88
" There was a contemptuous joke in Nazi Party circles of Hitler’s lackey Wilhelm Keitel reporting, “My Führer, Italy has entered the war!” Hitler answers, “Send two divisions. That should be enough to finish them.” Keitel says, “No, my Führer, not against us, but with us.” Hitler says, “That’s different. Send ten divisions. "
― Max Hastings , Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945
98
" Only a small number of warriors articulated hopes more ambitious than those for personal survival. One of these was a British officer who wrote to his parents before being killed in his first North African battle: “I should like you to know what it is I died for … There is, I feel, both in England and America a tremendous surge of feeling, a feeling which, for want of a better word, I shall call ‘goodness.’ It is not expressed by the politicians or the newspapers, for it is far too deep for them. It is the heartfelt longing of all the ‘middling folk’ for something better—a world more worthy of their children, a world more simple in its beliefs, nearer to earth and to God. I have heard it so often among soldiers in England and America, in trains, in factories in Chicago and in clubs in London, sometimes so poorly expressed that one can hardly recognize it, but underlying it all there is that craving for a new life. "
― Max Hastings , Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945