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Their companies must be like a big family and they must be the head of the family,
morphine Syrettes, “one for pain and two for eternity.”
The Ten Commandments say, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ There is something wrong with the Ten Commandments, or there is something wrong with the rules of the world today. They teach us the Ten Commandments and then they send us out to war. It just doesn’t make sense.”
H-Hour (0630, an hour after first light and an hour after dead low tide).
“It was the sort of behavior I expected of myself.”
although Winters was outnumbered five to one and was attacking an entrenched enemy, he and his men prevailed. They did so because they used tactics they had learned in training,
A. J. Liebling, who covered the invasion for the New Yorker,
“Lt. Leo Van de Voort said, ‘Let’s go, goddamn, there ain’t no use staying here, we’re all going to get killed!’ The first thing he did was to run up to a gun emplacement and throw a grenade in the embrasure. He returned with five or six prisoners. So then we thought, hell, if he can do that, why can’t we. That’s how we got off the beach.”
the simplest truth of war: “Generals are expendable just as is any other item in an army.”
“But there was one element of the attack they could not parry. . . . I am now firmly convinced that our supporting naval fire got us in; that without that gunfire we positively could not have crossed the beaches.”
Soldiers who encounter a wounded man (often an enemy) become tender, caring angels of mercy. The urge to kill and the urge to save sometimes run together simultaneously.
Robert Capa of Life magazine,
that line in ‘The Red Badge of Courage’ about how the soldiers were always busy, always deeply absorbed in their individual combats.
The most extreme experience a human being can go through is being a combat infantryman, and nowhere in World War II was the combat more extreme than at Omaha in the early morning hours of June 6.
The men at the shingle could have been ordered to fall back to the beach for withdrawal, but if they had obeyed they would have been slaughtered—Omaha Beach was one of the few battlegrounds in history in which the greater danger lay to the rear.
On Omaha, the situation was so bad that the evacuation of the wounded was toward the enemy. This may have been unique in military history.
Most Germans did not know it yet, but they had lost the battle.
tendency of the men who had made it up from the hell on the beach to the comparative quiet of the high ground to feel that they had triumphed—and
Allied high command had been right to insist that “there be practically no experienced troops in the initial waves that hit that beach, because an experienced infantryman is a terrified infantryman, and they wanted guys like me who were more amazed than they were frozen with fear,
“In war, the best rank is either private or colonel or better, but those ranks in between, hey, those people have got to be leaders.”
It reminded me of a scene in Petroushka.”
the two divisions could not be committed until Hitler gave the order, and Hitler was still sleeping.
Hitler slept until noon.
“They are landing here—and here: just where we expected them!” Goering did not correct this palpable lie.
Hitler was more eager to hit London than to fight a defensive war. He had a weapon to do it with, the V-1.
The V-1 was a jet-powered plane carrying a one-ton warhead.
Liberty Bell. It had last been tolled on July 8, 1835, for the funeral of Chief Justice John Marshall. At 0700 on D-Day, Philadelphia mayor Bernard Samuel tapped the bell with a wooden mallet,
Churchill was fond of saying that the first casualty of war is truth.
In 1940, Gertrude Stein had fled Paris when the Germans entered. “They all said, ‘Leave,’ ” Stein wrote in 1945, “and I said to Alice Toklas, ‘Well, I don’t know—it would be awfully uncomfortable and I am fussy about my food.’ ”
In Amsterdam, Anne Frank heard the news over the wireless in her attic hideaway. “ ‘This is D-Day,’ came the announcement over the English news,” she wrote in her diary. Then, in English, she wrote, “This is the day.” She went on, “The invasion has begun! The English gave the news. . . . We discussed it over breakfast at nine o’clock: Is this just a trial landing like Dieppe two years ago?”
the first use of D for Day, H for Hour was in Field Order No. 8, of the First Army, A.E.F., issued on Sept. 20, 1918,
the British wanted to fight World War II with gadgets, techniques, and espionage, rather than men, to outthink more than outfight the Germans; and that the Americans wanted to fight it out in a head-to-head encounter with the Wehrmacht.
the performance of the Wehrmacht’s high command, middle-ranking officers, and junior officers was just pathetic. The cause is simply put: they were afraid to take the initiative.
The men fighting for democracy were able to make quick, on-site decisions and act on them; the men fighting for the totalitarian regime were not.
not one German officer reacted appropriately to the challenge of D-Day.
