Inferno Quotes

“The street is no longer measured by meters but by corpses ... Stalingrad is no longer a town. By day it is an enormous cloud of burning, blinding smoke; it is a vast furnace lit by the reflection of the flames. And when night arrives, one of those scorching howling bleeding nights, the dogs plunge into the Volga and swim desperately to gain the other bank. The nights of Stalingrad are a terror for them. Animals flee this hell; the hardest stones cannot bear it for long; only men endure.”
― Max Hastings, Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

“In Soviet thinking the concept of economy of force has little place. Whereas to an Englishman the taking of a sledgehammer to crack a nut is a wrong decision and a sign of mental immaturity...in Russian eyes the cracking of nuts is clearly what sledgehammers are for.”
― Max Hastings, All Hell Let Loose: The World at War, 1939-1945

“it is a constant of history that nations which start wars find it very hard to stop them.”
― Max Hastings, Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

“Historically, and notably in the 1905 Russo-Japanese war, the Japanese army’s conduct towards defeated enemies had been characterised by mercy. The ruling Tokyo “control group” changed all that, instilling a culture of ruthlessness indistinguishable from barbarism into its armed forces; in 1934 the Ministry of War published a pamphlet which ennobled conflict as “the father of creation and mother of culture. Rivalry for supremacy does for the state what struggle against adversity does for the individual.” The Allies now began to discover the significance of this merciless vision for those who fell into enemy hands. Before”
― Max Hastings, Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

“Poles had a dark joke in 1944, about a bird which falls out of the sky into a cowpat, to be rescued by a cat; its moral, they said, was that “Not everyone who gets you out of the shit is necessarily your friend.”
― Max Hastings, Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

“Until 1943, when Stalingrad and bombing began to change everything, most German civilians save those who lost loved ones found the conflict a numbing presence rather than a trauma.”
― Max Hastings, Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

“The Russian armies drove forward in the same desperate fashion in which they had retreated in the previous year, numbed by daily horrors. Victory at Kursk meant little to a soldier such as Private Ivanov of the 70th Army, who wrote despairingly to his family in Irkutsk: “Death, and only death awaits me. Death is everywhere here. I shall never see you again because death, terrible, ruthless and merciless is going to cut short my young life. Where shall I find strength and courage to live through all this? We are all terribly dirty, with long hair and beards, in rags. Farewell for ever.” Private Samokhvalov was in equally wretched condition: “Papa and Mama, I will describe to you my situation, which is bad. I am concussed. Very many of my unit have been killed—the senior lieutenant, the regimental commander, most of my comrades; now it must be my turn. Mama, I have not known such fear in all my eighteen years. Mama, please pray to God that I live. Mama, I read your prayer … I must admit frankly that at home I did not believe in God, but now I think of him forty times a day. I don’t know where to hide my head as I write this. Papa and Mama, farewell, I will never see you again, farewell, farewell, farewell.”
― Max Hastings, Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

“total of around 300,000 Russian soldiers are believed to have been killed by their own commanders—more than the entire toll of British troops who perished at enemy hands in the course of the war.”
― Max Hastings, Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

“In the course of the war, 168,000 Soviet citizens were formally sentenced to death and executed for alleged cowardice or desertion;”
― Max Hastings, Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

“In action, there was a fine line between courage which heartened others and bluster which incurred their contempt.”
― Max Hastings, Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

“Many more Nazi battlefield triumphs lay ahead, but some generals privy to their Führer’s intentions already understood the Third Reich’s fundamental difficulty: anything less than hemispheric domination threatened disaster; yet Germany’s military and economic capability to achieve this remained questionable.”
― Max Hastings, Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

“American dismay in the face of those early defeats was assuaged by skilful propaganda. The United States had much less to lose in the East than did the British Empire.”
― Max Hastings, Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

“To put the matter bluntly, U.S. soldiers on Bataan and Corregidor showed themselves more stalwart than British imperial forces in Malaya and at Singapore, albeit likewise in a doomed cause. Brigadier Dwight Eisenhower, who had served unhappily under MacArthur a few years earlier, wrote in his diary: “Poor Wainwright! He did the fighting … [MacArthur] got such glory as the public could find … MacArthur’s tirades, to which … I so often listened in Manila … would now sound as silly to the public as they then did to us. But he’s a hero! Yah.” At home in the United States, news commentators squeezed every ounce of glory from Bataan, from skirmishes at sea and manifestations of America’s embryo mobilisation.”
― Max Hastings, Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

“Wainwright, who did his duty more impressively than MacArthur,”
― Max Hastings, Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

“Soviet conduct could be deemed less barbaric than that of the Nazis only because it embraced no single enormity to match the Holocaust.”
― Max Hastings, Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

“If Franco had joined the war, the inevitable fall of Gibraltar would have doomed Malta. It would have been much harder—perhaps impossible—for the British to hold the Middle East.”
― Max Hastings, Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

