Nigel Hamilton > Quotes

“The House of Savoy never finished a war on the same side it started, unless the war lasted long enough to change sides twice,” a Free French newspaper commented sarcastically.”
― Nigel Hamilton, Commander in Chief: FDR's Battle with Churchill, 1943

“It had been Theodore Roosevelt’s dictum — using a supposed West African proverb — that a successful leader should “speak softly and carry a big stick.”
― Nigel Hamilton, Commander in Chief: FDR's Battle with Churchill, 1943

“Secretary Hull was even more skeptical of de Gaulle than the President. He was equally opposed to the restoration of France’s colonial empire in the postwar world save as trusteeships — for how could American sons be expected to give their lives merely to reestablish a colonial yoke they themselves had thrown off in 1783?”
― Nigel Hamilton, Commander in Chief: FDR's Battle with Churchill, 1943

“The President certainly did not take amiss Churchill’s excitement over Mediterranean operations, or even the Prime Minister’s loyalty to a decaying British empire. Churchill was, he felt, merely misguided — the product of high Victorian imperialism”
― Nigel Hamilton, Commander in Chief: FDR's Battle with Churchill, 1943

“We must be sure that when you have won victory, you will not have to tell your children that you fought in vain—that you were betrayed. We must be sure that in your homes there will not be want—that in your schools only the living truth will be taught—that in your churches there may be preached without fear a faith in which men may deeply believe.”
― Nigel Hamilton, The Mantle of Command: FDR at War, 1941–1942

“As the cabinet members all said no, Lincoln had summarized: “Seven nays and one aye, the ayes have it”!”
― Nigel Hamilton, The Mantle of Command: FDR at War, 1941–1942

“(Of his first wife, Ekatarina, who had died of tuberculosis in 1907, a year after their marriage, Stalin had reportedly said: “With her died my last warm feelings for humanity.”3)”
― Nigel Hamilton, Commander in Chief: FDR's Battle with Churchill, 1943

“Ranked seventeenth in the table of world military strengths in 1939, the United States was now primus inter pares, with an all-American military, economic, and political agenda, based on the clear goals of the four freedoms, that the President was determined to fulfill come hell or high water — with or without Soviet participation.”
― Nigel Hamilton, Commander in Chief: FDR's Battle with Churchill, 1943

“More troubling still had been the sickening revelation, in April 1943, that more than twenty thousand Polish officers, police officers, and members of the intelligentsia had, on Stalin’s orders, been murdered in cold blood by Soviet occupation forces in 1940, during the time of the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact. That disclosure — the decomposing Polish bodies unearthed by the Germans in the Katyn forest near the Russian city of Smolensk, but the Soviets denying culpability”
― Nigel Hamilton, Commander in Chief: FDR's Battle with Churchill, 1943

“Lieutenant Colonel Elliott Roosevelt, his second son, standing beside Mike Reilly! And “looking very fit & mighty proud of his D.F.C. [Distinguished Flying Cross]”
― Nigel Hamilton, FDR At War: The Mantle of Command, Commander in Chief, and War and Peace

“If a leader merely carried out what historical forces made inevitable, it is not the person that mattered, it is the moment in time”
― Nigel Hamilton

“In his diary Bill Hassett recorded the sight of the venerable little Englishman standing at the top, “at just a sufficient height to accentuate his high-water pants—typically English—Magna Charta, Tom Jones, Doctor Johnson, hawthorn, the Sussex Downs, and roast beef all rolled into one.”
― Nigel Hamilton, The Mantle of Command: FDR at War, 1941–1942

“Communism was a godless ideology: an idealized system of human government that could only be maintained by operating a ruthless police state”
― Nigel Hamilton, War and Peace: FDR's Final Odyssey: D-Day to Yalta, 1943–1945

“Deference to the military by political leaders in World War I had permitted the senseless battles of attrition on the Western Front.”
― Nigel Hamilton, The Mantle of Command: FDR at War, 1941–1942

“The deficiency which now exists in our offensive weapons are the natural results of the policies of peaceful nations such as the Philippines and the United States”—nations “who without warning are attacked by despotic nations which have spent years in preparing for such action. Early reverses, hardships and pain are the price that democracy must pay under such conditions.”
― Nigel Hamilton, The Mantle of Command: FDR at War, 1941–1942

“the combined heavy bombers of the RAF and USAAF attacking from airfields in Britain the northern German city of Hamburg — Operation Gomorrah. Employing not hundreds but thousands of bombers in rolling attacks, night and day for an entire week, the Allies created a literal firestorm — with temperatures of 1,000 degrees Celsius, hurricane winds of 150 miles per hour, and melting asphalt in the streets. By its end, Operation Gomorrah had killed some forty-two thousand people — the majority, civilians — injured thirty-seven thousand more, left the center of Hamburg in utter ruin, and had caused a million people to evacuate the burning city.”
― Nigel Hamilton, Commander in Chief: FDR's Battle with Churchill, 1943

“Goebbels’s April announcement of totaler Krieg, in Roosevelt’s view, had merely confirmed his judgment of Germany as the world’s most dangerous nation, given the size and ruthlessness of its Wehrmacht and the abiding belief that Macht ist Recht: might is right.”
― Nigel Hamilton, Commander in Chief: FDR's Battle with Churchill, 1943

“[...] the President explained, [...]

