Infantry Regiment Quotes

If we can use an H-bomb--and as you said it's no checker game; it's real, it's war and nobody is fooling around--isn't it sort of ridiculous to go crawling around in the weeds, throwing knives and maybe getting yourself killed . . . and even losing the war . . . when you've got a real weapon you can use to win? What's the point in a whole lot of men risking their lives with obsolete weapons when one professor type can do so much more just by pushing a button?' Zim didn't answer at once, which wasn't like him at all. Then he said softly, 'Are you happy in the Infantry, Hendrick? You can resign, you know.' Hendrick muttered something; Zim said, 'Speak up!' I'm not itching to resign, sir. I'm going to sweat out my term.' I see. Well, the question you asked is one that a sergeant isn't really qualified to answer . . . and one that you shouldn't ask me. You're supposed to know the answer before you join up. Or you should. Did your school have a course in History and Moral Philosophy?' What? Sure--yes, sir.' Then you've heard the answer. But I'll give you my own--unofficial--views on it. If you wanted to teach a baby a lesson, would you cuts its head off?' Why . . . no, sir!' Of course not. You'd paddle it. There can be circumstances when it's just as foolish to hit an enemy with an H-Bomb as it would be to spank a baby with an ax. War is not violence and killing, pure and simple; war is controlled violence, for a purpose. The purpose of war is to support your government's decisions by force. The purpose is never to kill the enemy just to be killing him . . . but to make him do what you want him to do. Not killing . . . but controlled and purposeful violence. But it's not your business or mine to decide the purpose of the control. It's never a soldier's business to decide when or where or how--or why--he fights; that belongs to the statesmen and the generals. The statesmen decide why and how much; the generals take it from there and tell us where and when and how. We supply the violence; other people--"older and wiser heads," as they say--supply the control. Which is as it should be. That's the best answer I can give you. If it doesn't satisfy you, I'll get you a chit to go talk to the regimental commander. If he can't convince you--then go home and be a civilian! Because in that case you will certainly never make a soldier.

THE SHEEPDOGS Most humans truly are like sheep Wanting nothing more than peace to keep To graze, grow fat and raise their young, Sweet taste of clover on the tongue. Their lives serene upon Life’s farm, They sense no threat nor fear no harm. On verdant meadows, they forage free With naught to fear, with naught to flee. They pay their sheepdogs little heed For there is no threat; there is no need. To the flock, sheepdog’s are mysteries, Roaming watchful round the peripheries. These fang-toothed creatures bark, they roar With the fetid reek of the carnivore, Too like the wolf of legends told, To be amongst our docile fold. Who needs sheepdogs? What good are they? They have no use, not in this day. Lock them away, out of our sight We have no need of their fierce might. But sudden in their midst a beast Has come to kill, has come to feast The wolves attack; they give no warning Upon that calm September morning They slash and kill with frenzied glee Their passive helpless enemy Who had no clue the wolves were there Far roaming from their Eastern lair. Then from the carnage, from the rout, Comes the cry, “Turn the sheepdogs out!” Thus is our nature but too our plight To keep our dogs on leashes tight And live a life of illusive bliss Hearing not the beast, his growl, his hiss. Until he has us by the throat, We pay no heed; we take no note. Not until he strikes us at our core Will we unleash the Dogs of War Only having felt the wolf pack’s wrath Do we loose the sheepdogs on its path. And the wolves will learn what we’ve shown before; We love our sheep, we Dogs of War. Russ Vaughn 2d Bn, 327th Parachute Infantry Regiment 101st Airborne Division Vietnam 65-66

Charles had perished in Italy, like hundreds of other Japanese-Americans in the 442nd Infantry Regiment, which became known as the Purple Heart Battalion due to the extraordinary number of medals for valor it had been awarded. That regiment, made up entirely of nisei, was the most decorated in US military history,

How I wish I was a child again, when time was still my friend.

