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December 23, 2019 - January 5, 2020
“I do think unpunctuality is a vile habit, and all my life I have tried to break myself of it.” He never succeeded.
“the most splendid, as it was the most deadly year in our long British and English story.”
Referring to 1940.
“Had Churchill been a stable and equable man,” Storr writes, “he could never have inspired the nation.
“I blub an awful lot,” he once told a private secretary, and he never apologized for his blubbing.
Churchill cried frequently.
he manifested various symptoms of depression—risk taking, excessive drinking, mood swings—not intermittently, but regularly, even daily, and for his whole life.
The authors argue that Churchill did not suffer from clinical depression, as has been widely argued.
Hitler anointed himself, the military historian Sir John Keegan wrote, “first soldier of the Reich,” yet he had earned that title by virtue of his courage during the Great War.
Hitler was a vile human being, but he served in World War 1 with great courage.
Paris was gai—a gaiety which, in retrospect, seems cruelly ironic.
As the war entered its third season, the armies of France were stagnating, even rotting.
“People who go to Italy to look at ruins won’t have to go as far as Naples and Pompeii in the future.”
the Germans were more intent on causing terror than achieving accuracy.
Germany, Japan, and Italy had signed the Tripartite Pact in Berlin, on September 27,
by early 1941, America fielded only the seventeenth most powerful army in the world, strong enough to lick Canada or Mexico should the situation arise, but no match for the Wehrmacht.
It was an unlikely relationship—the impeccably dressed tycoon and the scruffy liberal social worker—and
In just three weeks Hitler had destroyed the Yugoslavs, the Greeks, and the British Expeditionary Force.
Almost ten million Russian soldiers and at least fifteen million Russian civilians would pay with their lives in the next four years for Stalin’s bungling.
Some casualty estimates are as high as 40 million citizens of the Soviet Union.
When Molotov encouraged him to return to the Kremlin, Stalin replied, “Lenin left us a great legacy, and we, his heirs, have fucked it all up.”
Stalin was a reader of Plato, a student of the American Civil War, a man of brains as well as prescient political instinct.
He had a sense of humor, which Hitler did not. He was perhaps the most politically adroit of all the principals, Allied and Axis.
Writing about Stalin.
The Middle East was the only theater of war exposed to both Germany and Japan,
Creativity in the face of changing battlefield conditions was not a Japanese trait.
Changes in plans are, necessarily, unscripted, and were therefore studiously avoided by Japanese commanders.
Gandhi had distanced himself from reality when he advised not only Indians but also Czechs and European Jews to accept their fate:
Almost seven hundred thousand British homes had been destroyed since 1940.
Il Duce, once emperor of more than 1.2 million square miles in Africa, had lost it all.
One recording, however, was often banned: Bing Crosby’s new hit, “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.”
This song meant a great deal to my grandfather when he served in World War Two.
King replied, “Look here, General, when there’s a war they send for the sons of bitches, and that’s me.”
cabled: “Considering that Russia has lost perhaps thirty millions of citizens… they have the right as well as the power to have their western frontiers secured.”43
From a cable written by Churchill.
Churchill to proclaim to Brooke, “Trying to maintain good relations with a communist is like wooing a crocodile…. When it opens its mouth you cannot tell whether it is trying to smile, or preparing to eat you up.”
In war, several options must be kept open at the same time; if only one option is on the table, it is not an option.
Asked by Montague Browne why the family called Sarah “the Mule,” Churchill replied, “Because she’s bloody obstinate and she won’t breed.”
At the height of the Blitz in the autumn of 1940, more than 150,000 Londoners took shelter in the Underground nightly.
By war’s end, 60,000 British civilians had been killed by German bombs and rockets.
Churchill watches an artillery barrage, Italy, August 1944. (NARA)
Churchill scribbles a message to Hitler on a British artillery shell at the Rhine, winter 1945. (NARA)
Churchill, Truman, and Stalin at the Potsdam Conference, July 1945. (AP)
