Sublime
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The enormous battlefield losses of World War I, Churchill’s own unfortunate experience with the amphibious landing at Gallipoli in 1915, plus an awareness of how ill-prepared the Allies, particularly the United States, were to take on a battle-tested German Army, caused the British government to rethink its earlier commitment.
Jean Edward Smith • Eisenhower in War and Peace
The Germans had suffered 100,000 casualties out of half a million men committed, and lost almost all their tanks and aircraft. The Wehrmacht infantry captain Rolf-Helmut Schröder said of his own part in the Battle of the Bulge, “We finished the battle where we had started it; then I knew—that’s
Max Hastings • Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945
The price the Allies paid for their missed opportunity in September was heavy. Of the 750,000 battle casualties the Western Allies suffered in Europe, two-thirds occurred after their autumn slowdown. The collateral costs were even greater. Millions of men and women on both sides died as a result of the continued fighting—to say nothing of the
... See moreJean Edward Smith • Eisenhower in War and Peace
The war’s cost was immense and horrific: some nine million soldiers lost their lives. Another twenty-one million were wounded. Civilian deaths numbered in the millions or even tens of millions if those who succumbed to infectious disease made worse by the war are counted.
Richard Haass • The World
I Antikvariatet hiver vi en ældre bog frem, som er aktuel i dag, og fortæller, hvad der gør den interessant og overraskende.
Denne gang har Bo Bjørnvig skrevet om den engelske krigsklassiker Den sidste fjende.
Hvilken bog?
Den sidste fjende af Richard Hillary fra 1942.
Fotocollage: Liv Lannser
Hvorfor skal vi høre om den nu?
Fordi tiden nu kan minde om
... See moreit. The killing of civilians must always be deplored, but Nazi Germany represented a historic evil. Until the last day of the war, Hitler’s people inflicted appalling sufferings upon the innocent. The destruction of their cities and the deaths of significant numbers of their inhabitants seems a price they had to pay for the horrors they unleashed
... See moreMax Hastings • Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945
In 1920, Fallujah had provided the spark in Iraq’s nationwide uprising against the British, with the initial fighting costing five hundred British lives and six thousand Iraqi ones, prompting Arabist T.E. Lawrence to later write: The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap…it will be hard to escape with dignity and honor. Things
... See moreJeff Neumann • Babylon by Bus: Or, the true story of two friends who gave up their valuable franchise selling YANKEES SUCK T-shirts at Fenway to find meaning and adventure ... jobs for which they lacked qualification..
The towering reality was that the BEF got away. Some 338,000 men were brought back to England, 229,000 of them British, the remainder French and Belgian.