Wars, wars, wars': reading up on the region I came across one moment when quintessential Englishness had in fact intersected with this darkling plain. In 1906 Winston Churchill, then the minister responsible for British colonies, had been honored by an invitation from Kaiser Wilhelm II to attend the annual maneuvers of the Imperial German Army, held at Breslau. The Kaiser was 'resplendent in the uniform of the White Silesian Cuirassiers' and his massed and regimented infantry... reminded one more of great Atlantic rollers than human formations. Clouds of cavalry, avalanches of field-guns and—at that time a novelty—squadrons of motor-cars (private and military) completed the array. For five hours the immense defilade continued. Yet this was only a twentieth of the armed strength of the regular German Army before mobilization. Strange to find Winston Churchill and Sylvia Plath both choosing the word 'roller,' in both its juggernaut and wavelike declensions, for that scene.

Having never commanded a company, battalion, regiment, brigade, division or corps of infantry or cavalry in battle, and trusting to his marshals’ experience and competence, Napoleon was generally content to leave logistics and battlefield tactics to them,

Napoleon I., whose career had the quality of a duel against the whole of Europe, disliked duelling between the officers of his army. The great military emperor was not a washbuckler, and had little respect for tradition. Nevertheless, a story of duelling, which became a legend in the army, runs through the epic of imperial wars. To the surprise and admiration of their fellows, two officers, like insane artists trying to gild refined gold or paint the lily, pursued a private contest through the years of universal carnage. They were officers of cavalry, and their connection with the high-spirited but fanciful animal which carries men into battle seems particularly appropriate. It would be difficult to imagine for heroes of this legend two officers of infantry of the line, for example, whose fantasy is tamed by much walking exercise, and whose valour necessarily must be of a more plodding kind. As to gunners or engineers, whose heads are kept cool on a diet of mathematics, it is simply unthinkable. The names of the two officers were Feraud and D'Hubert, and they were both lieutenants in a regiment of hussars, but not in the same regiment. [The duel]

It was the lot of the Fifity-fourth to bear the brunt of the struggle against the bitter injustice of inferior pay to which black troops were subjected, and the further struggle to secure for the enlisted men who earned it by intelligence and bravery, the right to rise from the ranks and serve as officers.

Amid this bureaucratic confusion, Pope’s General Order No. 33 stood. This meant that by virtue of the political and social contacts that had secured him command of the 18th Infantry Regiment, the obscure Colonel Henry Beebee Carrington, with no fighting experience and an attorney’s approach to most military hurdles, remained in charge of the Army’s most ambitious undertaking on the western frontier—the defeat of Red Cloud, the mightiest warrior chief of the mightiest tribe on the Plains. A plan to endow such an officer with the authority to build and maintain outposts throughout the very wilderness that had been ceded time and again to the Lakota by government treaty appeared not only duplicitous but idiotic.

You're no grenadier. Grenadiers are big, stalwart souls, the first into battle, or so I've been told." He raised his eyebrow at her, unsure if he was being insulted. "No," she concluded, "you must have been captain of the light infantry company. The quick-witted ones, the sharpshooters." "How ever did you guess?" "I know these things," she said with a sage look, then turned and walked on, entirely pleased with herself. Lucien gazed after her with a smile on his face. God help him, he was utterly charmed.

Slovik was arrested in October after living for weeks with a Canadian unit. Offered amnesty if he went to the front, he refused, vowing, “I’ll run away again if I have to.” He was convicted following a two-hour court-martial in the Hürtgen Forest on November 11. From a jail cell in Paris he appealed his death sentence to Eisenhower in a six-paragraph clemency plea. “How can I tell you how humbley sorry I am for the sins I’ve comitted.… I beg of you deeply and sincerely for the sake of my dear wife and mother back home to have mercy on me,” he wrote, according to the author William Bradford Huie. “I Remain Yours for Victory, Pvt. Eddie D. Slovik.” Unfortunately for the condemned, the supreme commander reviewed the petition at the nadir of the Bulge, on December 23, during a session in his Versailles office known as “the Hanging Hour.” Eisenhower not only affirmed the sentence, but decreed that as a lesson to shirkers it be carried out by Slovik’s putative unit, the 109th Infantry Regiment, in General Dutch Cota’s 28th Division.

