The Last Battle Quotes

“He looked up at the heavy smoke palls over the city and repeated softly to himself, “It’s all for nothing. All for nothing.”*”
― Cornelius Ryan, The Last Battle: The Classic History of the Battle for Berlin

“Their terror of the Russians was often intensified by a certain guilty knowledge. Some Germans, at least, knew all about the way German troops had behaved on Soviet soil, and about the terrible and secret atrocities committed by the Third Reich in concentration camps. Over Berlin, as the Russians drew closer, hung a night-marish fear unlike that experienced by any city since the razing of Carthage.”
― Cornelius Ryan, The Last Battle: The Classic History of the Battle for Berlin

“Stalin had decided that the Western Allies were lying; he was quite sure Eisenhower planned to race the Red Army for Berlin.”
― Cornelius Ryan, The Last Battle: The Classic History of the Battle for Berlin

“To the American military leaders there was only one aim, and it did not include political considerations. “The single objective,” they said, “should be quick and complete victory.”
― Cornelius Ryan, The Last Battle: The Classic History of the Battle for Berlin

“Montgomery failed to mention the part played by Bradley, Patton and the other American commanders, or that for every British soldier there were thirty to forty Americans engaged in the fighting. Most important, he neglected to point out that for every British casualty forty to sixty Americans had fallen.**”
― Cornelius Ryan, The Last Battle: The Classic History of the Battle for Berlin

“The shelving of the Roosevelt plan by his own military advisors was just one of a series of strange and costly blunders and errors of judgment that occurred among American officials in the days following the Iowa meeting. They were to have a profound influence on the future of Germany and Berlin.”
― Cornelius Ryan, The Last Battle: The Classic History of the Battle for Berlin

“doctors apparently concurred with this view. In Wilmersdorf, Surgeon Günther Lamprecht noted in his diary that “the major topic—even among doctors—is the technique of suicide. Conversations of this sort have become unbearable.”
― Cornelius Ryan, The Last Battle: The Classic History of the Battle for Berlin

“As his interrogators pressed him about the redoubt, Dittmar shook his head. “The National Redoubt? It’s a romantic dream. It’s a myth.”
― Cornelius Ryan, The Last Battle: The Classic History of the Battle for Berlin