The evil characteristic that makes a Nazi a Nazi is his utter inability
to understand and therefore to respect the qualities or the rights of his
fellowmen. His only method of dealing with his neighbor is first to
delude him with lies, then to attack him treacherously, then beat him
down and step on him, and then either kill him or enslave him. And
the same thing is true of the fanatical militarists of Japan.”
― Nigel Hamilton, Commander in Chief: FDR's Battle with Churchill, 1943

“Lieutenant Colonel Elliott Roosevelt, his second son, standing beside Mike Reilly! And “looking very fit & mighty proud of his D.F.C. [Distinguished Flying Cross]”8—awarded for dangerous low-level reconnaissance missions, flown both before and during the Torch invasion.”
― Nigel Hamilton, FDR At War: The Mantle of Command, Commander in Chief, and War and Peace

“The President, King had found on arrival, was “sitting up in his bed” on the second floor of the White House mansion, “wearing a gray sweater,” smoking. He’d”
― Nigel Hamilton, Commander In Chief: FDR's Battle with Churchill, 1943

“Picasso (full name Pablo Diego Jose Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Maria de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santisima Trinidad Clito Ruiz y Picasso)”
― Nigel Hamilton, How To Do Biography: A Primer

“At Singapore the Japanese promptly began murdering tens of thousands of Chinese civilians;34 and in the Philippines MacArthur had already passed back to Washington reports of Japanese atrocities and mistreatment of prisoners in Manila so disturbing that he recommended the President take a number of Japanese immigrants in America hostage, as a surety against further barbarity35—a suggestion that in part persuaded Roosevelt to authorize the removal and internment of over one hundred thousand members of Japanese immigrant families from the California area. It would be one of the most controversial decisions the President ever made—licensing paranoia and xenophobia over the very virtues the President claimed as the moral basis of the democracies.”
― Nigel Hamilton, FDR At War: The Mantle of Command, Commander in Chief, and War and Peace

“out, “‘and a most uncomfortable passage is a good possibility—’ “‘Oh—we wouldn’t go by ship. We would fly,’ said he.” Fly? McCrea was shocked. No U.S. president had flown while in office—ever. “This was a great surprise to me because I knew he did not regard flying with any degree of enthusiasm,” McCrea recounted. Mr. Roosevelt had not flown in a decade, in fact, since traveling to Chicago from New York before the 1932 election. In terms of the President’s safety, waging a world war, it seemed a grave and unnecessary risk—especially in terms of distance, and flight into an active war zone. But the President was the president. McCrea had therefore softened his objection. “I quickly saw that I was being stymied and I tried to withdraw a bit. “‘Mr. Pres.,’ said I, ‘you have taken me quite by surprise with this proposal. I would like to give it further thought. Right off the top of my head I wouldn’t recommend it.’” When, the next morning, Captain McCrea went upstairs to the President’s Oval Study, carrying with him some of the latest reports, secret signals, decoded enemy signals, and top-secret cables from the Map Room—of which he was the director—he’d recognized the futility of opposing the idea. It was a colossal risk, he still thought, but he knew the President”
― Nigel Hamilton, Commander In Chief: FDR's Battle with Churchill, 1943

“What was important was for the Allies therefore to make no mistakes. To proceed methodically, building up command and combat experience, and trained, well-armed forces in order to defeat the Wehrmacht completely and relentlessly in combat, as Grant and his generals had done in the Civil War. Fantasies of victory merely by peripheral operations were seductive in terms of saving lives, but in the end they were idle. Only by relentless concentration of force, in focused application of America’s growing output as the arsenal of modern democracy, would the Allies be enabled to win within a reasonable time frame.”
― Nigel Hamilton, FDR At War: The Mantle of Command, Commander in Chief, and War and Peace

“The President had been told, in December 1942, that almost two million Jews had in all probability already been “liquidated” by Hitler’s SS troops.12 How many more Jews and others would Hitler exterminate by 1946? And all this so that Britain could sit out the war in Europe, at its periphery — not even willing to open the road to China, but hanging on to India and merely waiting for the United States to win back for Great Britain its lost colonial Empire in the Far East? It seemed a pretty poor performance.”
― Nigel Hamilton, Commander in Chief: FDR's Battle with Churchill, 1943

“This, then, led to the President’s plans for a United Nations authority. The authority was to be “a world organization for the preservation of peace based upon the conceptions of freedom of justice and the revival of prosperity”—one that would not be “subject to the weakness of former League of Nations.” It would be held together under the military protection of the victors, who would “continue fully armed, especially in the air.” “None can predict with certainty that the victors will never quarrel amongst themselves, or that the United States may not once again retire from Europe, but after the experiences which all have gone through, and their sufferings and the certainty that a third struggle will destroy all that is left of culture, wealth and civilization of mankind and reduce us to the level almost of wild beasts, the most intense effort will be made by the leading Powers,” Churchill summarized, “to prolong their honorable association and by sacrifice and self-restraint to win for themselves a glorious name in human annals.” Great Britain would “do her utmost to organize a coalition of resistance to any act of aggression committed by any power;” moreover, “it is believed that the United States will cooperate with her and even possibly take the lead of the world, on account of her numbers and strength, in the good work of preventing such tendencies to aggression before they break into open war.”7 Though it might not be as magically phrased as some of his prose masterpieces and speeches, Churchill’s memorandum reflected the extent to which he now understood and agreed with the President’s vision of the United Nations and postwar world security at this moment in the war.”
― Nigel Hamilton, FDR At War: The Mantle of Command, Commander in Chief, and War and Peace

“Bearing a banner of American democracy, the United States was, in other words, on the move — producing planes, tanks, and matériel on a scale that beggared description: fifty-two thousand airplanes, twenty-three thousand tanks, forty thousand artillery guns in the first six months of 1943 alone, he reported. American shipyards were launching “almost five ships a day.”
― Nigel Hamilton, Commander in Chief: FDR's Battle with Churchill, 1943

“seigneurial.”
― Nigel Hamilton, The Mantle of Command: FDR at War, 1941–1942