Guts & Glory Quotes

“On December 22, General McAuliffe of the 101st Airborne in Bastogne received a pretty long letter from the German commander, asking him to surrender the town or be destroyed. McAuliffe’s reply was just one word: Nuts! Then he handed the paper back to the German messenger. The dude looked at it, didn’t understand, and asked”
― Ben Thompson, Guts & Glory: World War II

“Battle of the Bulge,” it’s not some annoying weight-loss reality TV series. It’s a sixty-mile-long formation of armored Nazi tanks wasting dudes with machine guns.”
― Ben Thompson, Guts & Glory: World War II

“COMMMMANNNNNNNDOOOOOO”
― Ben Thompson, Guts & Glory: World War II

“IN 1943 POLISH SOLDIERS TRAINED AN ADULT brown bear to help them fight Nazis in an old monastery atop a mountain in the Italian Alps. Yes, this is a true story, not the plot of the next Pixar film. The bear doesn’t sing or dance or talk, but it does carry artillery shells, take baths, and smoke cigarettes, even though smoking is really bad for you. Voytek the Soldier Bear’s story starts back during the German blitzkrieg against Poland at the very beginning of the war. As the Nazis were crushing their way through western Poland, the brave Polish defenders suddenly felt the stab of a knife in their back when the forces of the Soviet Union came rolling across Poland’s eastern border, eager to grab land for the USSR while the Polish were preoccupied with getting punched in the head by the German Army. One of the few, outnumbered defenders who stood his ground against the Soviet juggernaut was Captain Wladislaw Anders, a resolute cavalry officer who valiantly launched a charge against Soviet troops but was wounded in battle and taken as a prisoner of war. For over a year he rotted in Lubyanka Prison, one of Stalin’s worst and most inhospitable one-star prison facilities. Then a weird thing happened. On August 14, 1941, the Red Army guards unlocked the prison cell and told Anders he was a free man. The Germans had invaded Russia, and now the Soviets were prepared to offer Anders and 1.5 million other Polish citizens their freedom if they’d help old Uncle Joe Stalin battle those big evil Nazis. Anders cocked an eyebrow. He wasn’t exactly crazy about the idea of trusting his life to the men who had just shot and imprisoned him, but he agreed anyway. He was shipped out by rail and reunited with twenty-five thousand other Polish soldiers who had been similarly released from the Soviet prison system. Anders immediately”
― Ben Thompson, Guts & Glory: World War II