Quote by Joseph E. Persico

“The handful of Germans who had reached the trench had been sacrificed for the stupid sort of fun called. Strategy, probably. Stupid! . .…

— Ford Madox Ford

“like when it was falling on our position. We learned that mortar rounds come in silently, and their use against us would only become…

— Michael Bilder

“If you were AWOL when your company was going back into combat you might as well keep going because your own officers would blow…

— Charles Brandt

“The undeniable tactical skills and successes of the twentieth-century German military often obscure a greater truth: in wars the Germans always met defeat.”

— Geoffrey Jensen

“We have first seized the front line of trenches, then the second and the third, and our adversary, shut up in his retreat, in…

— Corneliu Zelea Codreanu

“artillery pieces were lined up, only more of them, 4,000 in all, a gun every six yards stretching for fifteen miles. The enemy would…

— Joseph E. Persico

“In the last days before the attack a strange feeling, not so much of confidence as of fatalism, pervaded the German tank forces- if…

— Alan Clark

“Germany’s siege mentality and gnawing sense of encirclement (the need to ‘storm out of the fortress’ to prevent a Russian attack); Austria-Hungary’s hatred of…

— Paul Ham

“The others had been driven into the desert to die of thirst (the Germans poisoned the waterholes), were shot, or—to economize on bullets—bayoneted or…

— Adam Hochschild

“Before a battle or a landing, you get a little nervous tension. Once the shooting starts it goes away. You don’t have time to…

— Charles Brandt

“Timing was something I had learned about as well. Early on in the fighting, we were moving on a German machine gun nest and…

— Michael Bilder

“Apparently the Germans had a database of 13,000 kicks.”

— Simon Kuper