Stephen E. Ambrose Quotes

"O.K., let's go." And again, cheers rang through Southwick House. Then the commanders rushed from their chairs and dashed outside to get to their command posts. Within thirty seconds the mess room was empty, except for Eisenhower, The outflow of the others and his sudden isolation were symbolic. A minute earlier he had been the most powerful man in the world. Upon his word the fate of thousands of men depended, and the future of great nations. The moment he uttered the word, however, he was powerless. For the next two or three days, there was almost nothing he could do that would in any way change anything. The invasion could not be stopped, not by him, not by anyone. A captain leading his company onto Omaha, or a platoon sergeant at Utah, would for the immediate future play a greater role than Eisenhower. He could now only sit and wait.

Crazy Horse called to his men, “Ho-ka hey! It is a good day to fight! It is a good day to die! Strong hearts, brave hearts, to the front! Weak hearts and cowards to the rear.

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.

During the third week in July, Lewis had two new rivers to name. Previously he and Clark had used the names of the men, of Sacagawea, of relatives, or of unusual features or incidents. Now that they were past the Great Falls, they changed their references. It was as if they suddenly recalled that they had some political responsibility here, that no politician can ever be flattered too much or too brazenly, and that nothing quite matches having a river named for you.

It is perhaps the consummate irony,” Arthur Moore writes, “that at each step up from savagery the human race has regarded the fruits of progress with a degree of misgiving and often longed against reason for a return to a simpler condition.

Those things that are precious are saved only by sacrifice.

you liked him so much you just hated to let him down.” He was, and is, all but worshiped by the men of E Company.

Speirs was an officer with a reputation. Slim, fairly tall, dark hair, stern, ruggedly handsome, he cultivated the look of a leader, and acted it.

The men of Easy Company lined the rails to see the Statue of Liberty slip astern. For nearly every one of them, it was his first trip outside the United States. A certain homesickness set in, coupled with a realization, as the regimental scrapbook Currahee put it, of “how wonderful the last year had been.

Routine wears down vigilance.

The campaign for human rights brightened Carter’s image, but had little discernible positive effect and did considerable harm. He preached to the converted; the sinners deeply resented Carter’s sermons on human rights and either ignored his pleas for improved treatment of their political prisoners or actually increased the repression.

We can't make you do anything, but we can make you wish you had. - Army saying

I ought. Thus would I pass cheerfully through that portion of my life which cannot last always, & with resignation wait for that which will last forever.”22

Those things which are precious are saved only by sacrifice.

There is no way to measure or accurately compare, but it can be asserted that no men ever worked harder under more dangerous conditions than those who built the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific [railroads].