when their own peoples suffered the same fate.” – Max Hastings, Bomber Command
“Rely on the blunder factor. Sit back and wait for the Fascists to louse it up.” – Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead
“If punishment is at all proportionate to the offense, then power becomes watered. The only way you generate the proper attitude of awe and obedience is through immense and disproportionate power.” – Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead