The Storm of War Quotes

“It was on 7 March 1936 that Hitler comprehensivelyviolated the Versailles Treaty by sending troops intothe industrial region of the Rhineland, which under Article 180 had been specifically designated ademilitarized zone. Had the German Army beenopposed by the French and British forces stationednear by, it had orders to retire back to base and sucha reverse would almost certainly have cost Hitler thechancellorship. Yet the Western powers, riven withguilt about having imposed what was described as a‘Carthaginian peace’ on Germany in 1919, allowedthe Germans to enter the Rhineland unopposed. ‘After all,’ said the influential Liberal politician andnewspaper director the Marquis of Lothian, who hadbeen Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in RamsayMacDonald’s National Government, ‘they are onlygoing into their own back garden.’ When Hitler assured the Western powers in March 1936 thatGermany wished only for peace, Arthur Greenwood,the deputy leader of the Labour Party, told the Houseof Commons: ‘Herr Hitler has made a statement…holding out the olive branch… which ought to be takenat face value… It is idle to say that those statementsare insincere.’ That August Germany adopted compulsory two-year military service”
― Andrew Roberts, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

“Winston Churchill told the House of Commons and the nation that they ‘must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations.’ He did not deny that being expelled from the Continent was ‘a colossal military disaster’, but he did produce the most sublime passage of all his magnificent wartime oratory when he said: We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”
― Andrew Roberts, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

“The Great Depression had taken a physical toll on American manhood; even though the Army would accept just about anyone sane over 5 feet tall, 105 pounds in weight, possessing twelve or more of his own teeth, and free of flat feet, venereal disease and hernias, no fewer than 40 per cent of citizens failed these basic criteria.”
― Andrew Roberts, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

“The Second World War lasted for 2,174 days, cost $1.5 trillion and claimed the lives of over 50 million people. That represents 23,000 lives lost every day, or more than six people killed every minute, for six long years.”
― Andrew Roberts, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

“Certainly the fighting around the huge water-tanks on the hillside was continuous for 112 days from the second half of September to 12 January 1943. Historians simply cannot say, or even estimate, how often the summit changed hands, for, as Chuikov notes, there were no witnesses who survived all through the whole battle for it, and in any case no one was keeping count. At one point the life expectancy of soldiers there was between one and two days, and to see a third day made one a veteran.”
― Andrew Roberts, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

“At one dinner he [George Smith Patton] toasted his officers’ wives with the words: ‘My, what pretty widows you’re going to make.”
― Andrew Roberts, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

“Grossly to oversimplify the contributions made by the three leading members of the Grand Alliance in the Second World War, if Britain had provided the time and Russia the blood necessary to defeat the Axis, it was America that produced the weapons.”
― Andrew Roberts, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

“They looked like scarecrows,’ Slim said of his troops. ‘But they looked like soldiers, too.’ He also recalled the heart-rending sight of a four-year-old child in Imphal trying to spoon-feed her dead mother from a tin of evaporated milk.”
― Andrew Roberts, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

“On 20 November, front-line troops got 500 grams of bread per day, factory workers received 250, and everyone else 125 (that is, two slices). ‘Twigs were collected and stewed,’ records an historian of the siege. ‘Peat shavings, cottonseed cake, bonemeal was pressed into use. Pine sawdust was processed and added to the bread. Mouldy grain was dredged from sunken barges and scraped out of the holds of ships. Soon Leningrad bread was containing 10% cottonseed cake that had been processed to remove poisons. Household pets, shoe leather, fir bark and insects were consumed, as was wallpaper paste which was reputed to be made with potato flour. Guinea pigs, white mice and rabbits were saved from vivisection in the city’s laboratories for a more immediately practical fate. ‘Today it is so simple to die,’ wrote one resident, Yelena Skryabina, in her diary. ‘You just begin to lose interest, then you lie on your bed and you never get up again. Yet some people were willing to go to any lengths in order to survive: 226 people were arrested for cannibalism during the siege. ‘Human meat is being sold in the markets,’ concluded one secret NKVD report, ‘while in the cemeteries bodies pile up like carcasses, without coffins.”
― Andrew Roberts, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

“As one Finn put it after the battle of Kuhmo, ‘There were more Russians than we had bullets.”
― Andrew Roberts, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

“The movie Waterloo Bridge (1940), starring Vivien Leigh and Robert Taylor, was a stern defence of British decency and values.”
― Andrew Roberts, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

“The valour of the firemen was ably recaptured by the Humphrey Jennings movie Fires Were Started (1943),”
― Andrew Roberts, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

“Paul Nash’s 1941 painting The Battle of Britain”
― Andrew Roberts, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

“There was no other occupied country during the second world war which contributed more to the initial efficiency of Nazi rule in Europe than France,’ is the estimation of one distinguished historian.80 There were millions of Frenchmen who made their private accommodations with Hitler’s New European Order, in circumstances varying between sullen cooperation, compromise and outright collaboration, but as a British writer has put it: ‘We who have not known hunger have no idea how empty bellies debilitate and dominate.’81 We cannot know how the British would have behaved under the same circumstances, and tragically it seems that human nature is such that every society has enough misfits, fanatics, sadists and murderers to run concentration camps.”
― Andrew Roberts, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

“As head of state, Pétain must take ultimate responsibility for the tortures and massacres perpetrated by the Milice death-squads in their vicious civil war against the Resistance.”
― Andrew Roberts, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

