Category: The Second World War
“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
“There damn sure ain’t anything special about a man if he can smell as bad as he does when he’s dead.” – Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead
“The root of all the liberals’ ineffectiveness comes right spang out of the desperate suspension in which they have to hold their minds.” – Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead
“It was always the men who never got anywhere that did the bitching.” – Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead
“At Ste.-Marie-du-Mont, a village just beyond Pouppeville, French baker Pierre Caldron had been awakened before sunrise by the sound of gunfire. A German officer had been billeted at Caldron’s home, but had left two days earlier. Looking out his second-floor window, Caldron caught sight of an American paratrooper moving through the yard. The soldier pointed a rifle at Caldron, but fortunately for the Frenchman, he was wearing his white baker’s hat. ‘I think he must have thought I was a medic from my hat,’ Caldron reasoned. The American moved on without firing. At 7 AM, a railway guard from the village rushed into Caldron’s house, kissed him on the cheek, and cried, ‘They’re here! They’re here! They’ve landed, and if you don’t believe me, here’s an American cigarette.’ ” – Roy Morris, Jr., “ ‘We’ll Start the War from Here’ ”
“Always turn and face the attack.” – Group Captain Adolph Gysbert “Sailor” Malan, DSO, DFC, from “Ten of My Rules for Air Fighting”
“The toughest job in the military is that of infantry platoon leader. The fresh second lieutenant who finds himself in command of 40 other infantrymen is often a newcomer to combat, younger than many of his soldiers and poorly prepared for the rigors of battlefield leadership. In spite of these obstacles, the new lieutenant must come to terms with the fact that the futures and fortunes of his men are in his hands. He must apply his theoretical training to the battlefield and learn fast. Truly, a young person can work under no greater pressure.” – John McManus, review of William L. Devitt’s Shavetail: The Odyssey of an Infantry Lieutenant in World War II
“On April 19 [1945], we occupied Oranienburg, a city of 25,000 people about 35 miles from Berlin. In the middle of town was a walled compound called Sachsenhausen. Originally built for political prisoners, it was the first concentration camp, older than Dachau. For the first time we came upon survivors—just barely surviving. The majority were women from all over Europe, Jewish and Christian. They were in deplorable condition, incoherent, afraid, crying uncontrollably because they did not know who we were, with our Polish uniforms. I tried all my languages to assure them that they were safe and in good hands now. Some Hungarian women spoke German with an accent, and I told them that we were Polish and that I was Jewish. We gave them food and water from our kitchen and told them that more would be coming. That was very gratifying. I felt that if I died the next day, it was worth it to know that at least I had saved somebody.” – Bernhard Storch (interviewed by Jon Guttman in “Polish Artilleryman on the Eastern Front”)