The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War QUOTES

1 " It was on 7 March 1936 that Hitler comprehensivelyviolated the Versailles Treaty by sending troops intothe industrial region of the Rhineland, which under Article 180 had been specifically designated ademilitarized zone. Had the German Army beenopposed by the French and British forces stationednear by, it had orders to retire back to base and sucha reverse would almost certainly have cost Hitler thechancellorship. Yet the Western powers, riven withguilt about having imposed what was described as a‘Carthaginian peace’ on Germany in 1919, allowedthe Germans to enter the Rhineland unopposed. ‘After all,’ said the influential Liberal politician andnewspaper director the Marquis of Lothian, who hadbeen Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in RamsayMacDonald’s National Government, ‘they are onlygoing into their own back garden.’ When Hitler assured the Western powers in March 1936 thatGermany wished only for peace, Arthur Greenwood,the deputy leader of the Labour Party, told the Houseof Commons: ‘Herr Hitler has made a statement…holding out the olive branch… which ought to be takenat face value… It is idle to say that those statementsare insincere.’ That August Germany adopted compulsory two-year military service "

― Andrew Roberts , The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

2 " On 20 November, front-line troops got 500 grams of bread per day, factory workers received 250, and everyone else 125 (that is, two slices). ‘Twigs were collected and stewed,’ records an historian of the siege. ‘Peat shavings, cottonseed cake, bonemeal was pressed into use. Pine sawdust was processed and added to the bread. Mouldy grain was dredged from sunken barges and scraped out of the holds of ships. Soon Leningrad bread was containing 10% cottonseed cake that had been processed to remove poisons. Household pets, shoe leather, fir bark and insects were consumed, as was wallpaper paste which was reputed to be made with potato flour. Guinea pigs, white mice and rabbits were saved from vivisection in the city’s laboratories for a more immediately practical fate. ‘Today it is so simple to die,’ wrote one resident, Yelena Skryabina, in her diary. ‘You just begin to lose interest, then you lie on your bed and you never get up again. Yet some people were willing to go to any lengths in order to survive: 226 people were arrested for cannibalism during the siege. ‘Human meat is being sold in the markets,’ concluded one secret NKVD report, ‘while in the cemeteries bodies pile up like carcasses, without coffins. "

― Andrew Roberts , The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

3 " They looked like scarecrows,’ Slim said of his troops. ‘But they looked like soldiers, too.’ He also recalled the heart-rending sight of a four-year-old child in Imphal trying to spoon-feed her dead mother from a tin of evaporated milk. "

― Andrew Roberts , The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

4 " Grossly to oversimplify the contributions made by the three leading members of the Grand Alliance in the Second World War, if Britain had provided the time and Russia the blood necessary to defeat the Axis, it was America that produced the weapons. "

― Andrew Roberts , The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

5 " At one dinner he [George Smith Patton] toasted his officers’ wives with the words: ‘My, what pretty widows you’re going to make. "

― Andrew Roberts , The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

6 " Certainly the fighting around the huge water-tanks on the hillside was continuous for 112 days from the second half of September to 12 January 1943. Historians simply cannot say, or even estimate, how often the summit changed hands, for, as Chuikov notes, there were no witnesses who survived all through the whole battle for it, and in any case no one was keeping count. At one point the life expectancy of soldiers there was between one and two days, and to see a third day made one a veteran. "

― Andrew Roberts , The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

7 " The Second World War lasted for 2,174 days, cost $1.5 trillion and claimed the lives of over 50 million people. That represents 23,000 lives lost every day, or more than six people killed every minute, for six long years. "

― Andrew Roberts , The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

8 " As one Finn put it after the battle of Kuhmo, ‘There were more Russians than we had bullets. "

― Andrew Roberts , The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

9 " Churchill summed up the neutrals’ position in a radio broadcast of 20 January 1940: ‘Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last. "

― Andrew Roberts , The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

10 " Sergeant Tony Aubrey of 8 Column recalled how one soldier, ‘whose feet were in a very bad state, made up his mind he could go no further. He lay down. His mates, worn out as they were, tried to carry him. But he wouldn’t allow them to. All he wanted was to be left alone with as many hand grenades as we could spare. So we gave him the hand grenades and left him. There wasn’t anything else to do.’ Stragglers got back as best they could. ‘At first we worried about him,’ Aubrey said of one such. ‘ “How’s so-and-so making out?” we asked each other. But after a time we forgot him. He was just another piece of landscape. This may sound like man’s inhumanity to man, but it wasn’t you know. We were just too tired to care. "

