Siege Tank Quotes

[A]lthough guns, tanks, and bombs win wars, they don't win peace. Peace takes research, planning reconstruction, the secrets to which can be found in books.

Weary of fire, weary of bombardment, and weary of siege, scattered groups of Chinese actually rushed out to welcome the Japanese invaders as they thundered into the city with their tanks, artillery, and trucks. Some people hung Japanese flags from their windows while others even cheered the Japanese columns as they marched through the south and west gates of the city.

Order No. 227, more commonly known as ‘Not One Step Backwards’. