The Second World Wars Quotes

“Field Marshal, and soon-to-be-relieved commander of Army Group South, Erich von Manstein summed up how isolated his Führer had become: “Hitler… thought he could see things much better from behind his desk than the commanders at the front. He ignored the fact that much of what was marked on his far-too-detailed situation maps was obviously out of date. From that distance, moreover, he could not possibly judge what would be the proper and necessary action to take on the spot.”6 An”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won

“For all Franklin Roosevelt’s inspired leadership, in his last enfeebled months he never quite grasped that his decisions about grand strategy made in 1944–1945 (drawing down US troops in China, not occupying Prague, not entering accessible German territory, inviting the Russians into the war against the Japanese, little worry about a future Russian presence in Korea) would soon have not only postwar implications but consequences that were antithetical to Roosevelt’s own often idealistic views of a postwar permanent peaceful order.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won

“Apparently, losing sixty million for a subsequent general seventy-year peace and the end of nightmarish ideologies was defensible, while losing fifteen to twenty million for a twenty-one-year hiatus was sometimes not.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won

“One was made famous by Ulysses S. Grant and later John J. Pershing, emphasizing finding the enemy, then confronting and destroying him through overwhelming firepower.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won

“Naval and occasionally land-based air power turned the great sea battles—the fighting near Singapore, the chase of the Bismarck, the Coral Sea, Midway, the fight over the Marianas, Leyte Gulf, and Okinawa—mostly into contests of carrier-based aircraft attacking with impunity any enemy ships except like kind.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won

“The individual Soviet infantryman after mid-1942 was often armed with the superb PPSh-41 submachine gun (over 6 million produced during the war) or the SVT-40 semi-automatic rifle (1.6 million).”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won

“Marshal Zhukov gave me a matter-of-fact statement of his practice, which was, roughly, ‘There are two kinds of mines; one is the personnel mine and the other is the vehicular mine. When we come to a minefield our infantry attacks exactly as if it were not there. The losses we get from personnel mines we consider only equal to those we would have gotten from machine guns and artillery if the Germans had chosen to defend that particular area with strong bodies of troops instead of mines’… I had a vivid picture,” Eisenhower noted, “of what would happen to any American or British commander if he pursued such tactics.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won

“it nonetheless remains an accurate generalization that no other single individual was responsible for more deaths between 1925 and 1945, whether by forced famines, mass executions, the aid to and empowerment of Hitler until June 1941, the reckless wastage of the Red Army in 1941–1942, and the political cleansing of Eastern Europe between 1945 and 1946. The Soviet Union entered the war seeking to grab territory with Hitler and ended the war acquiring more than it had ever envisioned by warring against him.21”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won

“The system rather than the man was what would win the war.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won

“Despite the far greater carnage between 1939 and 1945, seventy years later historians rarely write of the political or strategic futility of the Second World War as they so often do of the First. Apparently, losing sixty million for a subsequent general seventy-year peace and the end of nightmarish ideologies was defensible, while losing fifteen to twenty million for a twenty-one-year hiatus was sometimes not.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won

“After September 1939, perhaps one billion of the world’s roughly two billion population were soldiers, partisans, and producers engaged in trying to kill people.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won

“It proved almost impossible to square the circle of ensuring crew safety and comfort when trapped in a riveted or welded steel shell of stored gasoline, high-explosive shells and machine gun bullets, sparking engine plugs, and incoming projectiles.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won

“Nicholas Monsarrat’s epic postwar novel of the Battle of the Atlantic, The Cruel Sea, is a quite different, nightmarish elemental story of men at sea amid”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won

“mankind.”21 Hitler also suffered from the symptoms of the autodidact: superficial knowledge without depth or audit, energized by a forceful character dulled by a lack of subtlety. While his armies were stalling in Russia, Hitler’s midday and evening table talk ranged from the quality of honey bees to the best depth of cement for autobahns, always punctuated by conspiratorial interjections of anti-Semitism, contempt for Slavic peoples, crackpot views on art, and obsessions with his own health. Oddly, on some scattered topics—the vulnerability of New York skyscrapers to aerial attacks, the nutritional value of uncooked vegetables, or the eventual popularity of what would become the Volkswagen Bug—Hitler was occasionally strangely prescient.22”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won

“Rommel soon enjoyed almost mystical status among his Africa Korps troops, bringing to mind Virgil’s famous comment on improbable achievement: “Possunt, quia posse videntur” (“They can, because they think they can,” Aeneid 5.231).”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won

“Soldiers of every army in World War II at times shot considerable numbers of prisoners and committed atrocities against civilians. But no army of World War II committed so few war crimes in relationship to its size as the Americans, with the exception perhaps of the British and Dominion armies. The US Army as a general rule did not allow the deaths of hundreds of thousands of its prisoners as did the Germans on the Eastern Front, and it did not rape, loot, and murder civilians on the scale of depredations of the Red Army or the Japanese. It had no record of institutionalized brutality as did the Italians in Somaliland and Ethiopia; it did not coerce comfort women as did the Japanese, or shoot its former allies as did the Germans with the Italians in Greece. It did not help to organize death squads nor participate in genocide as was true of both the German and Japanese armies. In the end, most enemies preferred surrendering to the Americans or British; most allies sought American support; and most civilians welcomed the presence of Americans. p223”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won

“In France during the 1920s, teachers’ unions had all but banned patriotic references to French victories (which were regarded as “bellicose” and “a danger for the organization of peace”) and removed books that considered battles such as Verdun as anything other than a tragedy that affected both sides equally.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won

“saw rearming as reactionary and coming at the expense of achieving social justice.”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won

“Thucydides’s ancient warning that “it is a habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for, and to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they do not desire.”16”
― Victor Davis Hanson, The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won