Military Artillery Quotes

Just who has imposed on the suffering human race poison gas, barbed wire, high explosives, experiments in eugenics, the formula for zyklon b, heavy artillery, pseudo-scientific justifications for mass murder, cluster bombs, attack submarines, napalm, intercontinental missiles , military space platforms and nuclear weapons? If memory serves it was not the Vatican.

As a general rule, I am opposed to tax dollars being used for – well, damn near anything, barring mail delivery, law enforcement, and heavy artillery.

I've been a soldier all my life. I've fought from the ranks on up, you know my service. But sir, I must tell you now, I believe this attack will fail. No 15,000 men ever made could take that ridge. It's a distance of more than a mile, over open ground. When the men come out of the trees, they will be under fire from Yankee artillery from all over the field. And those are Hancock's boys! And now, they have the stone wall like we did at Fredericksburg. - Lieutenant General James Longstreet to General Robert E. Lee after the initial Confederate victories on day one of the Battle of Gettysburg.

Just who has imposed on the suffering human race poison gas, barbed wire, high explosives, experiments in eugenics, the formula for Zyklon B, heavy artillery, pseudo-scientific justifications for mass murder, cluster bombs, attack submarines, napalm, intercontinental ballistic missiles, military space platforms, and nuclear weapons? If memory serves, it was not the Vatican.

Man with a crossbow in the proper position at the proper time’s worth a corps of heavy artillery half an hour late and ten miles down the road from where it should be.

Just who has imposed on the suffering human race poison gas, barbed wire, high explosives, experiments in eugenics, the formula for Zyklon B, heavy artillery, pseudo-scientific justifications for mass murder, cluster bombs, attack submarines, napalm, intercontinental ballistic missiles, military space platforms, and nuclear weapons?

Was Trakl a Christian? Yes, of course, at times he becomes a Christian, among a general confusion of becomings—becoming an animal, becoming a virus, becoming inorganic—just as he was also an antichrist, a poet, a pharmacist, an alcoholic, a drug addict, a psychotic, a leper, a suicide, an incestuous cannibal, a necrophiliac, a rodent, a vampire, and a werewolf. Just as he became his sister, and also a hermaphrodite. Trakl's texts are scrawled over by redemptionist monotheism, just as they are stained by narcotic fluidities, gnawed by rats, cratered by Russian artillery, charred and pitted by astronomical debris. Trakl was a Christian and an atheist and also a Satanist, when he wasn't simply undead, or in some other way inhuman. It is perhaps more precise to say that Trakl never existed, except as a battlefield, a reservoir of disease, the graveyard of a deconsecrated church, as something expiring from a massive cocaine overdose on the floor of a military hospital, cheated by lucidity by the searing onslaught of base difference.

You cry, "give us war!" You are visionaries. When will you become thinkers? The thinkers do not look for power and strength from any of the dreams that constitute military art: tactics, strategies, fortifications, artillery and all that rubbish. They do no believe in war, which is a fantasy; they believe in chemistry, which is a science. They know the way to put victory into an algebraic formula.

All Nazi champions insist again and again that Marxism and Bolshevism are the quintessence of the Jewish mind, and that it is the great historic mission of Nazism to root out this pest. It is true that this attitude did not prevent the German nationalists either from coöperating with the German communists in undermining the Weimar Republic, or from training their black guards in Russian artillery and aviation camps in the years 1923–1933, or— in the period from August, 1939, until June, 1941—from entering into a close political and military complicity with Soviet Russia. Nevertheless, public opinion supports the view that Nazism and Bolshevism are philosophies—Weltanschauungen—implacably opposed to each other.

