All that technical expertise isn’t worth a damn if you don’t get the best out of people, though. . . . These were leaders who saw strength in ordinary people and showed them how to...

To me it was real war and my life was at stake, and I believe that all those clandestine spy games we played as children helped when the Occupation came.

I am a dash man and not a miler, and it is probable that I will never write a novel. So far the novels of this war have had too much of the strength, maturity...

There’s nothing funny about war. Well, aside from this joke Orafoura told me: What did WWI say to WWII? I wish I could tell you the punch line, but the restaurant was so noisy that...

Wonderful?” wrote J.O. Young in his diary. “To stand cheering, crying, waving your hat and acting like a damn fool in general. No one who has spent all but 16 days of the this war...

It had been his opinion that it might serve his country if the Chinese and his men saw that he was not afraid to die. For the comprehension of our age and the part treason...

We love WWII because the cause was so obviously just, because you can’t be a good person and say you wouldn’t fight against an evil like that. It was so black and white on our...

They were probably shot down with guns.

On the eighth day, the forty-year-old hobo said to Billy: “This ain’t bad. I can be comfortable anywhere.””You can?” said Billy.On the ninth day the hobo died. So it goes. His last words were: “You...

O Father, console them and please spare our country from that terrible disaster, not because we are any better but only out of grace. And if it has to be different, then teach me to...

Morale was deteriorating and it was all Yossarian’s fault. The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them.

They are the typical product of the structure of the German Lager: if one offers a position of privilege to a few individuals in a state of slavery, exacting in exchange the betrayal of a...

The dangers of the sea should always take precedenceover the violence of the enemy’Rear-Admiral Ben Bryant CB, DSO and two bars, DSC

The War Department in Washington briefly weighed more ambitious schemes to relieve the Americans on a large scale before it was too late. But by Christmas of 1941, Washington had already come to regard Bataan...

Finally, I wish to remember the millions of Allied servicemen and prisoners of war who lived the story of the Second World War. Many of these men never came home; many others returned bearing emotional...

Food in wartime Britain, she had to admit, was hardly inspiring.

I had no real communication with anyone at the time, so I was totally dependent on God. And he never failed me.

The Germans don’t want us, or did you not get that when they started dragging people into the streets and killing them? We can’t be Jews and Germans, not any more. You have to get...

When I got home from my war, my uncle Dan clapped me on the back, and he bellowed, ‘You’re a MAN now!’I damn near killed my first German.

I let them do some simple arithmetic. In a group of one hundred people, how many assholes are there? How many fathers who humiliate their children? How many morons whose breath stinks like rotten meat...

A day came when I should have died,and after than nothing seemed very important, so I stayed as I am, without regret separated from the normal human condition.

It is man who kills, man who creates or suffers injustice; it is no longer man who, having lost all restraint, shares his bed with a corpse. Whoever waits for his neighbor to die in...

At this period, too, Leningraders resorted to their most desperate food substitutes, scraping dried glue from the underside of wallpaper and boiling up shoes and belts. (Tannery processes had changed, they discovered, since the days...

As we drew nearer I saw a cathedral like a crown on the head of a city. In its white walls every window glinted in the sun. Lincoln! Of such places is England made. -“No...

Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line...

It was nearly ten years since the peace though her memories of the war still felt fresh.

Again, a conversation with the doctor. We always come back to the same point: “The church may not mix in politics.” he says. And I tell him that when you are a Christian and profess...

Caleb tossed him an explosive and Japhet lunged to catch it before it hit the ground. He glared but Caleb didn’t notice. Instead, he started to whistle I didn’t raise my boy to be a...

The occupying Russians, when they discovered that we were Americans, embraced us and congratulated us on the complete desolation our planes had wrought. We accepted their congratulations with good grace and proper modesty, but I...

Sturm, Swung, Wucht

Only victors have stories to tell,we the vanquished were then thought ofas cowards and weaklings whose memoriesand fears should not be remembered.

The living are more demanding; the dead can wait.

I was amongst them – the first female pilot who had got admission to the Sturmoviks…Since my childhood I’d been lucky enough to meet good people. Wherever I studied, wherever I worked I would meet...

The collective sign of relief heaved on V-J Day ought to have inspired Hollywood to release a flood of “happily ever after” films. But some victors didn’t feel too good about their spoils. They’d seen...

If seeing her an hour before her lastWeak cough into all blackness I could yetBe held by chalk-white walls- The Consumptive. Belsen 1945

Escapers were the cream of the crop.

(Thinking while being interrogated by the Germans) You big shots think you can decide on my life, but I have news for you: you can’t touch a hair on my head without the will of...

She could do anything with dynamite, except eat it.

If you live your life in fear and had the opportunity to change. . .could you muster the strength?

Odd, don’t you think? I have seen war, and invasions and riots. I have heard of massacres and brutalities beyond imagining, and I have kept my faith in the power of civilization to bring men...

I may be a criminal lunatic, but I’m an AMERICAN criminal lunatic!

All the nut eaters and food faddists I have ever known, died early after a long period of senile decay – Winston Churchill

I don’t know much about psychoanalysis, but I don’t believe that we can blame our actions on our upbringings. If we could, then nobody would be responsible for anything they do.

I once asked an old Japanese man why Japan decided to team up with Germany during WWII, and do you know what he told me? Well, you would if you speak Japanese, which I don’t.

Not every loss was confirmed by an officer at the door. Nor a telegram with the power to sink a fleet. Loss, often the worst kind, also arrived through the deafening quiet of an absence.

It was now December 7, 1941; the date that Franklin D. Roosevelt was destined to declare would live in infamy.

Yesterday the paper had a “short” summary of the places where Jews are not allowed! I can better mention where they are still aloud: “in their houses and in the streets!” God, punish those who...

Obsessed with Christine to the end, his last statement as he left his cell was, ‘to kill is the final possession’. But Muldowney was wrong. He had never possessed Christine; the resistance burning within her...

I…” He struggled to answer. “When everything was quiet, I went up to the corridor and the curtain in the livingroom was open just a crack… I could see outside. I watched, only for a...

His idleness was his refuge, and in this he was like many others in [occupied] France in that period; laziness became political.