“most of the French retreated into pursuit of their immediate material interests, hating the Occupation of course, but doing next to nothing to hasten its end. This was precisely what the Germans needed.”
― Andrew Roberts, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

“Long live the shameful peace,’ was Jean Cocteau’s pithy summation of the views of many. It was due to this that France could initially be held down by as few as 30,000 German troops in 1941.75 During the first eighteen months of the Occupation, no Germans were deliberately killed by any French in Paris, and only one French patriotic demonstration was held, during which all of the one hundred people involved were arrested. Everything reopened, except of course the Assemblée Nationale, whose building had been converted into German administrative offices with a huge banner hanging from it proclaiming Germany’s victories ‘on all fronts’.”
― Andrew Roberts, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

“The deportation to Auschwitz in 1942 of 4,000 Jewish children aged twelve and younger, after being forcibly separated from their parents at the Vélodrome and starved for a week, was done not by the Gestapo or the SS but by ordinary Parisian gendarmes acting under orders from French officials.”
― Andrew Roberts, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

“Churchill himself, a lifelong Francophile, stayed aloof from such anti-French sentiment. In June 1942 he complained to Sir Alan Brooke about the Foreign Office’s attitude. He pointed out that Britain had not supported French rearmament in the 1930s, had not rearmed herself, ‘and finally dragged France into the war in bad conditions’. The Director of Military Operations at the War Office, Major-General John Kennedy, reflected that ‘There is much truth in this. It should be remembered when we feel inclined to blame the French for their collapse.’70 All too often, however, Britons ignored such considerations. The”
― Andrew Roberts, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

“there could hardly have been very good Anglo-French relations after 3 July 1940, when Churchill permitted the Royal Navy to bombard the Vichy fleet at Oran in Algeria, in order to try to prevent it sailing for French ports and thence possible incorporation into the Kriegsmarine.”
― Andrew Roberts, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

“After Hitler had viewed the granite memorial to the 1918 Armistice near the railway carriage, he ordered it to be destroyed. Spears was right to think that the French initially had ‘a conception of the old days of royalty when you just exchanged a couple of provinces, paid a certain amount of millions and then called it a day and started off the next time hoping you would be more lucky’, but they were soon to be vigorously disabused.”
― Andrew Roberts, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

“The formal surrender took place shortly after 18.30 hours on Saturday, 22 June 1940, signed by the French General Charles Huntzinger in the same railway carriage at Compiègne, 50 miles north-east of Paris, where the Germans had themselves surrendered in 1918.”
― Andrew Roberts, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

“People in all occupied countries were forced to cooperate but their governments were destroyed or fled,’ an historian has written of the French experience in 1940, ‘and in none – not even in tiny Luxembourg – did such a significant part of the political class agree to do the bidding of what they thought would be the winning side.’60 In response to de Gaulle’s call for continued resistance, Weygand said: ‘Nonsense. In three weeks England will have her neck wrung like a chicken.”
― Andrew Roberts, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

“The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war’, wrote the Irish literary essayist Robert Wilson Lynd, ‘appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions.”
― Andrew Roberts, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

“The calm sea was the miracle of Dunkirk.”
― Andrew Roberts, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

“ninety POWs from the 2nd Battalion, the Royal Warwickshire Regiment were executed by grenade and rifle-fire by the Liebstandarte Adolf Hitler Regiment in a crowded barn at Wormhout, near the Franco-Belgian border.39 On seeing two grenades tossed into the crowded barn, Sergeant Stanley Moore and Sergeant-Major Augustus Jennings leapt on top of them to shield their men from the blasts. These despicable, cold-blooded massacres give lie to the myth that it was desperation and fear of defeat towards the end of the war that led the SS to kill Allied POWs who had surrendered; in fact such inhumanity was there all along, even when Germany was on the eve of her greatest victory. Although the officer responsible for Le Paradis, Hauptsturmführer (Captain) Fritz Knochlein, was executed in 1949, Hauptsturmführer Wilhelm Mohnke, who commanded the unit that carried out the Wormhout atrocity, was never punished for this war crime and died in 2001 in a Hamburg retirement home.”
― Andrew Roberts, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

“Dunkirk was to hold out until the day on which all the Allied troops in the pocket who could embark to Britain had done so. Ramsay and the British Government initially assumed that no more than 45,000 troops could be saved, but over the nine days between dawn on Sunday, 26 May and 03.30 on Tuesday, 4 June, no fewer than 338,226 Allied soldiers were rescued from death or capture, 118,000 of whom were French, Belgian and Dutch. Operation Dynamo – so named because Ramsay’s bunker at Dover had housed electrical equipment during the Great War – was the largest military evacuation in history so far, and a fine logistical achievement, especially as daylight sailings had to be suspended on 1 June due to heavy Luftwaffe attacks.”
― Andrew Roberts, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

“total, around 43,000 officers were killed or imprisoned, although 20,000 were later released.”
― Andrew Roberts, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

“Hitler in particular believed he learnt lessons about the performance of the Red Army that were to affect his decision to invade Russia the following year. Yet they were substantially the wrong ones.”
― Andrew Roberts, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

“By 5 January, a thousand Russian prisoners had been taken, a further 700 soldiers had escaped back to the Russian lines, and over 27,000 had been killed, all for the loss of 900 Finns.”
― Andrew Roberts, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War