So before and during the war, the Bush administration had to build up an image in people's minds of Iraq as a monstrous military superpower, in order to mobilize enough popular hysteria so that people here would go along with their policies. And again, the media did their job 100 percent. So I don't know how well you remember what was going on around the country back then, but people were literally quaking in their boots about the extraordinary might of Iraq―it was a superpower with artillery we'd never dreamt of, all this kind of stuff.93 I mean, this was a defenseless Third World country that was so weak it had been unable to defeat post-revolutionary Iran in eight years of warfare [from 1980 to '88]―and that was with the support of the United States, the Soviet Union, all of Europe, the Arab oil countries: not an inconsiderable segment of world power. Yet with all those allies, Iraq had been unable to defeat post-revolutionary Iran, which had killed off its own officers' corps and barely had an army left: all of a sudden this was the superpower that was going to conquer the world? You really had to be a deeply brainwashed Western intellectual even to look at this image―a defenseless Third World country threatening the two most advanced military forces in the world, the United States and Britain―and not completely collapse in ridicule. But as you recall, that's what all of them were saying―and people here really believed it.

Once again it is interesting that when Peiper’s Artillery fired it has been described as indiscriminate and barbaric, yet Allied Artillery firing blindly into the night at a village known to have many civilians still within it, is described in military terms as ‘short preparation’s.’[99]

The established German Army no longer had the physical power to overcome the uniformed private armies of Left and Right. This weakness was not due to a lack of rifles, machine guns, or artillery, or even to a lack of men, but to a shortage of trucks. The vital role of the truck had already been recognized by some military experts. In England Captain B. H. Liddell Hart greeted the six-wheel truck as a landmark in military evolution.

When this all started, when the US of A got into this war and the Supreme Court decided what the hell, let's send women to, everyone wondered what effect it would have. Could women fight my girl Rio has a shiny Silver Star, A fistful of Purple Hearts, and a notched M1 that say yes. Could the men fight alongside women, or would the simple creatures be too distracted by feminine curves? Well, I won't spend a long night in a hole with Luther gear, who has never been a gentleman but he is a good soldier and he never made a pass at me. Possibly he was distracted by the artillery garage coming down on our heads. Possibly was that I hadn't showered in ... God only knows how long you have to ask my fleas. We were not a man and a woman in that hole we were too scared little babies screaming and cursing and so we could be grateful for the warmth of our own piss running down our legs. It was not a romantic evening.

Even for Joan, there was a familiarity, by now, to the workings of the military machine. The noise was deafening. The roar of the Armagnac cannon was answered by artillery blasts from the walls above; whenever a Parisian gunner struck his target, the screams of mutilated horses and men added a nerve-shredding counterpoint to the shouts of the soldiers who toiled in the moat, hurling bundles of wood into the standing water at the bottom in an attempt to build a makeshift pathway to the foot of the walls.

It is not that modern people are less intelligent than their grandparents: only that, being busier, they are less careful. They must learn to take short cuts, skimming through the columns of a newspaper, flicking over the pages of a book or magazine, deciding at each new paragraph or page whether to read it either attentively or cursorily, or whether to let it go unread. There is a running commentary in the mind. For example, in reading a Life of Napoleon: ‘page 9 … yes, he is still talking about Napoleon’s childhood and the romantic scenery of Corsica … something about James Boswell and Corsican independence … tradition of banditry … now back to the family origins again … wait a minute … no … his mother … more about her … yes … French Revolution … page 24, more about the French Revolution … still more … page 31, not interested … ah … Chapter 2, now he’s at the military school … I can begin here … but oughtn’t to waste time over this early part … in the artillery, was he? … but when do we get to the Italian campaign?’ And even when the reader does get to the Italian compaign and settles down comfortably to the story, he seldom reads a sentence through, word by word. Usually, he takes it in either with a single comprehensive glance as he would a stream or a field of cows that he was passing in the train, or with a series of glances, four or five words to a glance. And unless he has some special reason for studying the narrative closely, or is in an unusually industrious mood, he will not trouble about any tactical and geographical niceties of the campaign that are not presented with lively emphasis and perfect clarity. And, more serious still from the author’s point of view, he will not stop when the eye is checked by some obscurity or fancifulness of language, but will leave the point unresolved and pass on. If there are many such obstructions he will skim over them until his eye alights on a clear passage again.

