FDR At War Quotes

“What was important was for the Allies therefore to make no mistakes. To proceed methodically, building up command and combat experience, and trained, well-armed forces in order to defeat the Wehrmacht completely and relentlessly in combat, as Grant and his generals had done in the Civil War. Fantasies of victory merely by peripheral operations were seductive in terms of saving lives, but in the end they were idle. Only by relentless concentration of force, in focused application of America’s growing output as the arsenal of modern democracy, would the Allies be enabled to win within a reasonable time frame.”
― Nigel Hamilton, FDR At War: The Mantle of Command, Commander in Chief, and War and Peace

“This, then, led to the President’s plans for a United Nations authority. The authority was to be “a world organization for the preservation of peace based upon the conceptions of freedom of justice and the revival of prosperity”—one that would not be “subject to the weakness of former League of Nations.” It would be held together under the military protection of the victors, who would “continue fully armed, especially in the air.” “None can predict with certainty that the victors will never quarrel amongst themselves, or that the United States may not once again retire from Europe, but after the experiences which all have gone through, and their sufferings and the certainty that a third struggle will destroy all that is left of culture, wealth and civilization of mankind and reduce us to the level almost of wild beasts, the most intense effort will be made by the leading Powers,” Churchill summarized, “to prolong their honorable association and by sacrifice and self-restraint to win for themselves a glorious name in human annals.” Great Britain would “do her utmost to organize a coalition of resistance to any act of aggression committed by any power;” moreover, “it is believed that the United States will cooperate with her and even possibly take the lead of the world, on account of her numbers and strength, in the good work of preventing such tendencies to aggression before they break into open war.”7 Though it might not be as magically phrased as some of his prose masterpieces and speeches, Churchill’s memorandum reflected the extent to which he now understood and agreed with the President’s vision of the United Nations and postwar world security at this moment in the war.”
― Nigel Hamilton, FDR At War: The Mantle of Command, Commander in Chief, and War and Peace

“Lieutenant Colonel Elliott Roosevelt, his second son, standing beside Mike Reilly! And “looking very fit & mighty proud of his D.F.C. [Distinguished Flying Cross]”8—awarded for dangerous low-level reconnaissance missions, flown both before and during the Torch invasion.”
― Nigel Hamilton, FDR At War: The Mantle of Command, Commander in Chief, and War and Peace

“Lieutenant Colonel Elliott Roosevelt, his second son, standing beside Mike Reilly! And “looking very fit & mighty proud of his D.F.C. [Distinguished Flying Cross]”
― Nigel Hamilton, FDR At War: The Mantle of Command, Commander in Chief, and War and Peace

“At Singapore the Japanese promptly began murdering tens of thousands of Chinese civilians;34 and in the Philippines MacArthur had already passed back to Washington reports of Japanese atrocities and mistreatment of prisoners in Manila so disturbing that he recommended the President take a number of Japanese immigrants in America hostage, as a surety against further barbarity35—a suggestion that in part persuaded Roosevelt to authorize the removal and internment of over one hundred thousand members of Japanese immigrant families from the California area. It would be one of the most controversial decisions the President ever made—licensing paranoia and xenophobia over the very virtues the President claimed as the moral basis of the democracies.”
― Nigel Hamilton, FDR At War: The Mantle of Command, Commander in Chief, and War and Peace