The Germans in Normandy Quotes

“Totalize had breathed its last breath. It died on the hills, in the woods and villages north of Falaise.”
― Richard Hargreaves, The Germans in Normandy

“The war will be won or lost on the beaches,’ as the Desert Fox famously told his trusted aide Hauptmann Hellmuth Lang. ‘We’ll only have one chance to stop the enemy and that’s while he’s in the water. The first twenty-four hours of the invasion will be decisive. For the Allies, as well as Germany, it will be the longest day.”
― Richard Hargreaves, The Germans in Normandy

“It was maybe a little after 5.30 a.m. when the turrets of some of the 10,000 ships the Allies ‘didn’t have’ slowly began turning to face the shoreline. Slowly the barrels of 5-in, 6-in, 8-in, 14-in, 15-in barrels were raised, then opened fire. In each broadside the veteran American battleships USS Texas and Nevada alone rained more than 12,000 tons of death and destruction on the German defenders.”
― Richard Hargreaves, The Germans in Normandy

“It was 5 a.m. when the early morning fog faded away to reveal ‘the most powerful armada of all time – an endless line of gigantic battleships’ stretching across the horizon.”
― Richard Hargreaves, The Germans in Normandy

“The sight which had greeted him through his binoculars had filled the thirty-two year old major with both awe and fear. ‘There must be ten thousand ships out there,’ he told headquarters. ‘It’s unbelievable, fantastic.”
― Richard Hargreaves, The Germans in Normandy

“Instead, the Desert Fox was offered a choice: ‘suicide’ followed by a state funeral and the promise that his family would be cared for, or trial before the People’s Court. Erwin Rommel chose suicide. On 14 October the captor of Tobruk, the scourge of the British Army for eighteen months in north Africa, took his own life.”
― Richard Hargreaves, The Germans in Normandy

“We’ll keep fighting this battle at all costs until one of our damned enemies gets tired of fighting. Adolf Hitler”
― Richard Hargreaves, The Germans in Normandy

“It was too much for Adolf Hitler. In the summer of 1944, he began to vent his anger at the Luftwaffe for its failures from the Battle of Britain to Stalingrad and now Normandy. ‘Goering! The Luftwaffe’s doing nothing,’ he railed at the Reichsmarschall during one conference. ‘It’s no longer worthy to be an independent service. And that’s your fault. You’re lazy.’ Tears rolled down the Reichsmarschall’s cheeks. He reported himself ‘sick’ for future conferences and ordered his generals to deputize.”
― Richard Hargreaves, The Germans in Normandy

“With the Führer to victory”
― Richard Hargreaves, The Germans in Normandy

“Everything you are all doing is nonsense,”
― Richard Hargreaves, The Germans in Normandy

“Pour le Mérite”
― Richard Hargreaves, The Germans in Normandy

“a soldier for fifty-two years.”
― Richard Hargreaves, The Germans in Normandy

“will finally be lost.’ They hoped Goebbels would ‘get down to business’ in invigorating the Reich’s war effort. The propaganda minister had ‘awakened large – and justifiable – hopes’.45 The reaction of the ordinary Landser was no different. Barely one in every thousand soldiers supported the putsch according to the censors who monitored troops’ letters from the front. Most regarded”
― Richard Hargreaves, The Germans in Normandy

“Death reaped a terrible harvest’... The hideously charred body of a German soldiet, trapped in his vehicle at Falaise.”
― Richard Hargreaves, The Germans in Normandy

“battlefield.”
― Richard Hargreaves, The Germans in Normandy

“Marshal”
― Richard Hargreaves, The Germans in Normandy