In 1969 the Khmer Rouge numbered only about 4,000. By 1975 their numbers were enough to defeat the government forces. Their victory was greatly helped by the American attack on Cambodia, which was carried out as an extension of the Vietnam War. In 1970 a military coup led by Lon Nol, possibly with American support, overthrew the government of Prince Sihanouk, and American and South Vietnamese troops entered Cambodia. One estimate is that 600,000 people, nearly 10 per cent of the Cambodian population, were killed in this extension of the war. Another estimate puts the deaths from the American bombing at 1000,000 peasants. From 1972 to 1973, the quantity of bombs dropped on Cambodia was well over three times that dropped on Japan in the Second World War. The decision to bomb was taken by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger and was originally justified on the grounds that North Vietnamese bases had been set up in Cambodia. The intention (according to a later defence by Kissinger’s aide, Peter W. Rodman) was to target only places with few Cambodians: ‘From the Joint Chiefs’ memorandum of April 9, 1969, the White House selected as targets only six base areas minimally populated by civilians. The target areas were given the codenames BREAKFAST, LUNCH, DINNER, SUPPER, SNACK, and DESSERT; the overall programme was given the name MENU.’ Rodman makes the point that SUPPER, for instance, had troop concentrations, anti-aircraft, artillery, rocket and mortar positions, together with other military targets. Even if relatively few Cambodians were killed by the unpleasantly names items on the MENU, each of them was a person leading a life in a country not at war with the United States. And, as the bombing continued, these relative restraints were loosened. To these political decisions, physical and psychological distance made their familiar contribution. Roger Morris, a member of Kissinger’s staff, later described the deadened human responses: Though they spoke of terrible human suffering reality was sealed off by their trite, lifeless vernacular: 'capabilities', 'objectives', 'our chips', 'giveaway'. It was a matter, too, of culture and style. They spoke with the cool, deliberate detachment of men who believe the banishment of feeling renders them wise and, more important, credible to other men… They neither understood the foreign policy they were dealing with, nor were deeply moved by the bloodshed and suffering they administered to their stereo-types. On the ground the stereotypes were replaced by people. In the villages hit by bombs and napalm, peasants were wounded or killed, often being burnt to death. Those who left alive took refuge in the forests. One Western ob-server commented, ‘it is difficult to imagine the intensity of their hatred to-wards those who are destroying their villages and property’. A raid killed twenty people in the village of Chalong. Afterwards seventy people from Chalong joined the Khmer Rouge. Prince Sihanouk said that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger created the Khmer Rouge by expanding the war into Cambodia.

the Cook expedition had another, far less benign result. Cook was not only an experienced seaman and geographer, but also a naval officer. The Royal Society financed a large part of the expedition’s expenses, but the ship itself was provided by the Royal Navy. The navy also seconded eighty-five well-armed sailors and marines, and equipped the ship with artillery, muskets, gunpowder and other weaponry. Much of the information collected by the expedition – particularly the astronomical, geographical, meteorological and anthropological data – was of obvious political and military value. The discovery of an effective treatment for scurvy greatly contributed to British control of the world’s oceans and its ability to send armies to the other side of the world. Cook claimed for Britain many of the islands and lands he ‘discovered’, most notably Australia. The Cook expedition laid the foundation for the British occupation of the south-western Pacific Ocean; for the conquest of Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand; for the settlement of millions of Europeans in the new colonies; and for the extermination of their native cultures and most of their native populations.2 In the century following the Cook expedition, the most fertile lands of Australia and New Zealand were taken from their previous inhabitants by European settlers. The native population dropped by up to 90 per cent and the survivors were subjected to a harsh regime of racial oppression. For the Aborigines of Australia and the Maoris of New Zealand, the Cook expedition was the beginning of a catastrophe from which they have never recovered. An even worse fate befell the natives of Tasmania. Having survived for 10,000 years in splendid isolation, they were completely wiped out, to the last man, woman and child, within a century of Cook’s arrival. European settlers first drove them off the richest parts of the island, and then, coveting even the remaining wilderness, hunted them down and killed them systematically. The few survivors were hounded into an evangelical concentration camp, where well-meaning but not particularly open-minded missionaries tried to indoctrinate them in the ways of the modern world. The Tasmanians were instructed in reading and writing, Christianity and various ‘productive skills’ such as sewing clothes and farming. But they refused to learn. They became ever more melancholic, stopped having children, lost all interest in life, and finally chose the only escape route from the modern world of science and progress – death. Alas,

