World War II

"The root of the trouble lies, I think, in the military situation. We do not like this unprecedented parade of bad news; we don't like to get shoved around all over the world; so we are complaining bitterly about almost everything. But neither do the British like it, and neither do the Russians, nor the Chinese, nor the Dutch, who have had to take a lot more than we have. Adverse criticism of our allies will not help our military situation. It does no good to complain now about Singapore; that milk has been well and truly spilt. It does even less good to meditate on King George III, or the last World War, or the war debts, or the unfortunate accents and manners of certain officials sent out here from Whitehall. I have not read any adverse criticism in the British press about Pearl Harbor (what would we have said if they had got caught like that at Alexandria or Gibraltar or Scapa Flow?); I have heard no attacks in the House of Commons on our naval dispositions or on the size of our expeditionary forces; I have heard of very few recriminations about our failure to be ready for war despite our years of criticizing British unpreparedness."

"On the eve of World War II, Japan was a thriving industrialized power of about seventy million people. The nation had become a major manufacturer of consumer goods, but, by the early 1930s, the military-dominated central government was increasingly replacing the market economy with features of a totalitarian command economy, including strong government control and planning of production. A growing sector of production was being devoted to war-related industries. Additionally, during 1934-36, the electric power and oil industries were nationalized, and in 1939 rice rationing was introduced. By the end of the decade, Japan was on a war footing driven by wartime economy."

"Of the 10,583,755 tons of Japanese naval and merchant vessels sunk during World War II, 9,736,068 tons were sunk by United States forces, 5,320,094 tons being accounted for by United States submarines alone. Our submarines were doing to the Japanese in the Pacific what the German U-boats were doing to Allied shipping in the Atlantic; but the industrial power of the United States was almost limitless, while that of Japan was not. Until the closing months of 1942 the German submarines continually reduced the available total of Allied tonnage, but thereafter both by the improved effectiveness of antisubmarine measures and the stupendous output of American and British shipyards, Allied shipping constantly increased. Although approximately 23,351,000 tons of Allied shipping were sunk by German U-boats between 1939 and 1945, new construction reached the total of 42,485,000 tons so that the final balance sheet in the Atlantic showed a net gain of 19,134,000 tons. Japanese losses, not being offset by comparable new construction, were in large part final. Thus as the enemy's links with his extended positions and overseas sources of logistic strength in the Pacific were being weakened by our submarines, his very hold upon those conquests was challenged by the industrial productivity of the United States."

"I have heard it often- that if the conquered peoples of Europe do not like our democracy the way it is, they can go fly a kite. It is absolutely true that a great majority of us found the old life very comfortable and would like to go back to the "normality" that produced it; but... we destroyed that "normality" trying to save our lives and cannot now go back to it any more than we can turn 1943 back into 1938. Nor can we tell the conquered peoples of Europe to go fly a kite if they do not like our democracy, because we need their help and will need it desperately before the war is over, and in order to get it we shall have to remove the doubts that are in their minds. That means that the people of America must look forward and not backward. That means that we must prove that our democracy is just as efficient as the totalitarian creed of our enemies. That means that we must make democracy live up to its promises. "Most governments," said Abraham Lincoln, "have been based on the denial of the equal rights of men; ours began by affirming those rights. We made the experiment, and the fruit is before us. Look at it- think of it." The democracy of Lincoln is not dead. It has not lost its revolutionary fervor. It has not lost its appeal to the men of the world. Our problem is to prove that we really believe in it."

"Unlike World War One, then, the Second War—Hitler's War—was a near-universal experience. And it lasted a long time—nearly six years for those countries (Britain, Germany) that were engaged in it from beginning to end. In Czechoslovakia it began earlier still, with the Nazi occupation of the Sudetenland in October 1938. In eastern Europe and the Balkans it did not even end with the defeat of Hitler, since occupation (by the Soviet army) and civil war continued long after the dismemberment of Germany."

"It gave me a good start in life. I decided that if I could learn to weld like a man, I could do anything it took to make a living."

