Blood and Ruins Quotes

“Moral and ethical questions have no validity in Total War except in as far as their maintenance or destruction contributes towards ultimate Victory. Expediency, not morality, is the sole criterion of human conduct in Total War.’ Dennis Wheatley, Total War, 1941”
― Richard Overy, Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931-1945

“Lemkin regretted comparing the plight of the Jews with that of blacks: ‘To be unequal is not the same as to be dead.’ In the end, the United States government did not ratify the Genocide Convention until”
― Richard Overy, Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931-1945

“The wave of anti-imperial nationalism proved this time to be irreversible, and it was met by the old imperial powers with an uneven mix of expedient compromise and extreme violence. The crises of empire when they came were not unpredictable, like an earthquake, but their effects were seismic. The collapse of the European Asian empires between 1946 and 1954 ended centuries of empire-building in eight years.”
― Richard Overy, Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931-1945

“prevent the crowding of spectators during the mass executions’.[126] At Himmler’s insistence, the perpetrators were supplied with generous measures of alcohol, often available before and during the killing. Ukrainian auxiliaries were notorious for their drunken cruelty, allegedly throwing children in the air to be shot at like birds. After killing sprees, the men were encouraged to spend evenings together carousing and drinking. Following the mass execution of 33,000 Jews and Soviet prisoners in the ravines at Babi Yar near Kiev, the killers enjoyed a banquet to mark the occasion.”
― Richard Overy, Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931-1945

“The failure of the resistance movement in the Vilna Ghetto stemmed from the wide support among the population for the Jewish leader Jacob Gens, whose strategy of compliance seemed more likely to save lives than a fruitless revolt.[202] One Jewish ghetto policeman reflected that nobody would take the heroic step to resistance ‘as long as one spark of hope existed that they would last out’. Hope, observed Herman Kruk in his diary of the Vilna Ghetto, is ‘the worst disease in the ghetto’.[203]”
― Richard Overy, Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931-1945

“The development of the RAF strategy of attacking enemy morale through deliberate destruction of the urban area had its roots in the 1930s, when the discussion of future bombing strategy assumed that in modern war there was no distinction any longer between combatant and non-combatant. Civilians were regarded as a target because they contributed materially to sustaining the enemy war effort, a mirror image of the popular civilian conviction that their own staying power was likely to be an objective in any future war.”
― Richard Overy, Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931-1945

“The high profile now enjoyed by the Holocaust or Shoah in public memory of the Second World War has contributed to the assumption that a major factor in waging the war against Germany and its European Axis allies was to end the genocide and liberate the remaining Jewish populations. This is largely an illusion. The war was not fought to save Europe’s Jews, and indeed the governments of all three major Allied powers worried lest the public should think this to be the case. Liberation when it came was a by-product of a broader ambition to expel the Axis states from their conquests and to restore the national sovereignty of all conquered and victimized peoples. Towards the Jews, the attitude of the Allied powers was by turns negligent, cautious, ambivalent or morally questionable.”
― Richard Overy, Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931-1945

“The United States army, wrote another disillusioned recruit, is ‘about as Nazi-like as Hitler’s’.[105] In 1944 the Office of War Information issued a confidential manual to white officers on ‘Certain Characteristics of the Negro’, which included the following: ‘gregarious, extrovertive [sic] . . . hot tempered . . . mentally lazy, not retentive, forgetful . . . ruled by instinct and emotion rather than by reason . . . keen sense of rhythm . . . evasive . . . lies easily, frequently, naturally’.[106] One black soldier writing back from the European theatre at news of racial violence in the New York district of Harlem claimed that black fighters were asking themselves, ‘what are we fighting for?’[107”
― Richard Overy, Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931-1945

“The Soviet propaganda effort in the West played on this sentimental view of Russia and the image of Stalin as a man committed to peace and democracy, a view swallowed uncritically by the Western public whose knowledge of Soviet realities was gleaned entirely from the propaganda image. When the bishop of Chelmsford, president of the National Council for British–Soviet Unity, opened a congress in London in November 1944, he talked of the Allies as the ‘three great democracies’. A second churchman at the congress spoke of the ‘truly religious achievements of the Soviet Government’ and the great contribution the Soviet regime had made ‘to the ethical side of life’.[78]”
― Richard Overy, Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931-1945

“In December 1941 the Japanese poet Takamura Kōtarō summed up the Japanese view of the conflict with the West: We are standing for justice and life, While they are standing for profits, We are defending justice, While they are attacking for profits, They raise their heads in arrogance, While we are constructing the Great East Asia family.”
― Richard Overy, Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931-1945