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no war can be won without young men dying. Those things which are precious are saved only by sacrifice.”
Code name was MARKET-GARDEN. The objective was to get British Second Army, with the Guards Armored Division in the van, through Holland and across the Rhine
his decision that to attack was his only option. He provided not only brains but personal leadership. “Follow me” was his code.
When it does come to a member of a rifle company in the front line, it is almost impossible to make him stay there and do his duty. His motivation has to be internal. Comradeship is by far the strongest motivator—not wanting to let his buddies down, in the positive sense, not wanting to appear a coward in front of the men he loves and respects above all others in the negative sense. Discipline won’t do it, because discipline relies on punishment, and there is no punishment the Army can inflict on a front-line soldier worse than putting him into the front line.
“the tyranny of the present” in a foxhole. The past and, more important, the future do not exist. He explains that there is “more time for thinking and more loneliness in foxholes at the front than in secure homes, and time is measured in other ways than by clocks and calendars.”
even the most horrible army jail looks appealing. What matters is living through the next minute.
souvenirs appeared to give the soldier some assurance of his future beyond the destructive environment of the present. They represented a promise that he might survive.”
soldiers learn more often than civilians ever do that everything external is replaceable, while life is not.”
The Allies were also badly deceived about the German will to fight,
The result of all this was the biggest single battle on the Western front in World War II and the largest engagement ever fought by the U.S. Army. The human losses were staggering: of the 600,000 American soldiers involved, almost 20,000 were killed, another 20,000 captured, and 40,000 wounded.
Hitler had counted on bad weather to negate the Allies’ biggest single advantage, air power
On the morning of December 17, Eisenhower made the critical decisions of the entire battle, and did so without consulting anyone outside his own staff. He declared the crossroads city of Bastogne as the place that had to be held no matter what.
Not even in Vietnam, not even in the 1991 Gulf War, was the U.S. Army capable of moving so many men and so much equipment so quickly.
When Easy set out to meet the Wehrmacht on the last, greatest German offensive, the company was under strength, inadequately clothed, and insufficiently armed.
in the movie Doctor Zhivago, I saw troops crossing snow-covered fields, being shot into by cannon from the edge of the woods, and men flying through the air. Those scenes seemed very real to me.”
The moral superiority was based on better training methods, better selection methods for command positions, ultimately on a more open army reflecting a more open society. Democracy proved better able to produce young men who could be made into superb soldiers than Nazi Germany.
The 101st Airborne was the most famous and admired of all the eighty-nine divisions the United States Army put into the Second World War. Ever since, men have worn that Screaming Eagle on their left shoulders with the greatest of pride.
Speirs’s philosophy was to avoid the unnecessary but to do properly and with snap the required.
This was the Third Reich, this was the New Order: Work till you died. With cold deliberation the Germans had enslaved the populace of Europe.”
Adolf Eichmann, wearing the uniform of a Luftwaffe corporal in a camp near Berchtesgaden. He managed to escape before he was detected, got to Argentina with his family and lived well until 1960 when Israeli agents discovered his whereabouts, captured him in a daring commando raid, brought him to Israel for trial, and hanged him.)
Pegasus Bridge,
Among his New York Times bestsellers are D-Day, June 6, 1944; Citizen Soldiers; Band of Brothers; Undaunted Courage; and Nothing Like It in the World.
