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1 " In the Middle Ages, cathedrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in flames. "
― Umberto Eco , Postscript to the Name of the Rose
2 " My wife is alone in our full bed too. Her husband, the father of her children, never came back from Iraq. When I deployed the first time she asked her grandmother for advice. Her grandfather served in Africa and Europe in World War II. Her grandmother would know what to do.“How do I live with him being gone? How do I help him when he comes home?” my wife asked. “He won’t come home,” her grandmother answered. “The war will kill him one way or the other. I hope for you that he dies while he is there. Otherwise the war will kill him at home. With you.” My wife’s grandfather died of a heart attack on the living-room floor, long before she was born. It took a decade or two for World War II to kill him. When would my war kill me? "
3 " After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the United States entered into World War II to protect our way of life and to help liberate those who had fallen under the Axis occupation. The country rallied to produce one of the largest war efforts in history. Young men volunteered to join the Armed Forces, while others were drafted. Women went to work in factories and took military jobs. Everyone collected their used cooking grease and metals to be used for munitions. They rationed gas and groceries. Factories now were producing airplanes, weapons, and military vehicles. They all wanted to do their part. And they did, turning America into a war machine. The nation was in full support to help our boys win the war and come home quickly.Grandpa wanted to do his part too. "
4 " During World War II the top secret “Norden XV” or “Blue Ox” otherwise known the Army Airforce’s “Norden M Series Bombsights,” were used up to and including the Vietnam War by all American military aircraft with bomb carrying capabilities. This bombsight was considered a “Canonical Tachometric Design” meaning that it had the ability to measure the aircraft's direction and ground speed. In time the Norden improved its original design by using a computer that constantly calculated the aircraft’s flight characteristic and external wind forces to determine the bomb's impact point. When the B-17 Flying Fortress was designed, it came equipped with a Sperry A-3 Autopilot that only corrected angular deviations in the aircraft’s straight and level course. In time most bombsights were replaced by video displays on the instrument panel. Dumb or gravity bombs were mostly replaced with in-flight guidance bombs, such as laser-guided bombs or those using a GPS system. The last combat use of the Norden bombsight was by the US Navy during the covert “Operation Igloo White” mission when OP-2E Neptune aircraft dropped electronic sensors to detect enemy activity along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Project CHECO Southeast Asia Report was declassified on May 5, 2013. "
― Hank Bracker
5 " The historical record contradicts the assumption that the Nazis sentenced large numbers of people to death during World War II for telling jokes. In the final phase of the Third Reich, some cases did receive capital sentences, but they were extreme exceptions to the rule. (We will return to them later.) The compilations of jokes that circulated in Germany after the war bore titles like Deadly Laughter and When Laughter Was Dangerous, but there is not much evidence that the jokes they contained were inevitably risky for the teller. "
― , Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler's Germany
6 " As with millions of others, Adeline Perry and her two young daughters endured the horrors of the Second World War in NAZI Germany. Following her death and armed with her manuscript, Captain Hank Bracker and his wife Ursula, Adeline’s youngest daughter, followed in Adeline’s footsteps to better understand the ordeal she experienced. Realizing that this book was the only way that her story could be preserved, Captain Hank took on the task of recording it. Ursula’s brother-in-law and stepsister, Peter Klett and his wife Jutta drove them to many of the places described in this book including Bischoffsheim, Strasbourg and Rosheim, in what was known as Reichsland Elsaß-Lothringen during World War II and which is now recognized as the administrative territory of Alsace-Moselle, France. He found the still existing bunker in Feudenheim and talked to people in Mannheim, Überlingen and Bischoffsheim who still remembered some of the details of the incidents in this book. Ursula’s sister Brigitte wrote her own manuscripts which helped fill in some previously unknown facts. “Suppressed I Rise” is an insight into how individual people’s lives were adversely affected by the insane acts of one man and the country he decimated. "