the military-industrial-scientific complex, because today’s wars are scientific productions. The world’s military forces initiate, fund and steer a large part of humanity’s scientific research and technological development. When World War One bogged down into interminable trench warfare, both sides called in the scientists to break the deadlock and save the nation. The men in white answered the call, and out of the laboratories rolled a constant stream of new wonder-weapons: combat aircraft, poison gas, tanks, submarines and ever more efficient machine guns, artillery pieces, rifles and bombs. 33. German V-2 rocket ready to launch. It didn’t defeat the Allies, but it kept the Germans hoping for a technological miracle until the very last days of the war. {© Ria Novosti/Science Photo Library.} Science played an even larger role in World War Two. By late 1944 Germany was losing the war and defeat was imminent. A year earlier, the Germans’ allies, the Italians, had toppled Mussolini and surrendered to the Allies. But Germany kept fighting on, even though the British, American and Soviet armies were closing in. One reason German soldiers and civilians thought not all was lost was that they believed German scientists were about to turn the tide with so-called miracle weapons such as the V-2 rocket and jet-powered aircraft. While the Germans were working on rockets and jets, the American Manhattan Project successfully developed atomic bombs. By the time the bomb was ready, in early August 1945, Germany had already surrendered, but Japan was fighting on. American forces were poised to invade its home islands. The Japanese vowed to resist the invasion and fight to the death, and there was every reason to believe that it was no idle threat. American generals told President Harry S. Truman that an invasion of Japan would cost the lives of a million American soldiers and would extend the war well into 1946. Truman decided to use the new bomb. Two weeks and two atom bombs later, Japan surrendered unconditionally and the war was over. But science is not just about offensive weapons. It plays a major role in our defences as well. Today many Americans believe that the solution to terrorism is technological rather than political. Just give millions more to the nanotechnology industry, they believe, and the United States could send bionic spy-flies into every Afghan cave, Yemenite redoubt and North African encampment. Once that’s done, Osama Bin Laden’s heirs will not be able to make a cup of coffee without a CIA spy-fly passing this vital information back to headquarters in Langley.

Unhappy with these posts, Jackson was exuberant when he was reassigned as an instructor at the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) in Lexington. On March 27, 1851 he assumed the position of Professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy and Artillery Tactics.[4]

The Jhang success encouraged Ranjit Singh to reconstitute the Sikh military into three wings. The first wing, which he commanded himself, included the best of his generals. Much of it trained in the European style, this wing possessed cavalry, infantry and artillery branches, the last led by a Muslim, Ghausa Khan. A second wing consisted of soldiers supplied as needed by a clutch of the once-powerful Bhangi sardars

The secret of any advance through a well-defended and carefully prepared position in the Great War depended almost entirely on artillery. In spite of the popular image created by TV documentaries and military memoirs, the Great War was primarily an artillery war. Over 60 per cent of the casualties were caused by artillery, and only artillery - heavy artillery - could beat down the enemy defences, flatten the wire, stun his troops, knock out the defending batteries and let the attackers go forward.

a trained incapacity to understand the most important aspects of military power, which happen to be nonmeasurable.”24 The various armed forces sought to maximize measurable “production”: the air force through the number of bombing sorties; artillery through the number of shells fired; infantry through body counts, reflecting statistical indices devised by McNamara and his associates in the Pentagon. But, as Luttwak writes, “In frontless war where there are no clear lines on the map to show victory and defeat, the only true measure of progress must be political and nonquantifiable: the impact on the enemy’s will to continue to fight.

