The Allies Quotes

“Eleanor Roosevelt had just conducted a two-month, twenty-five-thousand-mile tour of American fighting units in the South Pacific. This included Guadalcanal and other of the Solomon Islands, during which she is said to have told an audience of marines: “The marines that I have seen around the world have the cleanest bodies, the filthiest minds, the highest morale, and the lowest morals of any group of animals I have ever seen. Thank God for the United States Marines!”
― Winston Groom, The Allies: Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, and the Unlikely Alliance That Won World War II

“Strangely, contributions to the party came in from beyond the proceeds of extortion and robbery. Upper-class citizens (Marx’s “bourgeoisie”) often opened their wallets to the revolutionaries: doctors, lawyers, merchants, and factory owners who secretly hated the czar, as well as less well-off sympathizers including shopkeepers, academics, students, and the clergy. Lenin characterized these people as “useful idiots”; come the revolution, most of them would be killed or exiled to the slave mines of Siberia.”
― Winston Groom, The Allies: Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, and the Unlikely Alliance That Won World War II

“Churchill had lived by a simple dictum: “In war, resolution. In defeat, defiance. In victory, magnanimity. In peace, goodwill”—and he sincerely meant it.”
― Winston Groom, The Allies: Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, and the Unlikely Alliance That Won World War II

“Noting these developments, George Marshall, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and now secretary of state, had undertaken a fact-finding tour of Europe—and he didn’t like the facts he’d found. He told President Truman that if something wasn’t done to put the prostrated nations of Europe back on their feet, international trade would be crippled and some, if not most, of these countries would fall to Communist proselytizing and intrigue. What became known as the Marshall Plan was a multibillion-dollar American self-help handout in which war-torn nations could apply for direct aid from the United States after submitting a recovery plan. (The package was worth more than a trillion in today’s dollars and up to 15 percent of the U.S. federal budget.) Stalin stupidly forbade the Soviet Union or any of the countries it occupied in central and eastern Europe”
― Winston Groom, The Allies: Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, and the Unlikely Alliance That Won World War II

“It was one of the bloodiest battles in history, and one of the most historic. Kursk is generally viewed as the turning point in the Second World War in Europe, for the Germans never again launched a successful offensive.”
― Winston Groom, The Allies: Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, and the Unlikely Alliance That Won World War II

“One GI quipped (after Churchill) that “Never in the field of human conflict have so few been commanded by so many, from so far away.”
― Winston Groom, The Allies: Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, and the Unlikely Alliance That Won World War II

“The Midway battle was crucial. In exchange for 307 lives, the Yorktown and a destroyer, and 147 airplanes, the American fleet had destroyed four Japanese carriers, more than three hundred planes, a cruiser and a destroyer, and nearly five thousand Japanese sailors and airmen. It has been called, with justification, “the turning point” in the Pacific war.”
― Winston Groom, The Allies: Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, and the Unlikely Alliance That Won World War II

“It took Congress less than an hour to vote unanimously for war on Japan—except for one nay vote by the longtime Montana pacifist Jeannette Rankin, who had also voted against entering World War I.”
― Winston Groom, The Allies: Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, and the Unlikely Alliance That Won World War II

“By 1938 much of the New Deal was dead. The programs that were not killed by the Supreme Court had been killed by Congress, which had seen the election of a significant number of conservatives.”
― Winston Groom, The Allies: Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, and the Unlikely Alliance That Won World War II

“The trials continued week after week, until nearly all the old Bolsheviks who had formed the party during and after the October Revolution had been liquidated. In fact, of the nearly two thousand delegates to the 1934 party congress, half were arrested and many sent to the firing squad. The military fared no better. Three out of five field marshals were arrested, tried, and executed, as well as thousands of lesser grade officers.”
― Winston Groom, The Allies: Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, and the Unlikely Alliance That Won World War II

“Stalin’s opinion on the subject boiled down to this: “Education is a dangerous weapon, whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands, and at whom it is aimed.”
― Winston Groom, The Allies: Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, and the Unlikely Alliance That Won World War II

“(There were a million British casualties in the first three months of the war.)”
― Winston Groom, The Allies: Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, and the Unlikely Alliance That Won World War II

“It has been estimated that for the next twenty years an average of a million Russian people a year were executed by the Communist regime, which, for much of that time, would be headed by the dictator of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics: Joseph V. Stalin.29”
― Winston Groom, The Allies: Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, and the Unlikely Alliance That Won World War II

“Stalin underlined a passage in his copy of Marx that he kept in his library: “There is only one way to shorten and ease the convulsions of the old society and the bloody birth pangs of the new: revolutionary terror.” Beside it, Stalin wrote: “Terror is the quickest way to the new society.”
― Winston Groom, The Allies: Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, and the Unlikely Alliance That Won World War II

“Stalin believed all of his life, were a sign of weakness. If the people only pushed harder, the government would collapse and socialism would prevail.”
― Winston Groom, The Allies: Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, and the Unlikely Alliance That Won World War II

“He had been, and in some respects always would be, a defender of established order. Imperialism would never be a pejorative for [Churchill],” Manchester observed.”
― Winston Groom, The Allies: Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, and the Unlikely Alliance That Won World War II

“In life’s steeplechases, one must always jump the fences when they come.”
― Winston Groom, The Allies: Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, and the Unlikely Alliance That Won World War II

“The Roosevelts’ social activities compared favorably with those of Winston Churchill, except that while the Roosevelts associated mostly with politicians, high-ranking administrators, and wealthy swells, the Churchill’s world was composed of princes, dukes, counts, and other powerful men who’d make fortunes from the British Empire.
Both lives contrasted markedly with the social scene in Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union, where there were no royals, elected legislators, or wealthy swells, because the Communists had killed them all.”
― Winston Groom, The Allies: Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and the Unlikely Alliance That Won World War II