Masters and Commanders Quotes

“At a mile in circumference, the Pentagon was the largest building in the world at the time. With office space for forty thousand people it had been built in a little over a year, albeit with an accident rate four times the average for US building sites.19 The size of the edifice gave rise to jokes about how easy it was to get lost, such as the one about the pregnant lady who asked a Marine guard to help her get to a maternity hospital, saying it was an emergency as she was in labour. When he said that she shouldn’t have gone there in that condition, she replied: ‘When I came in here, I wasn’t.”
― Andrew Roberts, Masters and Commanders: How Four Titans Won the War in the West, 1941–1945

“The admission that Marshall was not warned about the bocages–the deep, thick, ancient Norman hedgerows that gave the German defenders such fine defensive cover–is a serious one, and a significant failure of US Military Intelligence (G-2). Brooke knew all about them because he had retreated over precisely that ground to evacuate from Cherbourg in June 1940, but his warnings were largely disregarded as yet another excuse for not invading.”
― Andrew Roberts, Masters and Commanders: How Four Titans Won the War in the West, 1941–1945