Stephen E. Ambrose Quotes

During the Second World War, the Germans took four years to build the Atlantic Wall. On four beaches it held up the Allies for about an hour; at Omaha it held up the U.S. for less than one day. The Atlantic Wall must therefore be regarded as one of the greatest blunders in military history.

D-Day was the pivot point of the 20th century. Everything that went before it can be said to have led up to it; all that followed came about because of what happened that day.

heifer for a joke. The heifer bucked and Autie was thrown to the ground, receiving a bad cut on his forehead.) Lydia wanted Autie to come to Monroe to live with her, help David in his draying business and on the farm, and attend school. Maria agreed — she had more than enough children to look after and Monroe’s schools were thought to be superior to those of New Rumley.16 So Autie left home. Monroe had a population of 3,500 in 1849, equal parts French, English, and German. The second oldest town in southern Michigan, it had pretensions of sophistication. There was an established class, a group of leading citizens who owned or controlled the community’s economic life and liked to think of itself as composing an elect society. In Monroe, in short, Autie encountered snobbery for the first time. He saw it from the underside, too, for the Reeds were not members of the better classes. A retired Army officer with aristocratic pretensions, Major Joseph R. Smith, dismissed the Reeds with a

"plan your work and work your plan"

"where there is a will, there is a way"

I sometimes think the biggest price we pay for war is what might have been.

"It all happened," Lipton summed up, "because Shifty saw a tree almost a mile away that hadn't been there the day before."

Routine wears down vigilance.

On the edge of town, Fitzgerald saw a sight “that has never left my memory. It was a picture story of the death of one 82nd Airborne trooper. He had occupied a German foxhole and made it his personal Alamo. In a half circle around the hole lay the bodies of nine German soldiers. The body closest to the hole was only three feet away, a potato masher [grenade] in its fist.II The other distorted forms lay where they had fallen, testimony to the ferocity of the fight. His ammunition bandoliers were still on his shoulders, empty of M-1 clips. Cartridge cases littered the ground. His rifle stock was broken in two. He had fought alone and, like many others that night, he had died alone.

In addition, it seemed unlikely that one nation could govern an entire continent. The distances were just too great. A critical fact in the world of 1801 was that nothing moved faster than the speed of a horse. No human being, no manufactured item, no bushel of wheat, no side of beef (or any beef on the hoof, for that matter), no letter, no information, no idea, order, or instruction of any kind moved faster. Nothing ever had moved any faster, and, as far as Jefferson’s contemporaries were able to tell, nothing ever would.I And

I had come to take Roosevelt for granted,” Webster wrote his parents, “like spring and Easter lilies, and now that he is gone, I feel a little lost.

Thus the total armada amounted to 5,333 ships and craft of all types,

Paul Fussell, in his book Wartime, has the best definition:

The Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis and Clark Expedition stretched the boundaries of the United States from sea to shining sea. Thus July 4, 1803, was the beginning of today’s nation. The celebration in 1976 was designated as the Bicentennial, and that was appropriate for the original thirteen colonies, but it was with the Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis and Clark Expedition that the United States west of the Mississippi River became a part of the nation. Therefore July 4, 2003, can be regarded as the real Bicentennial.

the reality of geography could not be wished away.

But then the GIs ran into an iron door that blocked access to St. Julien’s interior. The Shermans crossed the causeway and fired point-blank at it, but the 75mm shells just bounced off. A tank destroyer with a 90mm gun drove up. It fired six rounds at a range of less than fifty yards. They had no effect. With the machine-gun fire from the Shermans keeping the Germans back from the firing slits, a 155mm howitzer was wheeled into place. The big gun slammed ten rounds into the door, but still it held. That Vauban was some builder.