More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
David G. Wright
using as their criterion of success not the number of men who returned to combat, as Hastings had done, but the number that returned and performed reasonably well for at least four missions.
the cure rate improved, but only when patients were assured that they would never again have to fly combat missions. True healing, Air Force doctors would eventually discover, only occurred “in an atmosphere of safety.”
What stands out in Eighth Air Force history is not the number of men who broke in combat but the overwhelmingly larger number who did not. The most puzzling question in warfare is how fighting men stay the course. What inspires them to fight when every core instinct calls upon them to flee? What possesses rational men to act so irrationally?
“Courage,” Lord Moran shrewdly observed, “is a moral quality; it is not a chance gift of nature like an aptitude for games. It is a cold choice between two alternatives, the fixed resolve not to quit; an act of renunciation which must be made not once but many times, by the power of the will. Courage is will power.”
there had to be inspired leadership to buttress morale, the most important of all the war-winning qualities.
fear is not cowardice. Cowardice is “something a man does. What passes though his mind is his own affair,” Lord Moran wrote.