7 " From the Bridge”The Importance of HistoryNot all that many years ago the Importance of history would have been a “no brainer!” People understood that there was very little new under the sun, and history was a good barometer to the future. “Those that fail to heed history are doomed to repeat it, “was an adage frequently heard. It gave us a perspective by which to stabilize our bearings and allowed us to find one of the few ways by which we could understand who we are. The myth that George Washington, not being able to lie, admitted to chopping down his father’s favorite cherry tree helped us create a moral compass. Abraham Lincoln’s moniker “Honest Abe,” took root when he worked as a young store clerk in New Salem, IL. The name stuck before he became a lawyer or a politician. His writings show that he valued honesty and in 1859 when he ran for the presidency the nickname became his campaign slogan. However, apparently ”Honest Abe” did lie about whether he was negotiating with the South to end the war and also knowingly concealed some of the most lethal weapons ever devised during the Civil War." These however, were very minor infractions when compared to what we are now expected to believe from our politicians.Since World War II the pace of life has moved faster than ever and may actually have overrun our ability to understand the significance and value of our own honesty. We no longer turn to our past for guidance regarding the future; rather we look into our future in terms of what we want and how we will get it. We have developed to the point that we are much smarter than our ancestors and no longer need their morality and guidance. What we don’t know we frequently fabricate and in most cases, no one picks up on it and if they do, it really doesn’t seem to matter. In short the past has become outdated, obsolete and therefore has become largely irrelevant to us. Being less informed about our past is not the result of a lack of information or education, but of ambivalence and indifference. Perhaps history belongs to the ages but not to us. To a great extent we as a people really do not believe that history matters very much, if at all. My quote “History is not owned solely by historians. It is part of everyone’s heritage,” was written for the opening page of my award winning book “The Exciting Story of Cuba.” Not only is it the anchor holding our Ship of State firmly secure, it is the root of our very being. Yes, history is important. In centuries past this statement would have been self-evident. Our predecessors devoted much time and effort in teaching their children history and it helped provide the foundation to understanding who they were. It provided them a reference whereby they could set their own life’s goals. However society has, to a great extent, turned its back on the past. We now live in an era where the present is most important and our future is being built on shifting sand. We, as a people are presently engaged in a struggle for economic survival and choose to think of ourselves in terms of where wind and tide is taking us, rather than where we came from. We can no longer identify with our ancestors, thus they are no longer relevant. Their lives were so different from our own that they no longer can shed any light on our experience or existence. Therefore, in the minds of many of us, the past no longer has the value it once had nor do we give it the credence it deserves. As in war, the truth is the first victim; however this casualty threatens the very fabric of our being. When fact and fiction are interchanged to satisfy the moment, the bedrock of history in undermined. When we depend on the truth to structure our future, it is vital that it be based on truthful history and the honesty of those who write it. It is a crime without penalty when our politicians tell us lies. In fact they are often shamefully rewarded; encouraging them to become even more blatant in the lies they tell. "
8 " It wasn't until the 1920s that a bare majority of children grew up in families where the father's labor purchased the family's provisions, while their mother did unpaid child care, elder care, and housework.The Great Depression and World War II disrupted this family form, but it roared back in the 1950s, when the percentage of wives and mothers who were supported entirely by their husbands' wages reached a high that has never been equaled, before or since. "
― Stephanie Coontz
9 " War ends at the moment when peace permanently wins out. Not when the articles of surrender are signed or the last shot is fired, but when the last shout of a sidewalk battle fades, when the next generation starts to wonder whether the whole thing ever really happened. World War II ended as war always ends -- by trailing off into nothingness and doubt. Its final monument has never been seen by mortal eyes. It's a phantom image at the edge of a rumor: an unmarked grave in the depths of the South American jungle where a weird and decrepit old man, half forgotten by the world, at last entered the lists of oblivion. "
