–William Shirer, September 1934

                                     –Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf  (“My Struggle”)

–Haile Selassie

“We, therefore, petition the Congress of the United States TO REPEAL OUR SUICIDAL, HYPOCRITICAL AND DANGEROUS NEUTRALITY ACT, to remove the prohibition against arming our merchant ships, and dissolve the ban which prevents vessels flying the American flag from sailing the seven seas. . . .”

–petition sent from the Fight for Freedom National Offices, 1940

“Our national policy is this:

“. . . by an impressive expression of the public will and without regard to partisanship, we are committed to all-inclusive national defense.
“. . . we are committed to full support of all those resolute people everywhere who are resisting aggression and are thereby keeping war away from our hemisphere. By this support we express our determination that the democratic cause shall prevail, . . .
“. . . we are committed to the proposition that principles of morality and considerations for our own security will never permit us to acquiesce in a peace dictated by aggressors and sponsored by appeasers. We know that enduring peace cannot be bought at the cost of other people's freedom. . . .”

“We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields, and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”

“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. . . .”

“DON’T throw away a single drop of used cooking fat, bacon fat, meat drippings,
fry fats—every kind you use. After you’ve got all the cooking good from them, pour
them through a kitchen strainer into a clean, wide-mouthed can. Keep it in a cool dark place. . . .”

–U.S. government bulletin posted in American meat markets

“. . .Then, on the way home, some Focke-Wulfs [German fighter aircraft] showed up, armed with rockets, and I saw three B-17s in the different groups around us suddenly blow up and drop through the sky. Just simply blow up and drop through the sky. Nowadays, if you come across something awful happening, you always think, ‘My God, it's just like a movie,’ and that's what I thought. I had a feeling that the planes weren't really falling and burning, the men inside them weren't really dying, and everything would turn out happily in the end. Then, very quietly through the interphone, our tail gunner said, ‘I'm sorry, sir, I've been hit. . . .’”

–Joseph Theodore Hallock, bombardier on a B-17

“Flying Fortress”

–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

“ . . .The first bomb hit near the officers' quarters, the next struck the patients' mess just a few yards away. The concussion bounced us three feet off the cement floor and threw us down again. Beds were tumbling down. Flashes of heat and smoke burned our eyes. But through it all we could hear Father Cummings' voice reciting the Lord's Prayer. He never faltered, never even fell to the ground, and the patients never moved. Father Cummings' clear voice went through to the end. Then he turned quietly and said: ‘All right, you take over. Put a tourniquet on my arm, will you?’ And we saw for the first time that he'd been badly hit by shrapnel. . . .”

–Bataan, Hospital 1, a nurse’s account, 1942

–account of a survivor

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. . . .”