The success of the Industrial School at Sutton can also be measured in terms of its impact on Kate’s younger brothers and sister—Thomas, George, and Mary—who were sent there from Bermondsey Workhouse after the death of their father. Within several years, George Eddowes had been trained as a shoemaker, while Thomas Eddowes had been taught music and was sent to join the band of the 45th Nottinghamshire Regiment of Infantry in Preston. Mary too succeeded well enough in her “domestic studies” to warrant placement as a servant.

and he prepared his elite professional household regiments: the infantry – the famous Janissaries – the cavalry regiments, and all the other attendant corps of gunners, armorers, bodyguards, and military police. These crack troops, paid regularly every three months and armed at the sultan’s expense, were all Christians largely from the Balkans, taken as children and converted to Islam. They owed their total loyalty to the sultan. Although few in number – probably no more than 5,000 infantry – they comprised the durable core of the Ottoman army.

Hitler derived several things from his experience and achievements in World War I, without which his rise to power in 1933 would have been at the least problematical, and at the most inconceivable. Hitler survived the war as a combat soldier—a rifle carrier—in a frontline infantry regiment. The achievement was an extraordinary one based on some combination of near-miraculous luck and combat skill. The interpretive fussing over whether or not Hitler was a combat soldier because he spent most of the war in the part of the regiment described as regimental headquarters can be laid to rest as follows: Any soldier in an infantry regiment on an active front in the west in World War I must be considered to have been a combat soldier. Hitler’s authorized regimental weapon was the Mauser boltaction, magazine-fed rifle. This gives a basic idea of what Hitler could be called upon to do in his assignment at the front. As a regimental runner, he carried messages to the battalions and line companies of the regiment, and the more important ones had to be delivered under outrageously dangerous circumstances involving movement through artillery fire and, particularly later in the war, poison gas and the omnipresent rifle fire of the skilled British sniper detachments. --Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny, p. 96

Troops caught nibbling their emergency D- ration chocolate bars were dubbed Chocolate Soldiers and punished by forfeiting two meals. This was a happy penance. The galleys served so much fatty mutton that derisive bleating could be heard throughout the convoy and the 13th Armored Regiment proposed a new battle cry: 'Baaa!' Crunchy raisins in the bread proved to be weevils; soldiers learned to hold up slices to the light, as if candling eggs. The 1st Infantry Division on Reine de Pacifico organized troop details to sift flour through mesh screens in a search for insects. Wormy meat aboard the Keren so provoked 34th Division soldiers that officers were dispatched to keep order in the mess hall. When soldiers aboard Letitia challenged the culinary honor of one French cook, he 'became quite wild and threatened to jump overboard.

Major General Leonard Wood Leonard Wood was an army officer and physician, born October 9, 1860 in Winchester, New Hampshire. His first assignment was in 1886 at Fort Huachuca, Arizona where he fought in the last campaign against the fierce Apache warrior Geronimo. He was awarded the Medal of Honor for carrying dispatches 100 miles through hostile territory and was promoted to the rank of Captain, commanding a detachment of the 8th Infantry. From 1887 to 1898, he served as a medical officer in a number of positions, the last of which was as the personal physician to President William McKinley. In 1898 at the beginning of the war with Spain, he was given command of the 1st Volunteer Cavalry. The regiment was soon to be known as the “Rough Riders." Wood lead his men on the famous charge up San Juan Hill and was given a field promotion to brigadier general. In 1898 he was appointed the Military Governor of Santiago de Cuba. In 1920, as a retired Major General, Wood ran as the Republican candidate for the presidency of the United States, losing to Warren Harding. In 1921 following his defeat, General Wood accepted the post of Governor General of the Philippines. He held this position from 1921 to 1927, when he died of a brain tumor in Boston, on 7 August 1927, at 66 years of age after which he was buried, with full honors, in Arlington National Cemetery.

pushups

The 112th Infantry Regiment of Cota’s 28th Division found that ‘on the morning of the initial assault, there were strong indications that the German infantry had imbibed rather freely of alcoholic beverage . . . They were laughing and shouting and telling our troops not to open fire, as it disclosed our positions. We obliged until the head of the column was 25 yards to our front. Heavy casualties were inflicted. Examination of the canteens on several of the bodies gave every indication that the canteen had only a short time before contained cognac.