"To a striking degree, the way the United States conducted World War II was a consequence of Roosevelt’s own experience as the assistant secretary of the Navy during World War I—a period that made him appreciate the benefits of overwhelming the enemy with machinery, as well as the risks of ground warfare. When he traveled to France in 1918 to tour the front lines, the battlefield disgusted him. The conditions for soldiers were too crowded, and he wrote in his diary that “the smell of dead horses” offended his “sensitive naval” nose. Instead, he fixated on logistics and material: the deployment of large naval guns, transported on land via train carriages, to batter German lines; a push for rapid advances in aircraft and bomb technology. He promoted a plan to thwart German U-boat attacks by creating a minefield across the entire North Sea rather than putting Allied ships at risk. (The scheme was not complete when the war ended.) Roosevelt’s work during this period also showed him the value of working closely with trusted international partners such as Britain and France. Strong alliances, he came to learn, were how modern wars were won. Unlike many Americans, Roosevelt did not become an isolationist after World War I. He understood that aggressive authoritarian regimes had to be stopped and believed that the U.S. could protect many of its own interests via machinery and alliances. He was so wedded to these two ideas that, during World War II, he provided Britain and the Soviet Union with massive amounts of aid without expecting any repayment. So much better, Roosevelt believed, to strengthen U.S. allies and let them do much of the land fighting. This approach led to one of his greatest successes as a war leader."

"At the war's end, the death toll of the peoples of the Soviet Union numbered some 27 million. Twenty-seven million people were killed, murdered, bludgeoned, starved or left to die as a result of forced labour by National Socialist Germany. Fourteen million of them were civilians. No one had to mourn more victims in this war than the peoples of the then Soviet Union. And yet these millions are not as deeply etched in our collective memory as their suffering and our responsibility demand. This war was a crime – a monstrous, criminal war of aggression and annihilation."

"These are the thing we are really talking about when we speak of "our way of life"; and these are precisely the things that are at stake in this war. For the Germans have denied every democratic and Christian principle that has been handed down to us and preserved and developed in this great republic. The Greeks gave us the idea of intellectual liberalism, Plato the conception of reason, yet the Nazis deny their right to exist. Christ gave us the doctrine of love and mercy, but the Germans scorn Christ as a Jew and scoff at love and mercy. The French confirmed our faith in democracy with their cry of "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity," yet the Germans dismiss this as a hypocritical slogan to be opposed, as Hitler's pal Hans von Bülow has said, by their "Prussian realities of Infantry, Cavalry, and Artillery." The Romans and British gave us our conception of the "rule of law and the sanctity of treaties," and we have known for years what the totalitarians thought of these fundamental virtues. We in the United States have given all these honorable things a worthy home and have proved to the world what can be done by heroic men whose minds are free to question and experiment, to seek truth according to their own conscience, and to listen sympathetically to the most unorthodox views."

"A great number of people in this country do not even take the Atlantic Charter seriously. They think it is some jiggery-pokery trumped up by Roosevelt and Churchill to propagandize their meeting at sea in 1941. They do not see it for what it should be: an extension of the Rights of Man, and another logical step in the fulfillment of the purpose of this nation. The scornful conception of the Atlantic Charter and of all other attempts to state our purpose will not do. For unless the spirit of the people is behind these declarations, they will have no true value. The essence of patriotism is in believing in the principles of America. Either you believe in the equalitarian idea behind this republic or you do not. Either you believe in Lincoln's "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" or you do not. Either you believe in liberty, justice, and right, or you do not. If you do, then our appeal to the revolutionary spirit of the world will be heard, but if you do not, all the Atlantic Charters in the world will not inspire the conquered nations to fight for principles that we proclaim but do not follow."

"I wonder when I hear people scoffing at the four freedoms and wondering whether wars, after all, ever really settle anything. Do we, even now, understand the revolutionary nature of this war? Are we putting everything to the test; will it help win the war? Are we clear on the enormity of our task? Do we realize the size of the stakes?"

"The World War that reached its brutal end in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was fought among the wealthiest and most powerful of nations. Their civilizations had given the world great cities and magnificent art. Their thinkers had advanced ideas of justice and harmony and truth. And yet, the war grew out of the same base instinct for domination or conquest that had caused conflicts among the simplest tribes; an old pattern amplified by new capabilities and without new constraints. In the span of a few years, some 60 million people would die -- men, women, children no different than us, shot, beaten, marched, bombed, jailed, starved, gassed to death."

"Those Americans who went to Spain to fight Franco and stave off World War II have never minded being called "premature anti-fascists." They were proud of the label."

"The sirens blow, and death is in the air Still at her post the trusty Captain stands, And counts her change, and scampers up the stair,As brave a sailor as the King commands."

"Nova Lee Holbrook, on how her experience in war work was invaluable."

"We have long memories. We have developed a relative immunity to the endless barrage of propaganda, slander and outright lies that has been laid upon us. And especially, we are immune to the Big Lie that destroyed Spain and which Hitler developed to such a point of perfection that it was necessary for millions of human beings to die to achieve the defeat of the Axis. Yet the Big Lie survives and flourishes mightily in our own country today. As it is promulgated daily, hourly and every minute of the day through every medium of communication, so it must be answered- until our own people see it for what it is and explode it in their own good time."

"World War II, at least in Europe, may have had some moral justification, though there can be some legitimate debate as to whether the US and its freedoms were ever really threatened, and certainly many of the Americans who died in that war saw their struggle as worthy, so that we may at least in good conscience honor their deaths."

"There are many sites around the world that chronicle this war -- memorials that tell stories of courage and heroism; graves and empty camps that echo of unspeakable depravity. Yet in the image of a mushroom cloud that rose into these skies, we are most starkly reminded of humanity’s core contradiction; how the very spark that marks us as a species -- our thoughts, our imagination, our language, our tool-making, our ability to set ourselves apart from nature and bend it to our will -- those very things also give us the capacity for unmatched destruction."

"World War II gave King the opportunity of putting in practice another conviction. His earliest studies of the Napoleonic campaigns had indicated to him that the great weakness of the French military system of the period was that it required the detailed supervision of Napoleon. His belief that one must do the opposite, and train subordinates for independent action, had been confirmed and strengthened through his years of association with Admiral Mayo. During World War II King would jokingly maintain that he managed to keep well by "doing nothing that I can get anybody to do for me," but in all seriousness he could not have survived the four years of war without having made full use of the decentralization of authority into the hands of subordinate commanders, who were considered competent unless they proved themselves otherwise, and who were expected to think, decide, and act for themselves. Upon Nimitz in the Pacific, Edwards, Cooke and Horne in Washington, Ingersoll in the Atlantic, Stark in London, Halsey, Spruance, Kinkaid, Hewitt, Ingram and many other flag officers at sea, King relied with confidence and was not disappointed."

"The second paragraph of the Declaration continues: "That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness." This clearly is the very antithesis of the totalitarian belief. Those governments were not instituted to secure these individual rights for their people. Neither the Nazis nor the Japanese militarists nor the Fascists of Italy derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed," and their concentration camps and common graves are full of people who even dared to suggest that the people had any right to criticize let alone to alter or abolish, the existing regimes."

"Why, then, all the sniping over here? We are not doing anybody any favors in this war. This is no exercise in knight-errantry. The Russians and the British are doing just as much for us as we are doing for them. They need our weapons and what men we can send; we need their help, and we need it desperately if we are ever to win this war. If most of the people who are doing most of he complaining had their own way with our foreign policy, we might not have had any allies today, and unless we had wanted to connive with the Japs at the destruction of China, the Netherlands Indies, and the British Empire, we should still have been attacked at Pearl Harbor. There was only one honorable course on December 7, and we chose it; there is only one honorable course now, and that is to be helpful or to be quiet."

"Send us more Japs!"

"But we must understand that these are not permanent things. Democracy is no heirloom to be possessed and passed on like a Governor Winthrop desk. It is "an endowment like life that must be purchased in every generation." Sympathy and reason and true democracy can be destroyed overnight. They can be destroyed by a conqueror, as in Norway; they can be taken from us by our own selfishness, as in France. Every bureaucrat who tampers with freedom of the press, every newspaper publisher who willfully suppresses or distorts or minimizes the truth; every unreasonable citizen who nurses his own prejudices and refuses to listen sympathetically to the other fellow's point of view, is, we must clearly understand, endangering these principles for which we are fighting. Never before in the history of the republic has it been so important that we understand this fact, for in time of war these principles are often threatened at the top by a small minority of officials who would curtail our freedom to know, and at the bottom by a number of people who, even in the face of the enemy, cannot shelve their own prejudices or abandon the interests of their particular groups."

""We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable Rights; that among these, are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." Could anything be more in conflict with the fundamental philosophy of the totalitarian states? These states do not agree that there are any truths in this paragraph; they deny most vehemently and have taken up the sword to prove that all men are not created equal, but that they, the master races, have the right and duty to dictate to the lesser men of the world; they do not concede that man has any "unalienable Rights" except his right to bear arms and carry out the will of the God-state; and they deny him not only his liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but his life as well."

"To King, Leahy, Nimitz, and naval officers in general, it had always seemed that the defeat of Japan could be accomplished by sea and air power alone, without the necessity of actual invasion by the Japanese home islands by ground troops. In 1942, 1943 and 1944, while attention of most of the Allied political and military leaders was focused on Europe, and while the war in Japan was left largely to King to manage with what forces he could muster, the Pacific war had proceeded largely upon this assumption. With the approaching victory in Europe a larger amount of attention was concentrated on the Pacific by people who had not previously been too greatly concerned with the problems of that war, and an increasing amount of high-priced thought was devoted to it, some of which seemed to King not strictly pertinent. From the time of the Teheran Conference there had been the political consideration of Soviet intervention in the war against Japan, and the Army had been convinced that the use of ground troops would be necessary. Upon Marshall's insistence, which also reflected MacArthur's views, the Joint Chiefs had prepared plans for landings in Kyushu and eventually in the Tokyo plain. King and Leahy did not like the idea, but as unanimous decisions were necessary in the Joint Chiefs meetings, they reluctantly acquiesced, feeling that in the end sea power would accomplish the defeat of Japan, as proved to be the case."

"The last seven months of 1944 had witnessed incredible progress both in Europe and the Pacific. The long-awaited invasion of Normandy had taken place. The Marianas Islands were in our hands and we had returned to the Philippines, well in advance of even the most optimistic schedules. In the Battle of the Philippine Sea and the Battle for Leyte Gulf a great part of the Japanese fleet had been disposed of forever and the remainder had been made ineffective for some time to come. Although the war was still far from won, it was at least approaching its final stages on both sides of the world."

"I was there."

"It might have been the greatest lost weapon of World War II. Major-General JFC Fuller, the man credited with developing modern armored warfare in the 1920s, called failure to use it "the greatest blunder of the whole war." He even suggested that British and American tank divisions could have overrun Germany before the Russians – if it had been deployed, that is."

"All aid to the Allies short of war."

"Hitler is striking with all the terrible force at his command. His is a desperate gamble, and the stakes are nothing less than domination of the whole human race. If Hitler wins in Europe — the strength of the British and French armies and navies is forever broken — the United States will find itself alone in a barbaric world — a world ruled by Nazis, with ‘spheres of influence’ assigned to their totalitarian allies. However different the dictatorships may be, racially, they all agree on one primary objective: ‘Democracy must be wiped from the face of the earth.’... There is nothing shameful in our desire to stay out of war, to save our youth from the dive bombers and the flame throwing tanks in the unutterable hell of modern warfare. But is there not an evidence of suicidal insanity in our failure to help those who now stand between us and the creators of this hell?"

"What a shambles! If only our enemies knew what a mess we have made of it! Beneš was a fool not to fight!"

"I followed the German Army into Paris that June... and on June 19 got wind of where Hitler was going to lay down his terms for the armistice.... It was to be on the same spot where the German Empire had capitulated to France and her allies on November 11, 1918: in the little clearing in the woods of Compiègne. There the Nazi warlord would get his revenge.... Late on the afternoon of June 19 I drove out there and found German Army engineers... pulling the [railroad] car [where the war ended in 1918] out to the tracks in the center of the clearing on the exact spot, they said, where it had stood at 5 A.M. on November, 1918, when at the dictation of [[Ferdinand Foch|[French Marshal Ferdinand] Foch]] the German emissaries put their signatures to the armistice. And so was that on the afternoon of June 21 I stood by the edge of the forest at Compiègne to observe the latest and greatest of Hitler’s triumphs.... I look at the expression in Hitler’s face. I am but fifty yards from him and see him through my glasses as though he were directly in front of me. I have seen that face many times at the great moments of his life. But today! It is afire with scorn, anger, hate, revenge, triumph."

"France has lost a battle, but France has not lost the war."

"Many people, no doubt, honestly believe that they are only giving away the interests of Czechoslovakia, whereas I fear we shall find that we have deeply compromised, and perhaps fatally endangered, the safety and even the independence of Great Britain and France.... I foresee and foretell that the policy of submission will carry with it restrictions upon the freedom of speech and debate in Parliament, on public platforms, and discussions in the Press."

"Fog meant no airplanes, so we could relax. Yesterday they had been active all day, bombing Pinell behind us, Corbera and the road to Gandesa on our right, Mora and our lines of communication. We could see them from the hilltop, cruising slowly in formidable array and with damnable slowness over the terrain, sowing their seed up and down, back and forth over large square areas, and for hours the air was full of smoke and dust and trembling with the constant drumming of the explosive. Our 'pom-pom' guns sniped at them pitiably. This is a long, light anti-aircraft gun that was fairly effective, but we had s few that they paid no attention to them. Seventy-five planes merely sailed with exasperating ease through their sparse fire; then when ten of ours appeared they had to run a gauntlet of fire that blackened the sky for hundreds of acres. It was heart-breaking, and you could thank France for that; you could thank England and its Non-Intervention Committee; you could thank Italy and Germany, and last but not least you could thank the good old U.S.A. and its 'Neutrality' Act, that permitted the sale of American-made munitions to Italy and Germany for transhipment to Franco."

"What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, "This was their finest hour.""

"I have, myself, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once again able to defend our island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone."

"How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing. It seems still more impossible that a quarrel which has already been settled in principle should be the subject of war."

"We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.""

"The gratitude of every home in our Island, in our Empire, and indeed throughout the world, except in the abodes of the guilty, goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of the World War by their prowess and by their devotion. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few."

"I believe there is sincerity and good will on both sides. My main purpose has been to work for the pacification of Europe.... The question of Czechoslovakia is the latest and perhaps the most dangerous [problem]. Now that we have got past it I feel that it may be possible to make further progress along the road to sanity."

"They had started at twenty thousand feet, mixed it up till you couldn't tell what they were doing, and the scream of their propellors as they dived sounded in our ears as though they were directly overhead. Three went down in flames, one after the other, with two parachutes blooming suddenly like spring flowers in the air, and floating slowly down. You could see the men hauling on the shrouds to guide the chutes, swinging wildly from side to side like pendulums as their own planes, Fascists, dived at them and tried to machine-gun them. "The bastards!" Aaron said. "Look at them, the sons-of-bitches!" Two of our planes spiralled slowly around the descending pilots to protect them. "This is one hell of a war," Aaron said."

"More and more we felt that only a resolution of the European situation could save Spain, if Spain was to be saved. The Blum Government, at least, had recognized the importance of Spain to French security. The Daladier outfit was hand in glove, not only with its own brand of Fascists, but with the foreign gang as well. (Class is thicker than nationality.) "Why doesn't France do something?" became a cliché. "Don't they see that if Hitler and his little pal take over Spain, France will be strangled on three fronts?" Well, either they didn't see it or they didn't care, which was more likely. The French people were with us heart and soul; they had given thousands of their best sons, millions of their money; the French people's rulers were against us. They bore no ill-will toward the Fascists; they were Fascist."

"Comrades, Red Army and Red Navy men, commanders and political instructors, men and women guerrillas! The whole world is looking to you as a force capable of destroying the brigand hordes of German invaders. The enslaved peoples of Europe under the yoke of the German invaders are looking to you as their liberators. A great mission of liberation has fallen to your lot. Be worthy of this mission! The war you are waging is a war of liberation, a just war."

"There is no doubt that the absence of a second front in Europe considerably relieves the position of the German Army, nor can there be any doubt that the appearance of a second front on the Continent of Europe—and undoubtedly this will appear in the near future—will essentially relieve the position of our armies to the detriment of the German Army."

"Now may God bless you all, and may he defend the right. For it is evil things that we will be fighting against—brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution—and against them I am certain that the right will prevail."

"Regarding the conduct of troops towards the Bolshevistic system, vague ideas are still prevalent in many cases. The most essential aim of war against the Jewish-Bolshevistic system is a complete destruction of their means of power and the elimination of Asiatic influence from the European culture. In this connection the troops are facing tasks that exceed the one-sided routine of soldiering. The soldier in the Eastern territories is not merely a fighter according to the rules of the art of war but also a bearer of ruthless national ideology and the avenger of bestialities which have been inflicted upon German and racially related nations. Therefore, the soldier must have full understanding for the necessity of a severe but just revenge on subhuman Jewry. The Army has to aim at another purpose, i.e., the annihilation of revolts in the hinterland, which, as experience proves, have always been caused by Jews."

"Ни шагу назад! / Ni shagu nazad!"

"What place does the possibility of a second front occupy in the Soviet estimates of the current situation? A most important place; one might say a place of first-rate importance."

"We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down."