Cornelius Ryan > Quotes

“Wearily, he swung the glasses over to the left again. Slowly, he tracked across the horizon. He reached the dead center of the bay. The glasses stopped moving. Pluskat tensed, stared hard. Through the scattering, thinning mist the horizon was magically filling with ships—ships of every size and description, ships that casually maneuvered back and forth as though they had been there for hours. There appeared to be thousands of them. It was a ghostly armada that somehow had appeared from nowhere. Pluskat stared in frozen disbelief, speechless, moved as he had never been before in his life. At that moment the world of the good soldier Pluskat began falling apart. He says in those first few moments he knew, calmly and surely, that “this was the end for Germany.”
― Cornelius Ryan, The Longest Day: The Classic Epic of D-Day

“What I write about is not war but the courage of man.”
― Cornelius Ryan

“It began to seem that the generals had got us into something they had no business doing.”
― Cornelius Ryan, A Bridge Too Far

“(Actually, nobody at this time could even imagine the full extent of the Nazi barbarism that had washed across Europe—the millions who had disappeared into the gas chambers and furnaces of Heinrich Himmler’s aseptic crematoria, the millions who had been herded out of their countries to work as slave laborers, a tremendous percentage of whom would never return, the millions more who had been tortured to death, executed as hostages or exterminated by the simple expedient of starvation.) The great crusade’s unalterable purpose was not only to win the war, but to destroy Nazism and bring to an end an era of savagery which had never been surpassed in the world’s history.”
― Cornelius Ryan, The Longest Day: The Classic Epic of D-Day

“Across the nation, in sleeping towns and villages, lights flashed on. Quiet streets suddenly filled with sound as radios were turned up. People woke their neighbors to tell them the news, and so many phoned friends and relatives that telephone switchboards were jammed. In Coffeyville, Kansas, men and women in their night attire knelt on porches and prayed.”
― Cornelius Ryan, The Longest Day: The Classic Epic of D-Day

“Believe me, Lang, the first twenty-four hours of the invasion will be decisive … for the Allies, as well as Germany, it will be the longest day.”
― Cornelius Ryan, The Longest Day: The Classic Epic of D-Day

“By morning an immense fleet of five thousand ships would stand off the invasion beaches of Normandy.”
― Cornelius Ryan, The Longest Day: The Classic Epic of D-Day

“Along Dog Green and Dog White, a crusty fifty-one-year-old general named Norman Cota strode up and down in the hail of fire, waving a .45 and yelling at men to get off the beach. Along the shingle, behind the sea wall and in the coarse beach grass at the base of the bluffs, men crouched shoulder to shoulder, peering at the general, unwilling to believe that a man could stand upright and live.”
― Cornelius Ryan, The Longest Day: The Classic Epic of D-Day

“He looked up at the heavy smoke palls over the city and repeated softly to himself, “It’s all for nothing. All for nothing.”*”
― Cornelius Ryan, The Last Battle: The Classic History of the Battle for Berlin

“This was the pattern. Brigadier General Cota, the 29th Division’s assistant commander, had been setting an example almost from the moment he arrived on the beach.”
― Cornelius Ryan, The Longest Day: The Classic Epic of D-Day

“Many grew introspective and talked of things men usually keep to themselves. Hundreds later recalled that they found themselves admitting their fears and talking of other personal matters with unusual candor. They drew closer to one another on this strange night and confided in men they had never even met before.”
― Cornelius Ryan, The Longest Day: The Classic Epic of D-Day

“At OKW the message was delivered to Colonel General Alfred Jodl, Chief of Operations. The message remained on Jodl’s desk. He did not order an alert. He assumed Rundstedt had done so; but Rundstedt thought Rommel’s headquarters had issued the order.”
― Cornelius Ryan, The Longest Day: The Classic Epic of D-Day

“Sergeant Donald Gardner of the 47th and his men were dumped into the water about fifty yards from shore. They lost all of their equipment and had to swim in under machine-gun fire. As they struggled in the water, Gardner heard someone say, “Perhaps we’re intruding, this seems to be a private beach.”
― Cornelius Ryan, The Longest Day: The Classic Epic of D-Day

“To the American military leaders there was only one aim, and it did not include political considerations. “The single objective,” they said, “should be quick and complete victory.”
― Cornelius Ryan, The Last Battle: The Classic History of the Battle for Berlin

“But sir, I think we might be going a bridge too far.”
― Cornelius Ryan, A Bridge Too Far: The Classic History of the Greatest Battle of World War II

“Their terror of the Russians was often intensified by a certain guilty knowledge. Some Germans, at least, knew all about the way German troops had behaved on Soviet soil, and about the terrible and secret atrocities committed by the Third Reich in concentration camps. Over Berlin, as the Russians drew closer, hung a night-marish fear unlike that experienced by any city since the razing of Carthage.”
― Cornelius Ryan, The Last Battle: The Classic History of the Battle for Berlin

“The shelving of the Roosevelt plan by his own military advisors was just one of a series of strange and costly blunders and errors of judgment that occurred among American officials in the days following the Iowa meeting. They were to have a profound influence on the future of Germany and Berlin.”
― Cornelius Ryan, The Last Battle: The Classic History of the Battle for Berlin

“Stalin had decided that the Western Allies were lying; he was quite sure Eisenhower planned to race the Red Army for Berlin.”
― Cornelius Ryan, The Last Battle: The Classic History of the Battle for Berlin

“doctors apparently concurred with this view. In Wilmersdorf, Surgeon Günther Lamprecht noted in his diary that “the major topic—even among doctors—is the technique of suicide. Conversations of this sort have become unbearable.”
― Cornelius Ryan, The Last Battle: The Classic History of the Battle for Berlin

“Where is the Prince who can afford so to cover his country with troops for its defense, as that 10,000 men descending from the clouds, might not, in many places, do an infinite deal of mischief before a force could be brought together to repel them?” It had been written in 1784 by Benjamin Franklin.”
― Cornelius Ryan, A Bridge Too Far: The Classic History of the Greatest Battle of World War II

“Montgomery failed to mention the part played by Bradley, Patton and the other American commanders, or that for every British soldier there were thirty to forty Americans engaged in the fighting. Most important, he neglected to point out that for every British casualty forty to sixty Americans had fallen.**”
― Cornelius Ryan, The Last Battle: The Classic History of the Battle for Berlin

“... la pregunta no formulada seguía siendo: ¿cuánto tiempo más debían resistir? En aquellos momentos, en las primeras horas del domingo 24 de septiembre, después de ocho días de batalla, se calculaban las fuerzas de Urquhart en menos de 2.500 hombres. Y para todos ellos solamente había una pregunta: ¿cuándo llegarán las fuerzas de Monty?”
― Cornelius Ryan, A Bridge Too Far

“As his interrogators pressed him about the redoubt, Dittmar shook his head. “The National Redoubt? It’s a romantic dream. It’s a myth.”
― Cornelius Ryan, The Last Battle: The Classic History of the Battle for Berlin