Stephen E. Ambrose Quotes

The United States fought Germany and Japan, racist societies, with a segregated army.

As I have always held it a crime to anticipate evils I will believe it a good comfortable road untill I am conpelled to beleive differently.

f-word. It substituted for adjectives, nouns, and verbs. It was used, for example, to describe the cooks: “those f — — ers,” or “f — — ing cooks”; what they did: “f — — ed it up again”; and what they produced. David Kenyon Webster, a Harvard English major, confessed that he found it difficult to adjust to the “vile, monotonous, and unimaginative language.” The language made these boys turning into men feel tough and, more important, insiders, members of a group. Even Webster got used to it, although never to like it.

whom only the excitement of combat exceeded the joy

President Roosevelt led the American people in prayer: “Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set out upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization and to set free a suffering humanity. . . .” The invasion had

"The German today is like the June Bride. He knows he is going to get it, but he doesn't know how big it is going to be".

On his thirty-first birthday, Lewis wrote, in a famous passage, “This day I completed my thirty first year. . . . I reflected that I had as yet done but little, very little indeed, to further the hapiness of the human race, or to advance the information of the succeeding generation. I viewed with regret the many hours I have spent in indolence, and now soarly feel the want of that information which those hours would have given me had they been judiciously expended.” He resolved: “In future, to live for mankind, as I have heretofore lived for myself.”5

Time, along with work, is a major theme in the building of the railroad. Before the locomotive, time hardly mattered. With the coming of the railroad, time became so important that popular phrases included “Time was,” or “Time is wasting,” or “Time’s up,” or “The train is leaving the station.” What is called “standard time” came about because of the railroads. Before that, localities set their own time. Because the railroads published schedules, the country was divided into four time zones.

They were returning to Mourmelon, but not to the barracks. This time they were billeted in large green twelve-man wall tents, about a mile outside what Webster called “the pathetically shabby garrison village of Mourmelon, abused by soldiers since Caesar’s day, consisting of six bars, two whorehouses, and a small Red Cross club.” In Webster’s scathing judgment, “Mourmelon was worse than Fayetteville, North Carolina.

instinctively looked for guidance and inspiration. They were

Dwight Eisenhower, that in war, before the battle is joined, plans are everything, but once the shooting begins, plans are worthless.

Arthur Moore describes the results: “Whole forests of oak, beech, poplar, maple, and walnut, standing since Columbus, collapsed … from girdling and deadening with fire. There was in the heart of the new race no more consideration for the trees than for the game until the best of both were gone; steel conquered the West but chilled the soul of the conqueror. This assault on nature, than which few more frightful spectacles could be imagined, owed much to sheer need, but something also to a compelling desire to destroy conspicuous specimens of the fauna and flora of the wilderness. The origin of this mad destructiveness may be in doubt, but there is no question about its effect. The Ohio Valley today has neither trees nor animals to recall adequately the splendor of the garden of the Indian which the white man found and used so profligately.

Of the tens of thousands of men who died in combat in the war, possibly as many as half lost their lives in vain. Lee’s charges at Malvern Hill and Gettysburg, Burnside’s at Fredericksburg, Grant’s at Vicksburg, and many others left the dead strewn everywhere for no discernible military gain. The Sioux would never have followed men who led such bloody, futile assaults, but the Americans made heroes out of these generals — and the higher a general’s losses, it seemed, the greater the hero he became.

There are many rules of good writing, but the best way to find them is to be a good reader.

No war can be won without young men dying. Those things which are precious are saved only by sacrifice.