Joseph E. Persico > Quotes

“The imperative of war is to kill, and thus all wars are exercises in sanctioned murder.”
― Joseph E. Persico, Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918

“Compounding the horror, German officials committed an act of staggering insensitivity: they struck a commemorative medal with a depiction of the sinking ship on one side and on the other a smiling skeleton under the inscription “Business above all.”
― Joseph E. Persico, Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918

“the human nature whose strong quality it brings out and reveals. To attribute any nobility to war itself is as much a confusion of thought as to attribute nobility to cancer or leprosy, because of the skill, devotion and self-sacrifice of those who give up their lives to its cure.”
― Joseph E. Persico, Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918

“The last day of the war provided chilling closure. The ending, in its ferocity, bloodiness, and uselessness, contained the entire war in microcosm. The fighting went on for the hollowest of reasons: no one knew how to stop it.”
― Joseph E. Persico, Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918

“If one were to stand on a street corner at 9 A.M. and watch the spirits of the British dead march by four abreast, the column would be 97 miles long and would take twenty hours, or until five the next morning, to pass. The French dead would take an additional fifty-one hours and the Germans another fifty-nine hours. Considering all the dead on the western front, this parade would last from 9 A.M. Monday to 4 P.M. Saturday and stretch 386 miles, roughly the distance from Paris halfway through Switzerland or from New York to Cleveland.”
― Joseph E. Persico, Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918

“The retaking of Mons, site of the first retreat, might be seen as poetic closure. It could also symbolize futility. The British Army was back where it had started on the western front—some 700,000 lives later.”
― Joseph E. Persico, Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918

“One last unexploded mine remains, its exact location unknown and its hidden potency serving as something of a symbol of the Great War’s underlying power to influence events down to the present day.”
― Joseph E. Persico, Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918

“The artillery officer had mastered the technique of firing accurately in the dark by registering the guns beforehand, that is, determining the variance in each gun for barometric pressure, wind speed, and direction. The artillery could thus fire unceasingly both day and night prior to an attack.”
― Joseph E. Persico, Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918

“the Germans had built redoubts both sturdy and comfortable, homes away from home. Behind the lines, German soldiers cultivated gardens of fresh vegetables and kept dairy cows. Some had started second families, fathering children with Frenchwomen.”
― Joseph E. Persico, Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918

“Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Henry Cabot Lodge. Wilson rejected even reasonable compromises, and Lodge refused to budge. Hence, the United States failed to enter the League. Wilson suffered an incapacitating stroke in 1919,”
― Joseph E. Persico, Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918

“The first-day casualties on the Somme totaled 57,470.”
― Joseph E. Persico, Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918

“The American casualties continued to be staggering, in no small part because among the AEF’s junior officers enthusiasm generally outran their experience.”
― Joseph E. Persico, Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918

“Sergeant Powell would never understand what compelled Henry Gunther to rise up and charge the enemy. Gunther had never been seduced by dreams of battlefield glory. He had lost his sergeant’s stripes and been broken to private for urging a friend, in a censored letter, to stay out of the war. His pointless gesture might have been a last desperate effort to eradicate the stain. Whatever the impulse, Gunther kept advancing, bayonet fixed. The German gunners reluctantly fired a five-round burst. Gunther was struck in the left temple and died instantly. The time was 10:59 A.M. General Pershing’s order of the day would record Henry”
― Joseph E. Persico, Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918

“France is fighting for ‘La Patrie’; England is fighting for commerce; Italy is fighting to get a slice of Austria, and America is fighting for souvenirs.”
― Joseph E. Persico, Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918

“The Germans had more men killed and wounded at Verdun, 325,000, than all the 230,000 men deployed in the field at Stalingrad twenty-six years later.”
― Joseph E. Persico, Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918

“the western front on armistice morning, the commanders of seven judged the war essentially over upon receiving word of the signing and stopped; but the commanders of nine divisions decided that the war must go on until the last minute, with predictable results to the lives entrusted to them.”
― Joseph E. Persico, Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918

“Black Jack did not object to sending his men into the French and British lines under American command, but he did not want them dispersed.”
― Joseph E. Persico, Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918

“Hitler would later claim that his evacuation from the front had ended the happiest chapter of his life. In the trenches he had escaped from an aimless existence.”
― Joseph E. Persico, Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918

“Mustard gas was stubborn, clinging to the ground as long as three days. Heavier than air, it settled into craters and trenches where men had taken refuge. It ruined food supplies.”
― Joseph E. Persico, Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918

“MacArthur strode before his men, armed only with a riding crop, a cigarette holder clamped jauntily between his teeth, without the slightest suggestion in bearing or movement that he was under fire.”
― Joseph E. Persico, Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918

“Revel in the fulsome flattery, dear fool! It does not stop war from being a filthy trick.”
― Joseph E. Persico, Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918

“maintain overseas cemeteries, Pershing became the first chairman of the American Battle Monuments Commission, serving from 1923 until his death in 1948.”
― Joseph E. Persico, Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918

“The initial conclusion of the subcommittee was that “needless slaughter” took place on November 11, 1918. However, this finding was beaten back by vocal House members as a slur upon the nation’s wartime leadership. The report that was finally approved found no one culpable for the Armistice Day bloodshed. Throughout”
― Joseph E. Persico, Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918

“Had Marshal Foch accepted Matthias Erzberger’s plea to stop the fighting on November 8 while negotiations were under way, likely, 6,750 lives would have been spared and nearly 15,000 maimed, crippled, burned, blinded, and otherwise injured men would instead have gone home whole. All this sacrifice was made over scraps of land that the Germans, under the armistice, were compelled to surrender within two weeks.”
― Joseph E. Persico, Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918

“Country boys turned out to be the fittest, producing 4.8 percent more able-bodied draftees per 100,000 than city boys. Whites were 1.2 percent more physically qualified than blacks and native-born Americans 3.5 percent more than those foreign-born.”
― Joseph E. Persico, Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918

“Thus the total Armistice Day casualties were nearly 10 percent higher than those on D-Day.”
― Joseph E. Persico, Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918

“The key was to exploit contradictory British and French objectives. The BEF’s priority was to hold on to the French ports through which its manpower and resupply flowed. The French saw Paris as the keystone holding up their nation. In effect, the two Allies’ priorities pointed in opposite directions, one toward the sea, the other toward the French heartland.”
― Joseph E. Persico, Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918

“The New York Herald reported that a German soldier had been seen carrying a bagful of ears. Another newspaper accused Germany of melting down the enemy dead to manufacture soap.”
― Joseph E. Persico, Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918

“divisions in the Meuse-Argonne sector that continued fighting to 11 A.M. ran as high as four and a half times more than those in the seven divisions that halted after the signing.”
― Joseph E. Persico, Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918

“On December 18, he asked each side to set forth its terms for ending the war. The Allies demanded conditions certain to be unacceptable: withdrawal from all occupied territory and virtual dismemberment of the German and Austrian empires. The Germans wanted the iron ore fields in Lorraine, economic control over Belgium, and the Belgian Congo and Poland as German protectorates. Both sides told Wilson, in effect, no thank you, since each expected to win the war.”
― Joseph E. Persico, Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918