“Only a small number of warriors articulated hopes more ambitious than those for personal survival. One of these was a British officer who wrote to his parents before being killed in his first North African battle: “I should like you to know what it is I died for … There is, I feel, both in England and America a tremendous surge of feeling, a feeling which, for want of a better word, I shall call ‘goodness.’ It is not expressed by the politicians or the newspapers, for it is far too deep for them. It is the heartfelt longing of all the ‘middling folk’ for something better—a world more worthy of their children, a world more simple in its beliefs, nearer to earth and to God. I have heard it so often among soldiers in England and America, in trains, in factories in Chicago and in clubs in London, sometimes so poorly expressed that one can hardly recognize it, but underlying it all there is that craving for a new life.”
― Max Hastings, Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

“Pearl Harbor, together with racism soon fuelled by tidings of Japanese savagery, ensured that Americans found it easy to hate their Asian enemy. But from beginning to end, few felt anything like the animosity towards the Germans that came readily to Europeans; it proved hard even to rouse American anger about Hitler’s reported persecution of the Jews.”
― Max Hastings, Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

“The campaign’s most important consequence was that it precipitated the fall of Chamberlain. Had there been no Norway, it is overwhelmingly likely that he would have retained office as prime minister through the campaign in France that followed.”
― Max Hastings, Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

“After the armistice, Finland, having failed to gain useful help from Britain and France, turned to Germany for assistance in rearming its forces, which Hitler was happy to provide.”
― Max Hastings, Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

“The U.S. ambassador in London, Joseph Kennedy, shrugged and said to his Polish counterpart: “Where on earth can the Allies fight the Germans and beat them?” Though Kennedy was a shameless anglophobe, appeaser and defeatist, his question was valid, and the Allied governments had no good answer to it.”
― Max Hastings, Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

“It did not occur to Hitler, after his victories in the west, that it might be more difficult to overcome a brutalised society, inured to suffering, than democracies such as France and Britain, in which moderation and respect for human life were deemed virtues.”
― Max Hastings, Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

“The prime principle of employing force in pursuit of national objectives is to ensure that it is effective. The Germans failed to achieve this against Britain in 1940–41, a first earnest of one of the great truths of the conflict: while the Wehrmacht often fought its battles brilliantly, the Nazis made war with startling ineptitude. The Luftwaffe, instead of terrorising Churchill’s people into bowing to Hitler’s will, merely roused them to acquiesce in defiance.”
― Max Hastings, Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

“The prime principle of employing force in pursuit of national objectives is to ensure that it is effective.”
― Max Hastings, Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

“In all armies, soldiers serving with forward combat units shared a contempt for the much larger number of men in the rear areas who fulfilled roles in which they faced negligible risk: the infantry bore 90 percent of global army casualties.”
― Max Hastings, Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

“The Soviet Union suffered 65 percent of all Allied military deaths, China 23 percent, Yugoslavia 3 percent, the United States and Britain 2 percent each, France and Poland 1 percent each. About 8 percent of all Germans died, compared with 2 percent of Chinese, 3.44 percent of Dutch people, 6.67 percent of Yugoslavs, 4 percent of Greeks, 1.35 percent of French, 3.78 percent of Japanese, 0.94 percent of British and 0.32 percent of Americans.”
― Max Hastings, Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

“THE EXPERIENCE OF WAR was extraordinarily diverse. The Eastern Front, where 90 percent of all Germans killed in combat met their fate, overwhelmingly dominated the struggle against Hitler. Between 1941 and 1944, British and American sailors and airmen fought at sea and in the sky, but relatively small numbers of Western Allied ground troops engaged the Axis in North Africa, Italy, Asia and the Pacific.”
― Max Hastings, Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

“The Finnish government never deluded itself that the nation could inflict absolute defeat on the Russians: it aspired only to make the price of fulfilling Stalin’s ambitions unacceptably high. This strategy was doomed, however, against an enemy indifferent to human sacrifice. Stalin’s response to the setbacks, indeed humiliations, of the December offensive was to replace failed senior officers—one divisional commander was shot and another spent the rest of the war in the gulag—and to commit massive reinforcements.”
― Max Hastings, Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

“This is a book chiefly about human experience. Men and women from scores of nations struggled to find words to describe what happened to them in the Second World War, which transcended anything they had ever known. Many resorted to a cliché: “All hell broke loose.” Because the phrase is commonplace in eyewitness descriptions of battles, air raids, massacres and ship sinkings, later generations are tempted to shrug at its banality. Yet in an important sense the words capture the essence of what the struggle meant to hundreds of millions of people, plucked from peaceful, ordered existences to face ordeals that in many cases lasted for years, and for at least 60 million were terminated by death.”
― Max Hastings, Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

“France’s Gen. Alphonse Juin was the only Allied commander to emerge from the mountain campaigns with an enhanced reputation: a marshal who had voluntarily dropped a rank to fight in Italy, Juin was far better fitted to direct operations than either Alexander or Clark.”
― Max Hastings, All Hell Let Loose: The World at War, 1939-1945