Quote by Andrew Roberts

““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

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More by Andrew Roberts

“One of the chief values reading history, this is the author, is its capacity to "provoke renegade thoughts".”

Andrew Roberts

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

Andrew Roberts

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“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…

Andrew Roberts

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“Grossly to oversimplify the contributions made by the three leading members of the Grand Alliance in the Second World War, if Britain had provided…

Andrew Roberts

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“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…

Andrew Roberts

“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…

Andrew Roberts

“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

“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…

Andrew Roberts

“If you make war,’ he would say to General d’Hédouville in December 1799, ‘wage it with energy and severity; it is the only means…

Andrew Roberts

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What finally scuppered Napoleon's Europe was of course the fatal combination of the English Channel and the Russian winter; the same unlikely partnership that…

Andrew Roberts