Quote by Joseph E. Persico Download Open image ““The first-day casualties on the Somme totaled 57,470.”” — Joseph E. Persico ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 3.5 out of 5 (7 ratings) Copy quoteShare
“In the first half of 1944, battle casualty rates for every 1,000 bomber crewmen serving six months in combat included 712 killed or missing and 175 wounded: 89 percent. By one calculation, barely one in four U.S. airmen completed twenty-five missions over Germany, a minimum quota that was soon raised to thirty and then thirty-five on the assumption that the… — Rick Atkinson Copy Share
“The French suffered 531,000 casualties (dead, wounded and captured) in those three months, roughly as many as in the eight months of Verdun in 1916. The British (including Empire troops) had 411,000 casualties - almost exactly the same as in the four-and-a-half months of the Somme. The Americans suffered 127,000 casualties, more than double the total number of American casualties… — Margot Asquith Copy Share
“Who today reflects that in the Battle of the Somme alone, where every man was an eager volunteer of ‘Kitchener’s Army’, more British lives… — Arthur Stanley Gould Lee Copy Share Image
“Thus the total Armistice Day casualties were nearly 10 percent higher than those on D-Day.” — Joseph E. Persico Copy Share Image
“The war in Europe was over. Germans called it die Stunde Null, zero hour. Cities lay in ruins. Allied bombing had destroyed more than 1.8 million German homes. Of the 18.2 million men who had served in the German army, navy, Luftwaffe, and the Waffen-SS, a total of 5.3 million had been killed. Sixty-one countries had been drawn into a… — Annie Jacobsen Copy Share
“The casualties at Antietam numbered four times the total suffered by American soldiers at the Normandy beaches on June 6, 1944. More than twice as many Americans lost their lives in one day at Sharpsburg as fell in combat in the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Spanish-American War combined.” — James M. McPherson Copy Share
“Of the twenty-eight thousand German fighter pilots to see combat in WWII, only twelve hundred survived the war.” — Adam Makos Copy Share Image
“When the war was over and the British returned in 1945, there were less than 600,000. A million people dead or gone. Nearly two… — A.G. Riddle Copy Share Image
Of the 664 men who rode into the Valley of Death about 540 eventually got out of it again. By far the highest casualty… — Simon Heffer Copy Share Image
“Across Europe some 11 million men lay dead, including 2 million Germans, 1.4 million Frenchmen, and 900,000 British. Another 21 million had been wounded,… — Liaquat Ahamed Copy Share Image
“The ground over which the bulk of the battles raged was only about eighty-five miles wide, a relatively modest battleground but a rather large… — Joseph E. Persico Copy Share Image
“The Germans had more men killed and wounded at Verdun, 325,000, than all the 230,000 men deployed in the field at Stalingrad twenty-six years later.” — Joseph E. Persico Copy Share Image
“Sergeant Powell would never understand what compelled Henry Gunther to rise up and charge the enemy. Gunther had never been seduced by dreams of battlefield glory. He had lost his sergeant’s stripes and been broken to private for urging a friend, in a censored letter, to stay out of the war. His pointless gesture might have been a last desperate… — Joseph E. Persico Copy Share
“Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Henry Cabot Lodge. Wilson rejected even reasonable compromises, and Lodge refused to budge. Hence, the United States failed to enter… — Joseph E. Persico Copy Share Image
“On December 18, he asked each side to set forth its terms for ending the war. The Allies demanded conditions certain to be unacceptable:… — Joseph E. Persico Copy Share Image
“The last deaths of the Great War on the western front occurred at midnight on the twelfth in Hamont, a Belgian town near the Dutch border. Retreating German troops, believing they were the last to leave the city, mined the Hamont railroad station. But one final train filled with German soldiers arrived from Antwerp. The mine went off with a… — Joseph E. Persico Copy Share
“German resistance continued to present a hodgepodge of fanaticism amid disorder. A British patrol entering a deserted village east of Valenciennes in the northern sector came across a wounded German lieutenant propped up against the wall of a house. He told them, in flawless English, that his men had abandoned the town two hours before and he hoped a British… — Joseph E. Persico Copy Share
“The imperative of war is to kill, and thus all wars are exercises in sanctioned murder.” — Joseph E. Persico Copy Share Image
“The initial conclusion of the subcommittee was that “needless slaughter” took place on November 11, 1918. However, this finding was beaten back by vocal… — Joseph E. Persico Copy Share Image
“Moltke began to tamper with Schlieffen’s plan. Instead of investing 90 percent of the German Army in the French campaign, as required, he began chipping away at it. Russia was mobilizing more swiftly than anticipated; thus he sent 15 percent of the army to defend East Prussia. Moltke did not want the French to retake Alsace-Lorraine; hence another 25 percent… — Joseph E. Persico Copy Share
“Compounding the horror, German officials committed an act of staggering insensitivity: they struck a commemorative medal with a depiction of the sinking ship on… — Joseph E. Persico Copy Share Image
“constant companions throughout the project: Stanley Weintraub’s A Stillness Heard Round the World, A. J. P. Taylor’s The First World War, John Keegan’s The… — Joseph E. Persico Copy Share Image
“Mustard gas was stubborn, clinging to the ground as long as three days. Heavier than air, it settled into craters and trenches where men… — Joseph E. Persico Copy Share Image
“Barely across the Ourcq, Donovan’s battalion began taking fire from three sides. One bullet grazed Wild Bill’s thigh; another tore off the heel of his boot. A shell fragment would surely have killed him had it not struck the respirator of his gas mask. Donovan’s adjutant, Lieutenant Oliver Ames, ran forward and flung himself down alongside the major, joined by… — Joseph E. Persico Copy Share