― Lee Sandlin ,
10 " To say that the holocaust was objectively wrong, is to say that the holocaust was wrong even though the Nazis who carried it out thought that it was right, and it would still have been wrong, even if the Nazis had won World War II and succeeded in brainwashing or exterminating everybody who disagreed with them, so that everyone in the world thought that the holocaust was right and good. To say that the holocaust was objectively wrong, means that it's wrong regardless of the outcome of World War II. The premise is that if there is no God, then moral values or duties are not objective in that sense. "
― William Lane Craig
11 " Presidents lie all the time. Really great presidents lie. Abraham Lincoln managed to end slavery in America partially by deception. (In an 1858 debate, he flatly insisted that he had no intention of abolishing slavery in states where it was already legal — he had to say this in order to slow the tide of secession.) Franklin Roosevelt lied about the U.S. position of neutrality until we entered World War II after the attack on Pearl Harbor. (Though the public and Congress believed his public pledge of impartiality, he was already working in secret with Winston Churchill and selling arms to France.) Ronald Reagan lied about Iran-Contra so much that it now seems like he was honestly confused. Politically, the practice of lying is essential. By the time the Lewinsky story broke, Clinton had already lied about many, many things. (He’d openly lied about his level of commitment to gay rights during the ’92 campaign.) The presidency is not a job for an honest man. It’s way too complex. If honesty drove the electoral process, Jimmy Carter would have served two terms and the 2008 presidential race would have been a dead heat between Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich. "
― Chuck Klosterman
12 " We had our family patterns and were quite comfortable in them, which made it even more shocking when, just after his eightieth birthday, Papa began bringing up his time as a prisoner of war in Germany.Of course, I had always known that he had served in World War II and been captured, just like I had always know the stories about my grandmother and the build of their house. It's that peculiar type of family memory, where someone has obviously told you but you were too young to remember actually hearing it, so it seems like knowledge that was instilled at birth. Papa never brought it up, and my parents said they hadn't heard him mention it once in the previous fifty years. But suddenly, he was talking. "
― Jesse Cozean
13 " You know, Hitler wanted to be an artist. At eighteen he took his inheritance, seven hundred kronen, and moved to Vienna to live and study... Ever see one of his paintings? Neither have I. Resistance beat him. Call it overstatement but I'll say it anyway: it was easier for Hitler to start World War II than it was for him to face a blank square of canvas. "
― Steven Pressfield
14 " In the earliest days of World War II when London was undergoing the blitz but the United States had not yet been drawn into the hostilities, the US ambassador walked the streets during the hottest of the bombing and ask people at every level of British society what he could do to help. What a picture of our role as ambassadors of Christ's coming Kingdom! "
― Lynne Olson , Citizens of London: The Americans who Stood with Britain in its Darkest, Finest Hour
15 " Then, somehow, I got caught up in one of Kevin's World War II books - a book of excerpts from the recollections of concentration camp survivors. Stories of beatings, starvation, filth, disease, torture, every possible degradation. As though the Germans had been trying to do in only a few years what the Americans had worked at for nearly two hundred. ... Like the Nazis, antebellum whites had known quite a bit about torture - quite a bit more than I ever wanted to learn. "
― Octavia E. Butler , Kindred
16 " We owe our World War II veterans - and all our veterans - a debt we can never fully repay. "
17 " World War I broke out largely because of an arms race, and World War II because of the lack of an arms race. "
18 " Germany was beaten after World War I, but it didn't take long for it to rise again as a much more malignant threat. The end of World War II was not to be a compromise; it was to come about from the total annihilation of the enemies' ability and will to make war. "
19 " The government has a history of not treating people fairly, from the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II to African-Americans in the Civil Rights era. "
20 " There's something brave and touching about game girls of all ages keeping themselves smart in hard times - one thinks of those wonderful women during World War II drawing stocking seams in eyebrow pencil up the back of legs stained with gravy browning because nylons were so hard to get hold of. "