Snow and Steel Quotes

“They were forbidden by law to join political parties, even to vote: an historic way of keeping the army out of politics.10 Thus, after the war, Wehrmacht commanders argued they were set apart and had nothing to do with the political processes of the Reich, whereas in fact they had acquired a convenient moral blind spot.”
― Peter Caddick-Adams, Snow and Steel: The Battle of the Bulge, 1944-45

“I AM A creature of the British Army. My father served in the Second World War. My grandfather and his brother commanded battalions in the First World War; their”
― Peter Caddick-Adams, Snow and Steel: The Battle of the Bulge, 1944-45

“Humanitarian, but hardly controversial; the Count was a secret opponent of the regime, with form to prove it. In January 1939, as Major von Schwerin, he had approached the British Military Attaché in Berlin, Lieutenant-Colonel Kenneth Strong, with a deal. If Chamberlain abandoned his policy of appeasement and opposed Hitler, his friends in the army were willing to mount a coup against the Nazis. Lamentably this excellent opportunity was ignored by the Foreign Office. Meanwhile, by 1944 Strong had become Eisenhower’s chief of intelligence.14”
― Peter Caddick-Adams, Snow and Steel: The Battle of the Bulge, 1944-45

“Yet some of these austerity measures were needed desperately, as German designers tended to over-engineer their inventions: for example, the sixty-ton Tiger I tank took 300,000 man-hours to manufacture compared to 55,000 for a Panther, 48,000 for a Sherman – and only 10,000 hours for a Russian T-34.”
― Peter Caddick-Adams, Snow and Steel: The Battle of the Bulge, 1944-45

“Hitler was already aware of the differences between German and US industrial manufacturing methods, but had done nothing to implement change; in February 1942 he had observed, ‘We’ve always been hypnotised by the slogan “the craftsmanship of the German worker” … we are far behind the Americans [in industrial terms] … they build far more lightly than we do. A car of ours that weighs eighteen hundred kilos would weigh only a thousand if made by the Americans.”
― Peter Caddick-Adams, Snow and Steel: The Battle of the Bulge, 1944-45

“The very essence of leadership is that you have to have a vision. It’s got to be a vision you articulate clearly and forcefully on every occasion.”
― Peter Caddick-Adams, Snow and Steel: The Battle of the Bulge, 1944-45

“The German army appeared today to have taken its greatest gamble of the war, staking everything on a single desperate offensive to halt the allied march on Berlin now. Decisive failure in this big push, observers believed, might lead to a German military collapse and the final defeat of the Wehrmacht west of the Rhine. The full scope and purpose of the enemy’s winter offensive is still obscured by military censorship on both sides of the front, but field dispatches hinted strongly that the battle now swirling along the Belgian border may prove to be the last great action of the western war … All accounts indicated the Nazis have finally committed the cream of their armored reserves to this offensive, and the German home radio service boasted that the long-silent Adolf Hitler personally planned and ordered the attack.”
― Peter Caddick-Adams, Snow and Steel: The Battle of the Bulge, 1944-45