Max Hastings > Quotes

“The street is no longer measured by meters but by corpses ... Stalingrad is no longer a town. By day it is an enormous cloud of burning, blinding smoke; it is a vast furnace lit by the reflection of the flames. And when night arrives, one of those scorching howling bleeding nights, the dogs plunge into the Volga and swim desperately to gain the other bank. The nights of Stalingrad are a terror for them. Animals flee this hell; the hardest stones cannot bear it for long; only men endure.”
― Max Hastings, Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

“As George Orwell wisely observed a generation later, the only way swiftly to end a war is to lose it.”
― Max Hastings, Catastrophe (Enhanced Edition): Europe Goes to War 1914

“In Soviet thinking the concept of economy of force has little place. Whereas to an Englishman the taking of a sledgehammer to crack a nut is a wrong decision and a sign of mental immaturity...in Russian eyes the cracking of nuts is clearly what sledgehammers are for.”
― Max Hastings, All Hell Let Loose: The World at War, 1939-1945

“Machiavelli observed that ‘wars begin when you will, but do not end when you please’.”
― Max Hastings, Catastrophe (Enhanced Edition): Europe Goes to War 1914

“The quirky little melodrama that unfolded in Bosnia on 28 June 1914 played the same role in the history of the world as might a wasp sting on a chronically ailing man who is maddened into abandoning a sickbed to devote his waning days to destroying the nest”
― Max Hastings, Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War

“Germany’s highest commander succumbed to a disease common among senior soldiers of many nationalities and eras: he wished to demonstrate to his government and people that their vastly expensive armed forces could fulfil their fantasies.”
― Max Hastings, Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War

“Winston Churchill wrote afterwards: 'No part of the Great War compares in interest with its opening. The measured, silent drawing together of gigantic forces, the uncertainty of their movements and positions, the number of unknown and unknowable facts made the first collision a drama never surpassed. Nor was there any other period in the War when the general battle was waged on so great a scale, when the slaughter was so swift or the stakes so high. Moreover, in the beginning, our faculties of wonder, horror, or excitement had not been cauterized and deadened by the furnace fires of years.”
― Max Hastings, Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War

“We are readying ourselves to enter a long tunnel full of blood and darkness (Andre Gide, 28 July 1914)”
― Max Hastings, Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War

“Sir Edward Grey belongs to the class which, through heredity and tradition, expects to find a place on the magisterial bench to sit in judgement upon and above their fellow men, before they ever have any opportunity to make themselves acquainted with the tasks and trials of mankind.”
― Max Hastings, Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War

“it is a constant of history that nations which start wars find it very hard to stop them.”
― Max Hastings, Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

“It seems a fair test of any political movement to enquire not whether it is capitalist, communist or fascist, but whether it is fundamentally humane.”
― Max Hastings, Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy: 1945-1975

“It is not only more bloody and more murderous than any previous wars but also more cruel, more relentless, more pitiless … It discards all the parameters to which we defer in times of peace and which we called the rights of man. It does not recognise the privileges of the wounded man or of the doctor and it does not distinguish between non-combatants and the fighting part of the population.”
― Max Hastings, Catastrophe (Enhanced Edition): Europe Goes to War 1914

“Haw! Haw! Inconceivable stupidity is just what you're going to get! (Brigadier-General Henry Wilson, on being challenged in 1910 about the likelihood of a European war)”
― Max Hastings, Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War

“The main thing those Americans who really knew about Vietnam knew was how little they knew.”
― Max Hastings, Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy: 1945-1975

“The merits of rival causes are never absolute. Even in the Second World War, the Western allied struggle against fascism was compromised by its reliance upon the tyranny of Stalin to pay most of the blood price for destroying the tyranny of Hitler. Only simpletons of the political Right and Left dare to suggest that in Vietnam either side possessed a monopoly of virtue.”
― Max Hastings, Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975

“Poles had a dark joke in 1944, about a bird which falls out of the sky into a cowpat, to be rescued by a cat; its moral, they said, was that “Not everyone who gets you out of the shit is necessarily your friend.”
― Max Hastings, Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

“Amoz Oz, who said something of the same kind, but from a different perspective: ‘People like you’, he said to me, ‘are going to become very disappointed in Israel in the years ahead. You want it to behave like a European society. Instead, it is becoming a Middle Eastern society. I hope that it will not behave worse than other Middle Eastern societies. But you should not delude yourself that it is likely to behave much better.”
― Max Hastings

“Until 1943, when Stalingrad and bombing began to change everything, most German civilians save those who lost loved ones found the conflict a numbing presence rather than a trauma.”
― Max Hastings, Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

“All politicians find it hard to address with conviction more than one emergency at a time.”
― Max Hastings, Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War

“Historically, and notably in the 1905 Russo-Japanese war, the Japanese army’s conduct towards defeated enemies had been characterised by mercy. The ruling Tokyo “control group” changed all that, instilling a culture of ruthlessness indistinguishable from barbarism into its armed forces; in 1934 the Ministry of War published a pamphlet which ennobled conflict as “the father of creation and mother of culture. Rivalry for supremacy does for the state what struggle against adversity does for the individual.” The Allies now began to discover the significance of this merciless vision for those who fell into enemy hands. Before”
― Max Hastings, Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945

“The French were more tolerant of brothels than any other nation in Europe, though there was some dispute about whether this reflected enlightenment or depravity.”
― Max Hastings, Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War

“70 per cent to avoid a humiliating defeat (to our reputation as a guarantor) – 20 per cent to keep South Vietnam (and the adjacent territory) from Chinese hands – 10 per cent to permit the people of South Vietnam to enjoy a better, freer way of life’.”
― Max Hastings, Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy: 1945-1975

“Here was a manifestation of a huge, historic British folly, repeated over many centuries including the twenty-first: the adoption of gesture strategy, committing small forces as an earnest of good intentions, heedless of their gross inadequacy for the military purpose at hand.”
― Max Hastings, Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War

“The egregious error committed by US statesmen and commanders was not that of lying to the world, but rather that of lying to themselves.”
― Max Hastings, Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy: 1945-1975

“The domestic lesson of the 1950–53 war that wrecked Harry Truman’s presidency was that, though Americans were willing to pay other people to die combating ‘Reds’ in faraway Asian countries, they resisted seeing their own boys sacrificed.”
― Max Hastings, Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy: 1945-1975

“Looking back later, we could see that the military code was unreasonable. But at that time, we regarded dying for our country as our duty. If men had been allowed to surrender honourably, everybody would have been doing it.”
― Max Hastings, Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944–45

“Not until 1961 did Vice-President Lyndon Johnson deliver his memorable apologia for Diem: ‘Shit, man, he’s the only boy we got out there.”
― Max Hastings, Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy: 1945-1975

“At Arnhem, the British fielded too many gentlemen and not enough players.”
― Max Hastings, Armageddon

“Following a 1945 Muslim revolt in Algeria in which a hundred Europeans were killed, an estimated twenty-five thousand people were slaughtered by French troops. After a March 1947 rebellion in Madagascar, where thirty-seven thousand colons lorded it over 4.2 million black subjects, the army killed ninety thousand people.”
― Max Hastings, Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy: 1945-1975

“total of around 300,000 Russian soldiers are believed to have been killed by their own commanders—more than the entire toll of British troops who perished at enemy hands in the course of the war.”
― Max Hastings, Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945