Speirs was an officer with a reputation. Slim, fairly tall, dark hair, stern, ruggedly handsome, he cultivated the look of a leader, and acted it.
No war can be won without young men dying. Those things which are precious are saved only by sacrifice.
Discipline is what makes an army – and civilization.
When a man was hit hard enough for evacuation, he was usually very happy, and we were happy for him – he had a ticket out to the hospital, or even a ticket home – alive. “When a man was killed – he looked ‘so peaceful.’ His suffering was over.
That evening, the first Americans ever to enter Montana, the first ever to see the Yellowstone, the Milk, the Marias, and the Great Falls, the first Americans ever to kill a grizzly, celebrated their nation’s twenty-ninth birthday.
Despite himself, Webster was drawn to the people. “The Germans I have seen so far have impressed me as clean, efficient, law-abiding people,” he wrote his parents on April 14. They were churchgoers. “In Germany everybody goes out and works and, unlike the French, who do not seem inclined to lift a finger to help themselves, the Germans fill up the trenches soldiers have dug in their fields. They are cleaner, more progressive, and more ambitious than either the English or the French.”1.
The men of Easy Company lined the rails to see the Statue of Liberty slip astern. For nearly every one of them, it was his first trip outside the United States. A certain homesickness set in, coupled with a realization, as the regimental scrapbook Currahee put it, of “how wonderful the last year had been.
Each man in his own way had gone through what Richard Winters experienced: a realization that doing his best was a better way of getting through the Army than hanging around with the sad excuses for soldiers they met in the recruiting depots or basic training. They wanted to make their Army time positive, a learning and maturing and challenging experience.
They knew they were going into great danger. They knew they would be doing more than their part. They resented having to sacrifice years of their youth to a war they never made. They wanted to throw baseballs, not grenades, shoot a .22 rifle, not an M-1. But having been caught up in the war, they decided to be as positive as possible in their Army careers.
Anything was better than the blood and carnage, the grime and filth, the impossible demands made on the body – anything, that is, except letting down their buddies.
How he led is no mystery. His techniques were time-honored. He knew his men. He saw to it that they had dry socks, enough food, sufficient clothing. He pushed them to but never beyond the breaking point. He got out of them more than they knew they had to give. His concern for them was that of a father for his son. He was the head of a family. He.
Both Custer and Crazy Horse, in short, still had much to learn about each other.
It is perhaps the consummate irony,” Arthur Moore writes, “that at each step up from savagery the human race has regarded the fruits of progress with a degree of misgiving and often longed against reason for a return to a simpler condition.
Ethnic Germans also surrendered. Even veterans of the Eastern Front. Corp. Friedrich Bertenrath of the 2nd Panzer Division explained, “In Russia, I could imagine nothing but fighting to the last man. We knew that going into a prison camp in Russia meant you were dead. In Normandy, one always had in the back of his mind, ‘Well, if everything goes to hell, the Americans are human enough that the prospect of becoming their prisoner was attractive to some extent.
Daddy, were you a hero?” And he answered, “No, but I served with heroes.
The looting was profitable, fun, low-risk, and completely in accord with the practice of every conquering army since Alexander the Great’s time.
Nor did the Americans find it necessary to wage a ruthless campaign. As has been mentioned previously, both sides respected.
Winters and Welsh simply walked toward the man, who took off. The Americans split the silverware between them. Forty-five years later, both men were still using the Berchtesgaden Hof’s silverware in their homes. After getting what he most wanted out of the place, Winters then.
I read about a number of generals and colonels who are said to have wandered about exhorting the troops to advance. That must have been very inspirational! I suspect, however, that the men were more interested and more impressed by junior officers and NCOs who were willing to lead them rather than having some general pointing out the direction in which they should go.
What the Shoshones valued above all else, and depended on absolutely, was the bravery of their young men. Their childrearing system was designed to produce brave warriors. “They seldom correct their children,” Lewis wrote, “particularly the boys who soon became masters of their own acts. They give as a reason that it cows and breaks the Sperit of the boy to whip him, and that he never recovers his independence of mind after he is grown.” In.