Commander in Chief Quotes

“The House of Savoy never finished a war on the same side it started, unless the war lasted long enough to change sides twice,” a Free French newspaper commented sarcastically.”
― Nigel Hamilton, Commander in Chief: FDR's Battle with Churchill, 1943

“It had been Theodore Roosevelt’s dictum — using a supposed West African proverb — that a successful leader should “speak softly and carry a big stick.”
― Nigel Hamilton, Commander in Chief: FDR's Battle with Churchill, 1943

“Secretary Hull was even more skeptical of de Gaulle than the President. He was equally opposed to the restoration of France’s colonial empire in the postwar world save as trusteeships — for how could American sons be expected to give their lives merely to reestablish a colonial yoke they themselves had thrown off in 1783?”
― Nigel Hamilton, Commander in Chief: FDR's Battle with Churchill, 1943

“[...] the President explained, [...]

The evil characteristic that makes a Nazi a Nazi is his utter inability
to understand and therefore to respect the qualities or the rights of his
fellowmen. His only method of dealing with his neighbor is first to
delude him with lies, then to attack him treacherously, then beat him
down and step on him, and then either kill him or enslave him. And
the same thing is true of the fanatical militarists of Japan.”
― Nigel Hamilton, Commander in Chief: FDR's Battle with Churchill, 1943

“out, “‘and a most uncomfortable passage is a good possibility—’ “‘Oh—we wouldn’t go by ship. We would fly,’ said he.” Fly? McCrea was shocked. No U.S. president had flown while in office—ever. “This was a great surprise to me because I knew he did not regard flying with any degree of enthusiasm,” McCrea recounted. Mr. Roosevelt had not flown in a decade, in fact, since traveling to Chicago from New York before the 1932 election. In terms of the President’s safety, waging a world war, it seemed a grave and unnecessary risk—especially in terms of distance, and flight into an active war zone. But the President was the president. McCrea had therefore softened his objection. “I quickly saw that I was being stymied and I tried to withdraw a bit. “‘Mr. Pres.,’ said I, ‘you have taken me quite by surprise with this proposal. I would like to give it further thought. Right off the top of my head I wouldn’t recommend it.’” When, the next morning, Captain McCrea went upstairs to the President’s Oval Study, carrying with him some of the latest reports, secret signals, decoded enemy signals, and top-secret cables from the Map Room—of which he was the director—he’d recognized the futility of opposing the idea. It was a colossal risk, he still thought, but he knew the President”
― Nigel Hamilton, Commander In Chief: FDR's Battle with Churchill, 1943

“Ranked seventeenth in the table of world military strengths in 1939, the United States was now primus inter pares, with an all-American military, economic, and political agenda, based on the clear goals of the four freedoms, that the President was determined to fulfill come hell or high water — with or without Soviet participation.”
― Nigel Hamilton, Commander in Chief: FDR's Battle with Churchill, 1943

“Bearing a banner of American democracy, the United States was, in other words, on the move — producing planes, tanks, and matériel on a scale that beggared description: fifty-two thousand airplanes, twenty-three thousand tanks, forty thousand artillery guns in the first six months of 1943 alone, he reported. American shipyards were launching “almost five ships a day.”
― Nigel Hamilton, Commander in Chief: FDR's Battle with Churchill, 1943

“(Of his first wife, Ekatarina, who had died of tuberculosis in 1907, a year after their marriage, Stalin had reportedly said: “With her died my last warm feelings for humanity.”3)”
― Nigel Hamilton, Commander in Chief: FDR's Battle with Churchill, 1943

“the combined heavy bombers of the RAF and USAAF attacking from airfields in Britain the northern German city of Hamburg — Operation Gomorrah. Employing not hundreds but thousands of bombers in rolling attacks, night and day for an entire week, the Allies created a literal firestorm — with temperatures of 1,000 degrees Celsius, hurricane winds of 150 miles per hour, and melting asphalt in the streets. By its end, Operation Gomorrah had killed some forty-two thousand people — the majority, civilians — injured thirty-seven thousand more, left the center of Hamburg in utter ruin, and had caused a million people to evacuate the burning city.”
― Nigel Hamilton, Commander in Chief: FDR's Battle with Churchill, 1943

“Goebbels’s April announcement of totaler Krieg, in Roosevelt’s view, had merely confirmed his judgment of Germany as the world’s most dangerous nation, given the size and ruthlessness of its Wehrmacht and the abiding belief that Macht ist Recht: might is right.”
― Nigel Hamilton, Commander in Chief: FDR's Battle with Churchill, 1943

“The President certainly did not take amiss Churchill’s excitement over Mediterranean operations, or even the Prime Minister’s loyalty to a decaying British empire. Churchill was, he felt, merely misguided — the product of high Victorian imperialism”
― Nigel Hamilton, Commander in Chief: FDR's Battle with Churchill, 1943

“More troubling still had been the sickening revelation, in April 1943, that more than twenty thousand Polish officers, police officers, and members of the intelligentsia had, on Stalin’s orders, been murdered in cold blood by Soviet occupation forces in 1940, during the time of the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact. That disclosure — the decomposing Polish bodies unearthed by the Germans in the Katyn forest near the Russian city of Smolensk, but the Soviets denying culpability”
― Nigel Hamilton, Commander in Chief: FDR's Battle with Churchill, 1943

“The President had been told, in December 1942, that almost two million Jews had in all probability already been “liquidated” by Hitler’s SS troops.12 How many more Jews and others would Hitler exterminate by 1946? And all this so that Britain could sit out the war in Europe, at its periphery — not even willing to open the road to China, but hanging on to India and merely waiting for the United States to win back for Great Britain its lost colonial Empire in the Far East? It seemed a pretty poor performance.”
― Nigel Hamilton, Commander in Chief: FDR's Battle with Churchill, 1943

“The President, King had found on arrival, was “sitting up in his bed” on the second floor of the White House mansion, “wearing a gray sweater,” smoking. He’d”
― Nigel Hamilton, Commander In Chief: FDR's Battle with Churchill, 1943