Political novice Ulysses S. Grant was the first of six Union veterans to become president, five of whom were born in Ohio. The 23rd Ohio Infantry Regiment alone produced Maj. Gen. Rutherford B. Hayes and Maj. William McKinley. Former Brig. Gen. Benjamin Harrison defeated Grover Cleveland in 1888 partly because

You have probably seen the order from Washington which cuts down the pay for colored troops from $13 to $10. Of course if this affects Massachusetts regiments, it will be a great piece of injustice to them, as they were enlisted on the express understanding that they were to be on precisely the same footing as all other Massachusetts troops. (excerpt from letter to MA Gov. John A. Andrew from Col. Robert G. Shaw, 2 July 1863)

While recruiting, Lieutenant Grace was often insulted by such remarks as, "There goes the captain of the Negro Company! He thinks the negroes will fight! They will turn and run at the first sight of the enemy!" His little son was scoffed at in school because his father was raising a negro company to fight the white men.

The steamer, however, could not proceed until the cholera abated, and the regiment was detained still longer. Altogether, on the Isthmus and on the Pacific side, we were delayed six weeks. About one-seventh of those who left New York harbor with the 4th infantry on the 5th of July, now lie buried on the Isthmus of Panama or on Flamingo island in Panama Bay.

Besides the moral courage required to accept commissions in the Fifty-fourth at the time it was organizing, physical courage was also necessary, for the Confederate Congress, on May 1, 1863, passed an act, a potion of which read as follow: - Section IV. That every white person being a commissioned officer, or acting as such, who, during the present war, shall command negroes or mulattoes in arms against the Confederate States, or who shall arm, train, organize, or prepare negroes or mulattoes for military service against the Confederate States, or who shall voluntarily aid negroes or mulattoes in any military enterprise, attack, or conflict in such service, shall be deemed as inciting servile insurrection, and shall, if captured, be put to death or be otherwise punished at the discretion of the Court.

For more than two years he stayed on the slaughterhouse battlefields of France. In September at Varennes he was wounded by a ricocheting rifle bullet in his left thigh—characteristically for him, he was confronting three French soldiers alone and with an empty rifle. He was awarded the Iron Cross, Second Class. When he returned to the 124th Infantry from the hospital on January 13, 1915, it was fighting in grueling trench warfare in the Argonnes forest. Two weeks later he crawled with his riflemen through 100 yards of barbed wire into the main French positions, captured four bunkers, held them against a counterattack by a French battalion and then withdrew before a new attack could develop, having lost less than a dozen men. This bravery won Rommel the Iron Cross, First Class—the first for a lieutenant in the entire regiment.

Combat is, axiomatically, not fair nor does one try to be fair.

1899, the 24th Mounted Infantry, an African American army regiment, was entrusted with the protection of Yosemite, Sequoia, and Kings Canyon National Parks in California. For a long time people forgot their presence in the parks’ history, until Shelton Johnson found a picture.

Pvt. Harold “Hal” Baumgarten, Company B, 116th Infantry Regiment, 29th Division: Brig. Gen. Norman D. Cota, with a pistol in his hand, came running up our beach from the west. He was accompanied by a major I didn’t recognize. I couldn’t talk, due to my face wound, but some of the guys called to him to get down. It was reassuring to us to see this brave man on the beach, disregarding the snipers. We were advised that the only ones who were going to remain on the beach “were the dead, and those who were going to die.

No one works harder at perfection than the Third (3d) United States Infantry Regiment known as The Old Guard.

But I want you lads to think of me as, let’s say … your kindly uncle. Anything you need. Anything extra. Anything to make this army life of ours worth living.’ He leaned in closer and gave the suggestive eyebrows. ‘Anything. You can come to me.’ Lederlingen held up a hesitant finger. ‘Yes?’ ‘We’re cavalrymen, aren’t we?’ ‘Yes, trooper, we are.’ ‘Shouldn’t we have horses?’ ‘That’s an excellent question and a keen grasp of tactics. Due to an administrative error, our horses are currently with the Fifth, attached to Mitterick’s division, which, as a regiment of infantry, is not in a position to make best use of them. I’m told they’ll be catching up with us any day, though they’ve been telling me that a while. For the time being we are a regiment of … horseless horse.’ ‘Foot?’ offered Yolk. ‘You might say that, except we still …’ and Tunny tapped his skull, ‘think like cavalry. Other than horses, which is a deficiency common to every man in the unit, is there anything else you need?’ Klige

An enterprising shortwave radio operator managed to pick up the Army–Notre Dame football game and broadcast it to the 16th Infantry Regiment over the ship’s public address system.