The Russian and pro-Russian militants fighting in the Donbas are therefore giving the Ukrainian Army a crash course in real warfare, although the price of error is of course extremely high. For all intents and purposes, these militants are light mechanized infantry. They are armed with conventional and rocket artillery, heavy armor (including tanks), and air defense systems. They wage combined-arms warfare; they launch intelligent offensives and they have a well-organized defense. In other words, they are a real army.

The firm’s employees play active roles alongside those of the client, but in a way designed to make the overall combination more effective. Typically, their employees provide either specialized capabilities too cost-prohibitive for the local force to develop on its own (such as flying advanced fighter jets or operating artillery control systems), or they may be distributed across the forces of the client, in order to provide general leadership and experience to a greater number of individual units.

However, it also seems that he envisioned this system of command to take over when communications between headquarters failed.[103] Despite this nod to idea of Auftragstaktik, the rest of manual does little to suggest that DePuy actually believed in these concepts. The manual focused primarily on the technical aspects of weapons systems, not soldiers’ and commanders’ management of those weapons systems. The manual’s content suggested that the commander who masters the employment of tanks, infantry, and artillery pieces better than his opponent would win the battle. In the defense, brigade commanders should expect to move company-teams from individual battle positions to maximize lethality.[104]

The cofounder relationship goes way beyond the typical professional collegiality one finds in blah corporate life. One can stretch these military analogies too far—nobody is taking incoming artillery fire here, who are we kidding?—but the startup experience does have a certain comrade-in-arms, foxhole quality to it. Nobody believes in what you’re doing except this other poor fool sitting next to you, who’s just as fucked as you are if you don’t succeed. Nothing is keeping the entity going except your shared delusion. And there you sit, working, raging, doing both the best, and also the most poorly thought out, work of your life.

Whether the army was capable of carrying out such an operation was a question never asked. The officer corps had been repeatedly purged, those ousted replaced by some 2,000 Ba’thist-indoctrinated ‘educators.’ “I worked as a teacher in the staff college,” remembered Ibrahim Isma’il Khahya who, in 1966, became commander of the 8th Infantry Brigade. “My officers were mostly teachers, too. They weren’t ready for war.” The head of intelligence for the Golan district, Col. Nash’at Habash, had been kicked out and replaced by a mere captain, brother of a high-ranking Ba’th official. Ahmad Suweidani, the former military attaché in Beijing, had been boosted from colonel to lieutenant general and chief of staff. Though Syria’s 250 tanks and 250 artillery pieces were generally of more recent vintage than Israel’s, their maintenance was minimal. Supply, too, could be erratic; deprived of food, front-line troops had been known to desert their posts. The air force was particularly substandard. An internal army report rated only 45 percent of Syria’s pilots as “good,” 32 percent as “average,”‘ and the remainder “below average.” Only thirty-four of the forty-two jets at the Dmair and Saiqal airfields were operational. Yet, within the ranks, morale had never been higher. Capt. Muhammad ‘Ammar, an infantry officer serving in the fortress of Tel Fakhr, recalled: “We thought we were stronger, that we could cling to our land, and that the Golan was impenetrable. We were especially heartened by the unity between Syria, Egypt, and Jordan.” Another captain, Marwan Hamdan al-Khuli, heard that “we were much stronger and would defeat the enemy easily.

