Charles Whiting > Quotes

“If they were junior infantry officers, they survived, on average, three weeks. Enlisted men could expect twice that long in combat before they were killed, wounded or broke down.”
― Charles Whiting, America's Forgotten Army: The True Story of the U.S. Seventh Army in WWII - And An Unknown Battle that Changed History

“He added in typical Patton style, “There is one thing you men will be able to say when you go home. You may all thank God that 30 years from now when you are sitting with your grandson upon your knees and he asks: ‘Grandfather, what did you do in World War II?’ you won’t have to say, ‘I shovelled s**t in Louisiana!”
― Charles Whiting, America's Forgotten Army: The True Story of the U.S. Seventh Army in WWII - And An Unknown Battle that Changed History

“[They were possessed] of the conviction that optimistic publicity and euphemism had rendered their experience so falsely that it would never be readily communicable... what had happened to them had been systematically sanitized and Norman Rockwellized, not to mention Disneyfied.”
― Charles Whiting, America's Forgotten Army: The True Story of the U.S. Seventh Army in WWII - And An Unknown Battle that Changed History

“A few minutes later McAuliffe was woken again. He was told that the Germans demanded a formal written reply. They had brought a note, so now it was up to the Americans to do the same. McAuliffe was in a quandary; he had never been in a situation like this before. ‘I don’t know what the hell to say to them’, he snorted in disgust. ‘How about that first remark of yours?’ one of his officers suggested in a half-joking manner. ‘That would be pretty hard to beat.’ The suggestion was greeted with laughter and general agreement. However, McAuliffe, conscious of his new position as ‘American Commandant of the Besieged City of Bastogne’, thought he had to do better than a profanity. In the end he compromised on the one word that would go round the free world this third week of December 1944. Thus the message was returned to Lt Henke and the staff major. It read: ‘To the German commander, Nuts. From the American Commander.”
― Charles Whiting, The Battle of the Bulge: Britain's Untold Story

“The cardinal principle was: ‘A double agent should, as far as possible, actually live the life and go through the motions of a genuine agent.”
― Charles Whiting, Hitler's Secret War: The Nazi Espionage Campaign Against the Allies

“he”
― Charles Whiting, The Search for 'Gestapo' Müller: The Man Without a Shadow

“interlaced with ‘pregos’ and ‘subitos’. Eric Newby, the author of a celebrated book on the kind of life the escapers lived among the Italian peasants; Love and War in the Apennines,”
― Charles Whiting, The Long March on Rome: The Forgotten War