Pvt. Len Griffing, 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne: In the serenity of England, in our own camp, invading France seemed to be a lot easier than it turned out to be. Flight (Warrant) Officer Charles E.

Schuster, 1983. ———. The Supreme Commander: The War Years of General Dwight D. Eisenhower. New York: Doubleday, 1970. Ambrose, Stephen E., and Richard H. Immerman. Ike’s Spies: Eisenhower and the Espionage Establishment. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1981. Ankrum, Homer. Dogfaces Who Smiled Through Tears. Lake Mills, Ia.: Graphic Publishing, 1987. Armstrong, Anne. Unconditional Surrender. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1961. Arnbal, Anders Kjar. The Barrel-Land Dance Hall Rangers. New York: Vantage Press, 1993. Ashcraft, Howard D. As You Were: Cannon Company, 34th Infantry Division, 168th Infantry Regiment. Richmond, Va.: Ashcraft Enterprises, 1990. Astor, Gerald. The Greatest War: Americans in Combat, 1941–1945. Novato, Calif.: Presidio, 1999. Auphan, Paul, and Jacques Mordal. The French Navy in World War II. Trans. A.C.J. Sabalot. Annapolis: United States

Fifty of the Infantry tanks were at home in a battalion of the Royal Tank Regiment, and the remainder were in training-schools. Never has a great nation been so naked before her foes.

Munson was a member of the unit to which Corporal Gault assigned me after I flew my tenth mission back home to Rampont, a unit that would soon be known throughout the world as part of the Lost Battalion. That summer it was still simply the 1st Battalion of the 308th Regiment of the United States Army’s 77th Infantry Division, under the command of newly minted Major Charles White Whittlesey.

Alone and unarmed I was on the Via Ostiense – not quite a comfortable feeling. The only wish that I had was: ‘Get away from the street!’ As if sent by God, a house door to the right of me stood open. I gathered all my courage and jumped towards the open door and into the house, and received a shock: in the corridor stood a platoon of Italian infantry men under direction of a young Leutnant. Then I had more luck than sense: the Italian lieutenant held his hands up and his men hurried to do the same. It was the one time during the whole war that I personally took prisoners.

During this operation the Third Army moved farther and faster and engaged more divisions in less time than any other army in the history of the United States…No country can stand against such an army.

Another barrier fell in the Pacific theater in the spring of 1944, when the 24th Infantry Regiment and the 93rd Infantry Division became the first Black infantry troops to see combat in the war. Black infantry troops arrived as reinforcements on Bougainville Island, halfway between New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, after the majority of Japanese soldiers had been defeated.

old enough to have come to the island as a very young man in January of 1866 after the war ended and after the 29th Connecticut Colored Infantry Regiment he’d fought in had been decommissioned because he’d heard about the island from one of the Virginians he’d fought alongside who’d said his father had known a man named Honey a long time ago who it was said had gone north and founded an all colored town on an island. Zachary had lived his entire life on Apple Island since then.

The next day, when preparations were in full swing for the crossing of the Dniester river, the scouts of the 91st Infantry Regiment passed by a cross on the roadside on which someone had written Unknown Soldier. While some were making the cross sign over their chests, others were saying a God forgive him! or God rest his soul! But for most of them the old priest's words came back to them: These are our holy crosses, which spring from the bodies of our heroes and are watered with their blood and the tears of those who knew and loved them.

The East India Company has, thankfully, no exact modern equivalent. Walmart, which is the world’s largest corporation in revenue terms, does not number among its assets a fleet of nuclear submarines; neither Facebook nor Shell possesses regiments of infantry. Yet the East India Company – the first great multinational corporation, and the first to run amok – was the ultimate model and prototype for many of today’s joint stock corporations. The most powerful among them do not need their own armies: they can rely on governments to protect their interests and bail them out.

