“On Sunday afternoon I was resting, trying to relax from the grind of the past weeks . . . . I was rather abstractedly looking at a Sunday paper when the telephone rang and Louise Hackmeister said sharply:

“‘The President wants you right away. There's a car on the way to pick you up. The Japs just bombed Pearl Harbor!’

“With no more words and without time for me to make a single remark, she cut off the connection. . . . In twenty minutes I was drawing into the White House driveway, already swarming with extra police and an added detail of Secret Service men, with news and radio reporters beginning to stream into the Executive Office wing. . . .”

–General Dwight D. Eisenhower

“Our men were pinned down for a while, but finally they stood up and went through, and so we took that beach and accomplished our landing. In the light of a couple of days of retrospection, we sat and talked and called it a miracle that our men ever got on at all or were able to stay on. . . .
“I walked for a mile and a half along the water's edge of our many-miled invasion beach. I walked slowly, for the detail on that beach was infinite.
“The wreckage was vast and startling. The awful waste and destruction of war, even aside from the loss of human life, has always been one of its outstanding features to those who are in it. Anything and everything is expendable. And we did expend on our beachhead . . . during those first few hours.”

–Ernie Pyle, June 7, 1944

–R.W. Thompson, a British reporter

“I visited Treblinka to find out how they carried out their extermination. The camp commandant at Treblinka told me that he had liquidated 80,000 in the course of half a year. He was principally concerned with liquidating all the Jews from the Warsaw ghetto.
“He used monoxide gas and I did not think that his methods were very efficient. So when I set up the extermination building at Auschwitz, I used Zyklon B, which was a crystallized prussic acid which we dropped into the death chamber from a small opening. It took from three to fifteen minutes to kill the people in the death chamber, depending upon climatic conditions.”

–Rudolf Hoess, testifying at the Nuremberg war crimes trials

1,998

710

109

69

233

364

48

35

“. . . Everything flashed whiter than any white she had ever seen. . . . the reflex of a mother set her in motion toward her children. She had taken a single step (the house was 1,350 yards, or three-quarters of a mile, from the center of the explosion) when something picked her up and she seemed to fly into the next room over the raised sleeping platform, pursued by parts of her house.
    “Timbers fell around her as she landed, and a shower of tiles pommelled her; everything became dark, for she was buried. The debris did not cover her deeply. She rose up and freed herself. She heard a child cry, "Mother, help me!," and saw her youngest—Myeko, the five-year-old—buried up to her breast and unable to move. As Mrs. Nakamura started frantically to claw her way toward the baby, she could see or hear nothing of her other children. . . .”