Field Marshal Quotes

“It is a truism that all governments lie: they lie to each other, they lie to their own people, they frequently lie to themselves.”
― Daniel Allen Butler, Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel

“The British and American battleships, cruisers, and destroyers posted off the Normandy beaches carried awesome amounts of firepower that were on-call for the Allied soldiers struggling through the hedgerows—the big 15-inch guns of the battleships could range as far as 16 miles inshore, while even the 5-inch guns on the destroyers could strike targets 5 miles inland.”
― Daniel Allen Butler, Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel

“The day itself, June 6, 1944, has come to be commemorated as “D-Day.” An immense invasion fleet—6,939 ships in all: 1,213 warships, including six battleships, 23 cruisers and 104 destroyers, 4,126 landing craft of various types, 736 support vessels, and 864 merchantmen—departed ports all along the southern coast of England on June 5, bound for an assembly point in the middle of the English Channel, from whence they sailed south, for France.”
― Daniel Allen Butler, Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel

“Had the Allies invaded, the result would have been much like how the Marhathas recollected the capture of Ahmednagar in 1803: “They came here in the morning, looked at the wall, walked over it, killed the garrison, and returned to breakfast!”
― Daniel Allen Butler, Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel

“A good general not only sees the way to victory;
he also knows when victory is impossible. —POLYBIUS”
― Daniel Allen Butler, Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel

“Whereas the Soviets were content with the simplicity of sheer brute force strategy and tactics, and the Germans were depending on their technological superiority to make up for their deficiencies in production capacity, the Allies were building a systematic way of waging war, akin to a machine, one that would, if given sufficient time, integrate formations, units, and weapons types, land, air, and sea into an irresistible force. One that would still be subject to the mental and physical limitations of the flesh-and-blood creatures who had to operate and guide it, but that had been fundamentally designed from the beginning to fight battles in the way the Allies intended to fight them. As Rommel saw it, the Wehrmacht could not defeat that machine, therefore the Gemans must find a way to make it too expensive for the Allies to continue to operate it. That process, he believed, could begin in Tunisia.”
― Daniel Allen Butler, Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel

“Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die —ALFRED TENNYSON”
― Daniel Allen Butler, Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel

“With that, there was no holding back Rommel or his men: Benghazi fell that night, the British departure hasty and unorganized. (A few days later, when inspecting the port facilities, Rommel came across a blackboard where a cheeky Tommy had chalked an admonishment for the new owners: “Please keep tidy! Back soon!” Rommel grinned and then growled, “We’ll see about that!”)”
― Daniel Allen Butler, Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel

“The wound also earned Rommel his first combat decoration, the Iron Cross, Second Class. Years later, when he was writing of the tactical lessons to be learned from this encounter, he would comment wryly that “In a man-to-man fight, the winner is he who has one more round in his magazine.”
― Daniel Allen Butler, Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel

“The Great War would be the defining event of the twentieth century, even more so than the larger war which followed 20 years later. It was what historians deem a “world-historical event”: it fundamentally altered how humanity viewed itself, its societies and institutions, its values and morals. The world which emerged from the war in 1918 was far, far different than that which entered it in 1914; the Great War was (and remains) the greatest cataclysm in Western history since the fall of Rome.”
― Daniel Allen Butler, Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel