The Liberation Trilogy Boxed Set Quotes

“Patton inspected the cargo with the possessive eye of a man who intended to use every last bullet, bomb, and basketball shoe. When he asked a young quartermaster captain how the loading was proceeding, the officer replied, “I don’t know, but my trucks are getting on all right.” Patton took a moment to scribble in his diary: “That is the answer. If everyone does his part, these seemingly impossible tasks get done. When I think of the greatness of my job and realize that I am what I am, I am amazed, but on reflection, who is as good as I am? I know of no one.” It was a fair self-assessment by a man who had spent the past four decades preparing for this moment,”
― Rick Atkinson, The Liberation Trilogy Box Set: An Army at Dawn, The Day of Battle, The Guns at Last Light

“My country,” Prince Bernhard observed, “can never again afford the luxury of another Montgomery success.”
― Rick Atkinson, The Liberation Trilogy Box Set: An Army at Dawn, The Day of Battle, The Guns at Last Light

“After killing hundreds of American and British soldiers during TORCH, the French had failed to so much as scratch a single German invader.”
― Rick Atkinson, The Liberation Trilogy Box Set: An Army at Dawn, The Day of Battle, The Guns at Last Light

“A visit to the Tunisian battlefields tells a bit more. For more than half a century, time and weather have purified the ground at El Guettar and Kasserine and Longstop. But the slit trenches remain, and rusty C-ration cans, and shell fragments scattered like seed corn. The lay of the land also remains—the vulnerable low ground, the superior high ground: incessant reminders of how, in battle, topography is fate.”
― Rick Atkinson, The Liberation Trilogy Box Set: An Army at Dawn, The Day of Battle, The Guns at Last Light

“contumacious”
― Rick Atkinson, The Liberation Trilogy Box Set: An Army at Dawn, The Day of Battle, The Guns at Last Light

“swagger stick,”
― Rick Atkinson, The Liberation Trilogy Box Set: An Army at Dawn, The Day of Battle, The Guns at Last Light

“The Huntsman Is Hungry”
― Rick Atkinson, The Liberation Trilogy Box Set: An Army at Dawn, The Day of Battle, The Guns at Last Light

“soon enough, the day would come when new recruits claimed the Army no longer examined eyes, just counted them. A conscript had to stand at least five feet tall and weigh 105 pounds; possess twelve or more of his natural thirty-two teeth; and be free of flat feet, venereal disease, and hernias. More than forty of every hundred men were rejected, a grim testament to the toll taken on the nation’s health by the Great Depression.”
― Rick Atkinson, The Liberation Trilogy Box Set: An Army at Dawn, The Day of Battle, The Guns at Last Light

“September 1, 1939, was the first day of a war that would last for 2,174 days, and it brought the first dead in a war that would claim an average of 27,600 lives every day, or 1,150 an hour, or 19 a minute, or one death every 3 seconds. Within four weeks of the blitzkrieg attack on Poland by sixty German divisions, the lightning war had killed more than 100,000 Polish soldiers, and 25,000 civilians had perished in bombing attacks.”
― Rick Atkinson, The Liberation Trilogy Box Set: An Army at Dawn, The Day of Battle, The Guns at Last Light

“No twenty-first-century reader can understand the ultimate triumph of the Allied powers in World War II in 1945 without a grasp of the large drama that unfolded in North Africa in 1942 and 1943. The liberation of western Europe is a triptych, each panel informing the others: first, North Africa; then, Italy; and finally the invasion of Normandy and the subsequent campaigns across France, the Low Countries, and Germany. From a distance of sixty years, we can see that North Africa was a pivot point in American history, the place where the United States began to act like a great power—militarily, diplomatically, strategically, tactically.”
― Rick Atkinson, The Liberation Trilogy Box Set: An Army at Dawn, The Day of Battle, The Guns at Last Light

“Where, precisely, was Private Anthony N. Marfione when he died on December 24, 1942? What were the last conscious thoughts of Lieutenant Hill P. Cooper before he left this earth on April 9, 1943? Was Sergeant Harry K. Midkiff alone when he crossed over on November 25, 1942, or did some good soul squeeze his hand and caress his forehead? The dead resist such intimacy. The closer we try to approach, the farther they draw back, like rainbows or mirages.”
― Rick Atkinson, The Liberation Trilogy Box Set: An Army at Dawn, The Day of Battle, The Guns at Last Light

“At last the armies clashed at one strategic point, They slammed their shields together, pike scraped pike With the grappling strength of fighters armed in bronze And their round shields pounded, boss on welded boss, And the sound of struggle roared and rocked the earth. The Iliad, Book 4”
― Rick Atkinson, The Liberation Trilogy Box Set: An Army at Dawn, The Day of Battle, The Guns at Last Light

“Medjez,”
― Rick Atkinson, The Liberation Trilogy Box Set: An Army at Dawn, The Day of Battle, The Guns at Last Light