Infantryman Quotes

Pray use both cats as sponges if it pleases you, infatuated infantryman.

Former corporal Hitler, decorated for his service on the front lines of the Great War, may have believed he knew more about waging war than the Prussian generals. His successes as an infantryman, terrorist, diplomatic bully, and military victor in early 1940 had made him supremely confident. But, in reality, he was out of his depth. He already had failed to easily capture the British Expeditionary Force at Dunkirk in May, 1940 and failed again a few months later in the Battle of Britain despite superior air power. Understanding the enormous potential of a comprehensive geopolitical strategy, such as the Quadripartite Entente, was beyond his capabilities and destroyed by his hatreds. While Germany was still powerful, the misjudgments in 1940 and the failure to conquer Russia in 1941 were taking a toll. Largely unrecognized at the time, the odds were beginning to shift away from Hitler. 

Ever since I served as an infantryman in the First World War I had a great dislike of people who themselves in ease and safety, issue exhortations to men in the front line.

Every infantryman in the Soviet Army carries with him a small spade. When he is given the order to halt he immediately lies flat and starts to dig a hole in the ground beside him.

An infantryman can fight only if somebody else delivers him to his zone; in a way I suppose pilots are just as essential as we are.

An infantryman’s job is to deliver his enemies into the waiting hands of Death. It is Doc’s job to protect his brothers from Death, to knock him aside and say, “Not today.

The writer is an infantryman. He knows that progress is measured in yards of dirt extracted from the enemy one day, one hour, one minute at a time and paid for in blood. The artist wears combat boots.

an average infantryman records one enemy fatality for every fifteen thousand combat rounds expended.

The infantryman's way of life has a knack for distilling a man's character down to its most essential elements. If he measures up, nothing else matters.

Look at an infantryman's eyes and you can tell how much war he has seen.

And the knowledge Inside the hill on which you are sitting, A moated fort hill, bigger than your house, Failed to reach the picture. While your next moment, Coming towards you like an infantryman Returning slowly out of no-man's-land, Bowed under something, never reached you-- Simply melted into the perfect light.

Go fuck yourself, Teague,” Marshall said. “If you were a real infantryman, you’d have already commanded instead of hiding out on the staff.” “Maybe there are limits to how many hairy asses I’ll kiss to make major. Feel free to continue for the both of us, though,” Teague said.

One soldier in the Ypres Salient, at Messines, Belgium, wrote of the frustration of the trench stalemate. “We are still in our old positions, and keep annoying the English and French. The weather is miserable and we often spend days on end knee-deep in water and, what is more, under heavy fire. We are greatly looking forward to a brief respite. Let’s hope that soon afterwards the whole front will start moving forward. Things can’t go on like this for ever.” The author was a German infantryman of Austrian descent named Adolf Hitler.

His sword took the nearest neatly, because killing fleeing infantryman was an essential part of knightly training, taken for granted, like courage.

As I looked out across the gym at row after row of stretchers the scene reminded me of one in Gone with the Wind. It is always the infantryman who suffers worst in war.

what was neither a horse nor a cannon must be an infantryman!

Pray use both cats as sponges if it pleases you, infatuated infantryman,

A quotation in a speech, article, or book is like a rifle in the hands of an infantryman. It speaks with authority.

A chipped concrete bunker shaped like an infantryman’s helmet was tilted insolently on a mound at the track’s edge.

We] picked them up, that is, their internals, and did not know the soldiers they belonged to. So you see, the cavalryman got an infantryman’s guts, and an infantryman got a cavalryman’s guts.

One night," Lillian continued, "Daisy was ill, and they kept her in the nursery. I had to sleep in another room in case the fever was catching. I was frightened for my sister, and I woke up in the middle of the night crying. Rafe heard me and came to ask what was the matter. I told him how worried I was for Daisy, and also about a terrible nightmare I'd had. So Rafe went to his room, and came back with one of his soldiers. An infantryman. Rafe put it on the table by my bed, and told me, 'This is the bravest and most stalwart of all my men. He'll stand guard over you during the night, and chase off all your worries and bad dreams.'" The countess smiled absently at the memory. "And it worked.

We try to reproduce the reality, but the harder we try, the more we find the pictures that make up the stock-in-trade of the spectacle of history forcing themselves upon us: the fallen drummer boy, the infantryman shown in the act of stabbing another, the horse’s eye starting from its socket, the invulnerable Emperor surrounded by his generals, a moment frozen still amidst the turmoil of battle. Our concern with history, so Hilary’s thesis ran, is a concern with preformed images already imprinted on our brains, images at which we keep staring while the truth lies elsewhere, away from it all, somewhere as yet undiscovered.

Guards, meanwhile, had to resist the

The writer is an infantryman. He knows that progress is measured in yards of dirt extracted from the enemy one day, one hour, one minute at a time and paid for in blood. The artist wears combat boots. He looks in the mirror and sees GI Joe. Remember, the Muse favors working stiffs. She hates prima donnas. To the gods the supreme sin is not rape or murder, but pride.

His description of the many arms which the Roman soldier was required to become expert in reminds one of the almost innumerable duties of the present day infantryman. Recruits were to be hardened so as to be able to march twenty miles in half a summer's day at ordinary step and twenty-four miles at quick step. It was the ancient regulation that practice marches of this distance must be made three times a month.

A French officer . . . felt that there was a reverse correlation between xenophobia and proximity to the enemy: Hatred of the enemy diminished as one passed from the interior to the front, where it tapered still more as one went from staffs to field headquarters, from headquarters to batteries, from batteries to the battalion command post, and finally from there to the infantryman in the trench and observation sap, where it reached its lowest ebb. Or, as C.E. Mentague put it, rather more tersely: "War hath no fury like a noncombatant.

When we were a few minutes from the LZ, I turned around in my seat to look at the faces of the American soldiers about to go into battle. I did this as part of my plan, hatched months ago, to see the war up close from a helicopter. Although I guess I knew better, what I expected to see were grim, masculine faces with determined, steely eyes and firmly set jaws. The image of GI Joe. But that was not what I saw. I saw pimples and peach fuzz and eyes full of fear. Some of the soldiers were big guys and some were slight, but they all had one thing in common—they were young, really young. I’ll never forget that image. The typical American infantryman was a kid.

Until the last day of the war, MacArthur and his staff continued to plan for Olympic [the invasion of the Japanese home islands]. Yet nobody, with the possible exception of the general, wanted to launch the operation. A British infantryman, gazing at bloated corpses on a Burman battlefield, vented the anger and frustration common to almost every Allied soldier in those days, about the enemy's rejection of reason: "Ye stupid sods! Ye stupid Japanni sods! Look at the fookin' state of ye! Ye wadn't listen--and yer all fookin' dead! Tojo's way! Ye dumb bastards! Ye coulda bin suppin' chah an' screwin' geeshas in yer fookin' lal paper 'ooses--an' look at ye! Ah doan't knaw!

Bavaria, May 8, 1945. While civilians embraced...and took to the streets around the globe...many infantrymen in Europe, brutalized and broken, sat alone with their grief or paced their rest areas in mournful silence. "There is V-E Day without, but no peace within," wrote the war's most decorated infantryman, Audie Murphy..."People were damaged," remembered Thunderbird Guy Prestia. "It was like we'd been in a car crash. There was trauma. It takes a while to get over that."..."There was great relief," recalled [Lieutenant Colonel Felix] Sparks, "but no celebrations."....It was hard to believe, hard to accept that the killing and dying were finally over. There would be no more Anzios, Salernos, or Reipertswillers. Finally, after the death of 135,576 young Americans, Europe was free.

Ever since I served as an infantryman in the first world war I have had a great dislike of people who, themselves in ease and safety, issue exhortations to men in the front line. As a result I have a reluctance to say much about temptations to which I myself am not exposed. No man, I suppose, is tempted to every sin. It so happens that the impulse which makes men gamble has been left out of my make-up; and, no doubt, I pay for this by lacking some good impulse of which it is the excess or perversion. I therefore did not feel myself qualified to give advice about permissable and impermissable gambling: if there is any permissable, for I do not claim to know even that. I have also said nothing about birth-control. I am not a woman nor even a married man, nor am I a priest. I did not think it my place to take a firm line about pains, dangers and expenses from which I am protected; having no pastoral office which obliged me to do so.

They are swatting us like flies,’ a Soviet infantryman on the Finnish front complained in December 1939. By the time the conflict was over, more than 126,000 Soviet troops had been killed and another 300,000 evacuated from the front because of injury, disease or frostbite. Finnish losses were also severe, indeed proportionately even more so, at 50,000 killed and 43,000 wounded. Nevertheless, there was no doubt that the Finns had given the Soviets a bloody nose. Their troops showed not only courage and determination, fuelled by strong nationalist commitment, but also ingenuity. Borrowing from the example of Franco’s forces in the Spanish Civil War, the Finns took empty bottles of spirits, filled them with kerosene and other chemicals, stuck a wick in each of them, then lit them and threw them at incoming Soviet tanks, covering them with flames. ‘I never knew a tank could burn for quite that long,’ said a Finnish veteran. They devised a new name for the projectile, too: in honour of the Soviet Foreign Minister they called them ‘Molotov cocktails’.

When you're responsible for half the planet's military spending, and 80 percent of its military R&D, certain things can be said with confidence: No one is going to get into a nuclear war with the United States, or a large-scale tank battle, or even a dogfight. You're the Microsoft, the Standard Oil of conventional warfare: Were they interested in competing in this field, second-tier military powers would probably have filed an antitrust suit with the Department of Justice by now. When you're the only guy in town with a tennis racket, don't be surprised if no one wants to join you on center court--or that provocateurs look for other fields on which to play. If you've got uniformed infantryman and tanks and battleships and jet fighters, you're too weak to take on the hyperpower. But, if you've got illiterate goatherds with string and hacksaws and fertilizer, you can tie him down for a decade. An IED is an "improvised" explosive device. Can we still improvise? Or does the planet's most lavishly funded military assume it has the luxury of declining to adapt to the world it's living in?

Eric Steele was strapped in and rubbing a rag over his father’s 1911. Demo had brought the pistol with the rest of Steele’s gear on board the C-17. In the cockpit, the pilot pushed the throttle forward, shoving Steele back in his seat. He barely noticed because he was thinking about the first time his father let him hold the pistol. It had felt so heavy in his hands back then. So much I never got to ask him. He ran his thumb over the spot where the serial number should have been. It was silver and all traces of the file marks were smoothed out by years of use. The pistol was one of John Moses Browning’s masterpieces, the same design that the American infantryman had carried in the Battle of Belleau Wood, Iwo Jima, Korea, and Vietnam. It was the only thing he had to remind him of the father he never really knew. Steele had made the pistol his own by modifying it to shoot 9mm, adding a threaded barrel, and installing suppressor sights, which were taller than the factory ones. It was his gun now, and he slipped it away before taking an amphetamine tablet out of his pocket and downing it with a sip of water.

In May of 1945, only a few weeks after the fighting had ended in Europe, I was rotated back to the States, where I spent the remainder of the war with a training company at Camp Crowder, Missouri. Along with the rest of the Ninth Army, I had been racing across Germany so swiftly during the late winter and spring that when I boarded the plane, I couldn't believe its destination lay to the west. My mind might inform me otherwise, but there was an inertia of the spirit that told me we were flying to a new front, where we would disembark and continue our push eastward-eastward until we'd circled the globe, marching through villages along whose twisting, cobbled streets crowds of the enemy would watch us take possession of what, up till then, they'd considered their own. I had changed enough in two years not to mind the trembling of old people, the crying of the very young, the uncertainty and fear in the eyes of the once arrogant. I had been fortunate enough to develop an infantryman's heart, which, like his feet, at first aches and swells but finally grows horny enough for him to travel the weirdest paths without feeling a thing.

These inventions became, incidentally, increasingly revolting to me, for I was ineradicably marked by a touch of the old cavalryman's primitive evaluation. I admit that in the earliest times the horseman had a considerable advantage over the foot soldier. (On the other hand considerably higher expenses were involved.) But the advantage was balanced by the invention of gunpowder, so rightly lamented by Ariosto. It was the end of glorious armies like those led by Charles the Bold. Cavalry charges still took place of course – and I cannot consider it unfair for the infantryman to load and fire two or three times before he received his comeuppance – but after that, death came to the cavalry. The old Centaurs were overpowered by the new Titan. I had seen my own conqueror at close hand when I lay bleeding on the grass. He had unhorsed me – a sickly fellow, a pimply lad from the suburbs, some cutler from Sheffield or weaver from Manchester. He cowered behind his rubble heap, one eye shut, the other aiming at me across the machine gun, which did the damage. In a pattern of red and gray, he wove an evil cloth. This was the new Polyphemus or, rather, one of his lowest messenger boys with a wire mask before his one-eyed face. This was how the present masters looked. The beauty of the forests was past.

Hitler initially served in the List Regiment engaged in a violent four-day battle near Ypres, in Belgian Flanders, with elite British professional soldiers of the initial elements of the British Expeditionary Force. Hitler thereby served as a combat infantryman in one of the most intense engagements of the opening phase of World War I. The List Regiment was temporarily destroyed as an offensive force by suffering such severe casualty rates (killed, wounded, missing, and captured) that it lost approximately 70 percent of its initial strength of around 3,600 men. A bullet tore off Hitler’s right sleeve in the first day of combat, and in the “batch” of men with which he originally advanced, every one fell dead or wounded, leaving him to survive as if through a miracle. On November 9, 1914, about a week after the ending of the great battle, Hitler was reassigned as a dispatch runner to regimental headquarters. Shortly thereafter, he was awarded the Iron Cross Second Class. On about November 14, 1914, the new regimental commander, Lieutenant Colonel Philipp Engelhardt, accompanied by Hitler and another dispatch runner, moved forward into terrain of uncertain ownership. Engelhardt hoped to see for himself the regiment’s tactical situation. When Engelhardt came under aimed enemy smallarms fire, Hitler and the unnamed comrade placed their bodies between their commander and the enemy fire, determined to keep him alive. The two enlisted men, who were veterans of the earlier great four-day battle around Ypres, were doubtlessly affected by the death of the regiment’s first commander in that fight and were dedicated to keeping his replacement alive. Engelhardt was suitably impressed and proposed Hitler for the Iron Cross Second Class, which he was awarded on December 2. Hitler’s performance was exemplary, and he began to fit into the world around him and establish the image of a combat soldier tough enough to demand the respect of anyone in right wing, Freikorps-style politics after the war. -- Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny, p. 88

Physical fitness. Being a light infantryman is physically demanding. Troops must maintain the ability to move long distances quickly, with or without loads. At the same time, the “soldier’s load” should not exceed 45 pounds, beyond which march performance is degraded regardless of physical conditioning. Light infantry also requires a different approach to physical fitness from that currently taken by many state militaries. Light infantry requires endurance far more than physical strength. Soldiers must be able to march long distances; they must be prepared to move all night carrying their combat load in difficult terrain. Physical fitness standards for light infantrymen should reflect this emphasis on endurance.

A German infantryman wrote in his diary, ‘Courage has nothing to do with it. The fear of death surpasses all other feelings and terrible compulsion alone drives the soldier forward.’22

From the ranks of the Richmond militia across the square, a thin-shouldered infantryman glared at the hooded figure on the scaffold. The militiaman’s eyes were dark with excitement, as if he had quite lost himself in the spectacle. He was Private John Wilkes Booth.

The individual Soviet infantryman after mid-1942 was often armed with the superb PPSh-41 submachine gun (over 6 million produced during the war) or the SVT-40 semi-automatic rifle (1.6 million).

It helped that both the Pathfinders and the Alarians chosen to join them were a cut above the average infantryman, having been forged into true professionals in the fires of their respective training programs.

The writer is an infantryman. He knows that progress is measured in yards of dirt extracted from the enemy one day, one hour, one minute at a time and paid for in blood.

Whatever it did to Churchill, Gallipoli saw the birth of a nation, or rather two. By no remote consequence of the campaign, Mustafa Kemal would become Kemal Ataturk, while the rump of the Ottoman Empire became a Turkish national state under his leadership. And Australia would change also. The headstone of one Australian infantryman bears the words, chosen by his parents, ‘When day break, duty done for King and Country,’ but that was not how later generations of Australians would feel. ‘From a place you’ve never heard of, comes a story you’ll never forget’ was the quaint slogan advertising the 1981 Australian movie Gallipoli, which helped launch Mel Gibson’s career, but every Australian has heard of it.

They walked round the open space, in the center of which stands a fine group of Silenus figures, and stopped. The infantryman threw away his cigarette. The Senegalese picked it up, took a few quick puffs at it, put it out by squeezing it between his fore-finger and thumb and stuffed it into his pocket. All this without a word.

perhaps

I was no longer an infantryman. I had been promoted. I was a general, admiring the work of my seemingly loyal subordinates.

Given the medical realities, I could hardly object to her position. Women in childbed faced about the same odds of survival as the average infantryman on the day of battle, and yet, motherhood earned the ladies neither a regular pay packet, nor handsome medals, nor a hero’s accolades.

I jump over dead bodies, and in my mind flashes a thought: how quickly men become accustomed to things which, at one time, they would have found impossible to imagine.

Distance was a cleansing agent for everything. “The pervasive mud, and jungle gloom and tropical sun, when they are not all around you smothering you, can have a haunting beauty at a far remove,” wrote an infantryman who would arrive at Guadalcanal later, James Jones. “When you are not straining and gasping to save your life, the act of doing so can seem adventurous and exciting from a distance. The greater the distance, the greater the adventure. But, God help me, it was beautiful.

In the armed forces, those who fight on the ground generally see those on ships as much better off. The Marines live in both worlds, and they have strong views. Major General Julian C. Smith put it well on the eve of the bloody 1943 Tarawa landing: “Even though you Navy officers do come in to about a thousand yards, I remind you that you have a little armor. I want you to know that Marines are crossing that beach with bayonets, and the only armor they will have is a khaki shirt.” As an admiral who had risen from the ranks once told an Army infantryman, the worst wardroom always trumps the best foxhole.

The hand squeezing the handle was not a Roman infantryman. The force behind the hammer was not an angry mob. The verdict behind the death was not decided by jealous Jews. Jesus himself chose the nails.

Ever since I served as an infantryman in the First World War I have had a great dislike of people who, themselves in ease and safety, issue exhortations to men in the front line." C S Lewis, Mere Christianity, Preface, p. xii

Thankful that her face plate hid her expression as it contorted with that old mix of the infantryman's favorite fuel, hate and discontent.

For instance, we had learned that the Germans were booby-trapping everything, and that you didn’t touch anything you couldn’t be sure of. We had learned how to fight in hedgerows. We had learned that the Germans had snipers everywhere. We had learned that we had to walk, not on the road, or even on the side of the road, but on the very edge of the road, since it was the only area where the Germans couldn’t plant a land mine. We learned how to dive into ditches when enemy tanks or planes suddenly appeared.

Timing was something I had learned about as well. Early on in the fighting, we were moving on a German machine gun nest and I was assigned to throw grenades to keep the Germans’ heads down while

like when it was falling on our position. We learned that mortar rounds come in silently, and their use against us would only become evident after the first incoming round exploded. We also knew the fearful sound of a bullet whizzing by our ears and the dreaded thwack it makes when it hits a human being. We developed an instinct that enabled us to drop down to the ground at the first inkling of trouble, but then to adapt and move ahead as quickly as possible. And now, in just three short weeks, we had learned just how well, and how dirty, the Germans could fight.

We had also learned many simple things about combat that war games and training can’t teach you, but can only be acquired from experience. We now knew exactly what an artillery shell sounded

The writer is an infantryman. He knows that progress is measured in yards of dirt extracted from the enemy one day, one hour, one minute at a time and paid for in blood. The artist wears combat boots. He looks in the mirror and sees GI Joe. Remember, the Muse favors working stiffs. She hates prima donnas. To the gods the supreme sin is not rape or murder, but pride. To think of yourself as a mercenary, a gun for hire, implants the proper humility. It purges pride and preciousness.

The musket made the infantryman and the infantryman made the democrat.

Have you ever seen a horse wounded in action? I have. It was a horse I rode for several kilometres, until a shell exploded near us. Making a few circles in the air I finally landed. Then I saw the animal: its front legs, set against the ground, made jerky movements as if dancing; its body was covered in sweat, the muscles vibrating with a futile effort. The poor thing didn’t understand that it would never rise again. Its nostrils quivered, pink and bloody. It groaned like a human, and looked at me with wide open eyes, tears falling from them. I stood close by but did not have the nerve to shoot it. Some old soldier stopped by and put an end to the suffering of the wounded horse. He stuck a carbine into its ear and fired. I’m crying as I write these lines. What was the dying horse thinking when it looked at me with its wide open eyes? That men are a sick race, a force that disfigures nature? No, this knowledge is accessible only to Man himself. At its final moment, the horse expected from me – a human being – help and salvation.

from the individual infantryman’s point of view there really is no such thing as too much personal firepower.

The principals simply could not understand the leavening influence of the terrain, the jungle, the paddies, on their modern fire power, thus stripping away the greatest advantage the Americans had, nullifying all their hardware, making even the helicopters a limited weapon (and the cruelest of all ironies, coming up with a basic infantrymans's weapon, the Chinese-made AK-47, which worked better under extremely difficult conditions and jammed less frequently than the basic weapon carried by the Americans). Thus, with technology stripped away, were the Americans that impressive? Would they be braver, more willing to die than their enemies, who were leaner, less expectant of what life was going to give them, easily as well led, and above all Vietnamese?

When it was all said and done at Guadalcanal, three sailors would die at sea for every infantryman who fell ashore.