Top 32 Rick Atkinson Quotes
#1. There is something within our biological structure that screams out and says it is morally wrong for the old to outlive the young. This is one of the times when God doesn't seem to make sense. This is the worst that life gets.
Rick Atkinson
#2. A soldier would snake his way painfully through rocks and rubble to set up a light machine gun, raise his head cautiously to aim, and find a dozen natives clustered solemnly around him. Street
Rick Atkinson
#3. American audiences tend to underappreciate the British, but 240 years ago they were us: They were the most powerful nation on Earth. Their mercantile empire spanned the planet. They had the most potent and experienced army and navy the world had ever seen.
Rick Atkinson
#4. I was a foreign correspondent in Berlin in the mid-'90s.
Rick Atkinson
#5. The U.S. Army records alone for World War II weigh 17,000 tons, and even the best historians have not done more than just scratch the surface. The story is such that 500 years from now people will be writing and reading about it.
Rick Atkinson
#6. The faults were clear enough: the greatest of them was an initial lack of appreciation of the possibilities of the enemy; a certain indiscipline of mind; a tendency towards exaggeration
Rick Atkinson
#7. Tanks beached at X and Z were to race inland before dawn in a pincer movement to help capture two airfields south of Oran while Operation RESERVIST supposedly secured the port. Infantrymen would also encircle the city, preventing any reinforcements from reaching Oran if the French chose to fight.
Rick Atkinson
#8. They're not shooting at us, they're not shooting at us," one infantry commander insisted, even as French artillery plastered his battalion.
Rick Atkinson
#9. Global war is a clash of systems, not just battalions biffing one another in some godforsaken forest.
Rick Atkinson
#10. He looked as though he had just had a steam bath, a massage, a good breakfast and a letter from home," wrote one journalist.
Rick Atkinson
#11. I was born in Munich, and my father was stationed in Salzburg. For the first three years of my life, I lived in Austria back when the American Army was still in Austria. I grew up subsequently in posts around the country around veterans.
Rick Atkinson
#12. I think I may try and write something about my pretty extraordinary experience with the 101st in Iraq.
Rick Atkinson
#14. There are a number of World War II historians I admire: Cornelius Ryan, Mark Stoler, Antony Beevor, to name a few. As for generals, there are those I admire as combat leaders and others I admire because they're great fun to write about.
Rick Atkinson
#15. A German pilot came out of his plane, drew his legs into a ball, his head down. Papers flew out of his pockets. He did a triple somesault through our formation. No chute.
Rick Atkinson
#16. I was with the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq, really in the middle of nowhere, about 80 miles south of Baghdad. And it was almost midnight, and I got a computer message from the home office of the Washington Post asking me to call them. I did call them and was told that I'd won the Pulitzer Prize.
Rick Atkinson
#18. It's my belief that by demonizing Saddam, by raising the stakes in this war to the point where we're talking about a great moral crusade, that Bush in fact planted the seeds of discontent in the country, because this was fundamentally a limited war with limited objectives and with limited gains.
Rick Atkinson
#19. Hitler had a police state of the first order. And those who showed any sign of being weak-kneed faced prison or often summary execution. That prevented a lot of people who knew that the war was not going to turn out well for Germany from giving up.
Rick Atkinson
#20. ...the first Allied troops cantered eastward in the rollicking high spirits obligatory at the beginning of all military debacles.
Rick Atkinson
#22. The rates of venereal disease soared and the 82nd Airborne opened a medically certified brothel in Trapani under a supervising officer soon known as the Madam;
Rick Atkinson
#23. the combat career of a new German pilot now lasted, on average, less than a month.
Rick Atkinson
#24. Almost everything about American society is affected by World War II: our feelings about race; our feelings about gender and the empowerment of women, moving women into the workplace; our feelings about our role in the world. All of that comes in a very direct way out of World War II.
Rick Atkinson
#25. There were almost 11,000 American soldiers killed in Germany in April of 1945, the last full month of the war. That's almost as many as died in June, 1944. Right to the very end, it was absolutely brutal.
Rick Atkinson
#26. If I've vividly laid out the narrative, the reader will come to his own conclusions.
Rick Atkinson
#27. At last the armies clashed at one strategic point, They slammed their shields together, pike scraped pike With the grappling strength of fighters armed in bronze And their round shields pounded, boss on welded boss, And the sound of struggle roared and rocked the earth. The Iliad, Book 4
Rick Atkinson
#28. In one typical battalion, of forty-one officers who had landed on Sicily in July, only nine remained, and six of them had been wounded, according
Rick Atkinson
#29. As a battalion commander in France, it was said, he had once pulled a pistol on a hesitant junior officer and shot him in the buttocks. "There," Allen said. "You're out. You're wounded." Such gestures would be unnecessary here.
Rick Atkinson
#30. I'm going to leave WWII. I considered and rejected doing something on the Pacific. Fourteen years is enough. I'd like to take on a different challenge and probably a different era. But it will be another war. It's what I do.
Rick Atkinson
#31. I suffer from the usual difficulty that besets the higher commander - things can be ordered and started, but actual execution at the front has to be turned over to someone else.
Rick Atkinson
#32. The American army between world wars after World War I had virtually disintegrated. It was a very small force, given largely to practicing cavalry charges on western outposts.
Rick Atkinson
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