During the nineteenth century, corps commander was the highest level of command to still require skills of an operator for success. A corps commander was still able to see a problem develop and to dispatch soldiers or artillery to solve it on the spot. But at the army level of command the dynamics were for the first time different. The army commander was much more distant from the battle and consequently had no ability to act immediately or to control soldiers he could not see. The distance of the army commander from the action slowed responses to orders and created friction such that the commander was obliged to make decisions before the enemy’s actions were observed. Civil War army commanders were now suddenly required to exhibit a different set of skills. For the first time, they had to think in time and to command the formation by inculcating their intent in the minds of subordinates with whom they could not communicate directly. Very few of the generals were able to make the transition from direct to indirect leadership, particularly in the heat of combat. Most were very talented men who simply were never given the opportunity to learn to lead indirectly. Some, like Generals Meade and Burnside, found themselves forced to make the transition in the midst of battle. General Lee succeeded in part because, as military advisor to Jefferson Davis, he had been able to watch the war firsthand and to form his leadership style before he took command. General Grant was particularly fortunate to have the luck of learning his craft in the Western theater, where the press and the politicians were more distant, and their absence allowed him more time to learn from his mistakes. From the battle of Shiloh to that of Vicksburg, Grant as largely left alone to learn the art of indirect leadership through trial and error and periodic failure without getting fired for his mistakes. The implications of this phase of military history for the future development of close-combat leaders are at once simple, and self-evident. As the battlefield of the future expands and the battle becomes more chaotic and complex, the line that divides the indirect leader from the direct leader will continue to shift lower down the levels of command. The circumstances of future wars will demand that much younger and less experienced officers be able to practice indirect command. The space that held two Civil War armies of 200,000 men in 1863 would have been controlled by fewer than 1,000 in Desert Storm, and it may well be only a company or platoon position occupied by fewer than 100 soldiers in a decade or two. This means younger commanders will have to command soldiers they cannot see and make decisions without the senior leader’s hand directly on their shoulders. Distance between all the elements that provide support, such as fires and logistics, will demand that young commanders develop the skill to anticipate and think in time. Tomorrow’s tacticians will have to think at the operational level of war. They will have to make the transition from “doers” to thinkers, from commanders who react to what they see to leaders who anticipate what they will see. To do all this to the exacting standard imposed by future wars, the new leaders must learn the art of commanding by intent very early in their stewardship. The concept of “intent” forms the very essence of decentralized command.

Jones described what followed in his official report: All the oil, the tanks, barrels,engines for pumping, engine-houses, and wagons- in a word, everything used for rising, holding, or sending it off was burned. The smoke is very dense and jet black. The boats, filled with oil in bulk, burst with a report almost equaling artillery, and spread the burning fuel down the river. Before night huge columns of ebony smoke marked the meanderings of the stream as far as the eye could see. By dark the oil from the tanks on the burning creek had reached the river and the whole stream was a sheet of fire. A burning river, carrying destruction to our merciless enemy, was a scene of magnificence that might well carry joy to every patriotic heart.- General William E. " Grumble" Jones

Of the 48 forward observers working with the 15th Field Artillery Battalion, 32 were evacuated for wounds or exposure in six days of battle.

On September 1, 1969, for example, members of the 196th Infantry Brigade in Quang Tin Province spotted a group of Vietnamese. Officers and sergeants, peering through binoculars, conferred about the situation. After about ten minutes of observation the senior officer, Captain David Janca, ordered his machine gunners to open fire and called in an artillery fire mission. A small patrol was then dispatched to the kill zone. “Upon arrival,” assistant machine gunner Robert Gray said later, “we found dead and wounded Vietnamese children.”28 Patrol member Welkie Louie described the scene: “I observed about four to six Vietnamese children lying in one pile, dead. About five meters from this position were two or three wounded Vietnamese children huddled together.”29 Afterward, artillery forward observer Robert Wolz told army investigators that he saw an official document in which “the dead were listed as VC.”30 Another report even referred to them as “NVA”—that is, North Vietnamese army troops.31 In death, this small group of children had morphed into guerrillas and then into uniformed enemy soldiers as the body count wound its way through the military’s statistics generation machine.

Close studies reveal that the debacle of 1962 didn't occur for want of men and equipment., for there was enough of both, but it was rather spread out all over India. It may not have been available at a particular place, because we had to face the situation rather suddenly and we didn't have time. General Thimayya, then COAS, wrote an article in July 1962 that as a soldier, he couldn't envisage India taking on China in an open conflict on its own because China's military strength, with the full support of the USSR, exceeded India's military resourced a hundredfold. The only way to counter Chinese aggression on the border, according to him, was to attack the enemy in the Himalayan passes, which were practically impossible to cross for six months of the year. Here, the Indian Army could make full use of its manpower and light equipment against a Chinese force deprived of the use of its heavy equipment including tanks and heavy-calibre artillery. In case the Chinese got through to the plains and foothills, guerrilla tactics would have to be used to harass their lines of communication. The Indian Army's superior firepower and manoeuvrability would then have to be brought into play to defeat the enemy forces. As Air Chief Marshal Arjan Singh later pointed out, there was insufficient appreciation of the problems of operating aircraft from high altitude airfields. If those problems had been thought through, there wouldn't have been as much reluctance to use Indian air power in support of our operations in 1962 as there actually was.