― Andrew Roberts , The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

11 " Attempting to escape across the Swiss border on 26 April 1945, Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci, her brother Marcello and fifteen others were captured by the Italian partisans. On Saturday the 28th Mussolini and Petacci were executed by sub-machine gun in front of a low stone wall by the gates of a villa outside the village of Giulino di Mezzegra on Lake Como, one of the loveliest beauty-spots in Italy. (It seems rather unItalian to murder an attractive and apolitical mistress, but such is war.) Their bodies were added to those of the other captured Fascists, loaded in to a removal van and driven to Milan, the birthplace of Fascism. There, the corpses of Mussolini and Petacci were kicked, spat upon, shot at and urinated over, and then hung upside-down from a metal girder in front of the petrol station in the Piazzale Loreto, with their names on pieces of paper pinned to their feet. "

― Andrew Roberts , The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

12 " Patton’s personality was immense, but his battlefield achievements matched it. ‘I want you men to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country,’ he told his troops. ‘He won it by making the other dumb bastard die for his country… Thank God that, at least, thirty years from now, when you are sitting around the fireside with your grandson on your knee and he asks you what you did in the great World War II, you won’t have to say, “I shovelled shit in Louisiana. "

― Andrew Roberts , The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

13 " Hitler had done quite enough in his career to prove how utterly untrustworthy he was long before the Nazi–Soviet Pact was signed in August 1939, yet as Alexander Solzhenitsyn pointed out: ‘Not to trust anybody was very typical of Josef Stalin. All the years of his life did he trust one man only, and that was Adolf Hitler. "

― Andrew Roberts , The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

14 " The documentary and anecdotal evidence is overwhelming and indisputable; the Red Army, which had behaved so heroically on the battlefield, raped the women of Germany as part of their reward, with the active collusion of their officers up to and including Stalin. Indeed he explicitly excused their behaviour on more than one occasion, seeing it as part of the rights of the conqueror. ‘What is so awful in his having fun with a woman, after such horrors?’ Stalin asked Marshal Tito about the ordinary Russian soldier in April 1945. ‘You have imagined the Red Army to be ideal. And it is not ideal, nor can it be… "

― Andrew Roberts , The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

15 " The statistics are unequivocal: up until the end of 1944, on a man-for-man basis, the Germans inflicted between 20 and 50 per cent higher casualties on the British and Americans than they suffered, and far higher than that on the Russians, under almost all military conditions. Although they lost because of their Führer’s domination of grand strategy as well as the sheer size of the populations and economies ranged against them, it is indisputable that the Germans were the best fighting men of the Second World War for all but the last few months of the struggle, when they suffered a massive dearth of equipment, petrol, reinforcements and air cover. "

― Andrew Roberts , The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

16 " For every American who died, the Japanese lost 6 people, the Germans 11, and the Russians 92. "

― Andrew Roberts , The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

17 " It was the Russians who provided the oceans of blood necessary to defeat Germany, and it cannot be reiterated enough that out of every five Germans killed in combat – that is, on the battlefield rather than in aerial bombing or through other means – four died on the Eastern Front. "

― Andrew Roberts , The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

18 " so-called leadership is characterized by a pathological reacting to the impressions of the moment and a total lack of any understanding of the command machinery and its possibilities.4 Halder told Lieutenant-General Kurt Dittmar of OKH that Hitler ‘was a mystic, who tended to discount, even when he did not disregard, all the "

― Andrew Roberts , The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

19 " set up to study the tactics and equipment required to defeat Japan, even recommended the use of mustard and phosgene gas against underground enemy positions, and was supported in this by Army Chief of Staff George Marshall and Supreme Commander General Douglas MacArthur, but it was vetoed by President Roosevelt. "

― Andrew Roberts , The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

20 " General Konstantin Rokossovsky, one of those who were tortured during that time – though not shot despite his Polish origins – later said that purges were even worse for morale than when artillery fired on one’s own troops because it would have to have been very accurate artillery fire "

― Andrew Roberts , The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War