The day after Republicans used Black votes to regain the House in the 1906 midterm elections, President Theodore Roosevelt ordered the dishonorable discharge (and loss of pensions) of 167 Black soldiers in the 25th Infantry Regiment, a Black unit that had been a huge source of Black pride. A dozen or so members of the regiment had been falsely accused of murdering a bartender and wounding a police officer in the horrifically racist town of Brownsville, Texas, on August 13, 1906. Overnight, the most popular US president in Black communities since Abraham Lincoln became the most unpopular. “Once enshrined in our hearts as Moses,” shouted out a Harlem pastor, the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Sr., Roosevelt was “now enshrouded in our scorn as Judas.” In the final days of 1906, it was hard to find an African American who was not spitting ire at the Roosevelt administration. Roosevelt’s efforts to regain Black support with new Black federal appointments failed. Sounding the indignation of the observant press, the New York Times reported that “not a particle of evidence” had been given to prove the men were guilty. Roosevelt was defiant in his Annual Message to Congress on December 3, 1906 (defiant in his crude attempts to gain southern White voters). He warned “respectable colored people… not to harbor criminals,” meaning the criminals of Brownsville. And then he turned to lynchings: “The greatest existing cause of lynching is the perpetration, especially by black men, of the hideous crime of rape.

Colonel John (Mike) Michaelis, a regimental commander with the legendary Wolfhounds and one of the early heroes of the war, thought the American troops did not know their weapons, or even the basics of infantry life and survival. “They’d spent a lot of time listening to lectures on the differences between communism and Americanism and not enough time crawling on their bellies on maneuvers with live ammunition singing over them. They’d been nursed and coddled, told to drive safely, to buy War Bonds, to give to the Red Cross, to avoid VD, to write home to mother—when someone ought to have been telling them how to clear a machine gun when it jams.

A baboon called Jackie served in the 3rd South African Infantry Regiment during World War I. He saluted superior officers, stood sentry, and was even wounded by enemy fire. For his bravery, Jackie was awarded a medal for valour, as well as promoted from private to corporal.

Many of these men were going to be my regimental peers. I knew I needed to build cohesion with them if I was going to have a successful career. It seemed like it was my responsibility to shift their paradigms against women in combat but it felt like trying to tame sharks while swimming in the same waters, already bleeding from some of their nibbles. I stayed alert and guarded, all the while trying to convince them I was worthy of being in the infantry, despite their opinions to the contrary.

I didn't like to be singled out or recognized individually. I didn't like to be the centre of anything, except perhaps an empty room filled with books, a valley surrounded by mountains, a small canoe in the middle of a vast lake. I was as introverted as they come. Yet, here I was, wanting to join an infantry regiment of fifteen hundred men. I might as well jump into shark-infested waters and ask them not to take much notice of me.

Behind them, filling the roads that converged on Liège came the infantry of Emmich’s assault force, rank after rank. Only the red regimental number painted on helmet fronts broke the monotony of field-gray Horse-drawn field artillery followed. The new leather of boots and harness creaked. Companies of cyclists sped ahead to seize road crossings and farmhouses and lay telephone wires. Automobiles honked their way through, carrying monocled Staff officers with orderlies holding drawn pistols sitting up front and trunks strapped on behind. Every regiment had its field kitchens on wheels, said to be inspired by one the Kaiser had seen at Russian maneuvers, with fires kindled and cooks standing up stirring the stew as the wagons moved. Such was the perfection of the equipment and the precision of the marching that the invaders appeared to be on parade.

On Mount Harriet 42 Commando found themselves with over 300 prisoners, including the Commanding Officer of the Argentine 4th Infantry Regiment and several officers. This gave the lie to later Press reports that all the officers ran off leaving their conscript soldiers to be slaughtered or surrender like sheep. On Mount Harriet, as elsewhere, the Argentine officers and senior NCOs fought hard and on several occasions towards the end of the battle, tried

sleep, we agreed that we would meet next Christmas in a beer joint called Logan’s

Martin K. A. Morgan, wrote in Down to Earth: The 507th Parachute Infantry Regiment in Normandy,