Warfare has changed, no doubt. The king and queen of battle are no longer the artillery and infantry. Now surprise is king, and speed is queen.

Whatever China has and Vietnam needs, we will provide,” Mao intoned. The Chinese Communist Party “offers all the military assistance Vietnam needs in its struggle against France.”[67] True to his word, Mao gave Ho everything he requested. During the first nine months of 1950, the Chinese shipped the Viet Minh 14,000 rifles, 1,700 machine guns and recoilless rifles, 60 artillery pieces, 300 bazookas, and a variety of other military equipment.

On July 29, 2008, paramilitary forces in South Ossetia began shelling Georgian villages. On the night of August 7, the government panicked. The Georgian military launched artillery into the enclave’s provincial capital. And then the Russians struck after midnight. Putin’s tanks and troops rolled south, the first Russian military invasion of a sovereign nation in nearly thirty years,

In June it took part in an elaborately planned action at Messines Ridge, in Belgian Flanders, which opened with the Allies detonating a million pounds of explosives next to the German trenches, instantly killing 10,000 enemy soldiers. The blast was heard in London and felt across southern England. In the fighting that ensued, Bill Alabaster led the parties carrying grenades, ammunition and water from the 45th Battalion headquarters to the troops at the front line, across open ground raked by artillery and machine-gun fire. Herring recommended him for the Military Medal. The 45th lost seven officers and 344 other ranks over four days of combat.

Even in his mode of warfare this improvised generalship may still be recognized; the enterprises of Napoleon against Egypt and against England do not more clearly exhibit the artillery-lieutenant who had risen by service to command than the similar enterprises of Caesar exhibit the demagogue metamorphosed into a general. A regularly trained officer would hardly have been prepared, through political considerations of a not altogether stringent nature, to set aside the best-founded military scruples in the way in which Caesar did on several occasions, most strikingly in the case of his landing in Epirus. Several of his acts are therefore censurable from a military point of view; but what the general loses, the statesman gains.

The Suez Canal was a vital British interest. Moreover, Nasser was supporting Algerian rebels in their fight against France. The two European powers decided that military action was the only solution. They needed a regional ally—one that was also threatened by Egypt. Israel fit the bill. France began supplying Israel with the arms, tanks, armored vehicles, and planes it needed to counter the growing Egyptian menace. Meanwhile, the situation along the Egyptian border worsened, as waves of fedayeen continued to kill civilians while Egyptian artillery struck into Israel.

At the age of twenty-one, as a second lieutenant just out of St. Cyr, Gallieni had fought at Sedan and been held prisoner for some time in Germany, where he learned the language. He chose to make his further military career in the colonies where France was "growing soldiers." Although the Staff College clique professed to regard colonial service as "le tourisme," Gallieni's fame as the conqueror of Madagascar brought him, like Lyautey of Morocco, to the top rank of the French Army. He kept a notebook in German, English, and Italian called Erinnerungen of my life di ragazzo, and never ceased studying, whether it was Russian or the development of heavy artillery or the comparative administrations of the colonial powers. He wore a pince-nez and a heavy gray mustache that was rather at odds with his elegant, autocratic figure. He carried himself like an officer on parade. Tall and spare, with a distant, untouchable, faintly stern air, he resembled no other French officer of his time. Poincare described the impression he made: "straight, slender and upright with head erect and piercing eyes behind his glasses, he appeared to us as an imposing example of powerful humanity.

Additionally, visitors can learn some interesting lessons in military logistics since a section of George Spangler’s acreage behind the hospital site served as a camp for some of the Army of the Potomac’s Reserve Artillery.8

He nodded. “I know. Many, many Leningraders sent their boys there yesterday.” His face was blank. “Alexander, the Germans are down in Crimea,” said Tatiana. “Comrade Molotov said so himself. Didn’t you hear his speech?” “Yes, they are in Crimea. But we have a border with Europe that’s two thousand kilometers long. Hitler’s army is on every meter of that border, Tania, south from Bulgaria north to Poland.” He paused. She didn’t say anything. “For right now, Leningrad is the safest place for Pasha. Really.” Tatiana was skeptical. “Why are you so sure?” She became animated. “Why does the radio keep talking about the Red Army being the strongest army in the world? We have tanks, we have planes, we have artillery, we have guns. The radio is not saying what you’re saying, Alexander.” She spoke those words almost as a rebuke. He shook his head. “Tania, Tania, Tania.” “What, what, what?” she said, and saw that Alexander, despite his serious face, nearly laughed. That made her nearly laugh herself, despite her own serious face. “Tania, Leningrad has lived for so many years with a hostile border with Finland only twenty kilometers to the north that we forgot to arm the south. And that’s where the danger is.” “If that’s where the danger is, then how come you’re sending Dimitri up to Finland where, as you suggest, all is quiet?” Alexander was silent. “Reconnaissance,” he said at last. Tatiana felt he left something unsaid. “My point is,” he went on, “all of our precautionary defenses are focused in the north. But south and southwest, Leningrad does not have a single division, a single regiment, not one military unit deployed. Do you understand what I’m telling you?” “No,” she said, a little defiantly. “Talk to your father about Pasha,” he repeated.

To the north, Winston Churchill was warning that Hitler wanted to take over the world. The new British prime minister had been saying it for years. No one had listened. Now der Führer was on the march, and France was not ready. Not the people. Not the politicians. Not the press. Not even the generals. In Paris, they said the Germans would never dare to invade France. They said the Nazis could never penetrate the Maginot Line, the twenty-five-kilometer-thick virtual wall of heavily armed and manned guard posts and bunkers and concrete tank barricades and antiaircraft batteries and minefields and all manner of other military fortifications designed to keep the Germans at bay. They’d convinced themselves Hitler would never try to move his panzer divisions through the forests of the Ardennes. Those forests were too thick, too dense, too foreboding for anyone to move tanks and mobile artillery and armored personnel carriers and other mechanized units through.

This is especially true in a place as overcrowded as the Gaza Strip, where people have nowhere to flee even if they are given prior notice that their homes are about to be destroyed. Beyond the horrific injuries they inflict on human flesh, air bombardment and artillery fire on this scale cause unimaginable destruction to property: in the 2014 assault, over 16,000 buildings were rendered uninhabitable, including entire neighborhoods. A total of 277 UN and government schools, seventeen hospitals and clinics, and all six of Gaza’s universities were damaged, as were over 40,000 other buildings. Perhaps 450,000 Gazans, about a quarter of the population, were forced to leave their homes, and many of them no longer had homes to go back to afterward. These were not random occurrences, nor was this the regrettable collateral damage often lamented during a war. The weapons chosen were lethal, meant for employment on an open battlefield, not in a heavily populated urban environment. Moreover, the scale of the onslaught was entirely in keeping with Israeli military doctrine. The killing and mangling in 2014 of some 13,000 people, most of them civilians, and the destruction of the homes and property of hundreds of thousands, was intentional, the fruit of an explicit strategy adopted by the Israeli military at least since 2006, when it used such tactics in Lebanon. The Dahiya doctrine, as it is called, is named for the southern suburb of Beirut—al-Dahiya—which was destroyed by Israel’s air force using 2,000-pound bombs and other ordnance. This strategy was explained in 2008 by Maj. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot, then head of Northern Command (and thereafter Israeli chief of staff): What happened in the Dahiya quarter … will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on.… We will apply disproportionate force on it and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases.… This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved.34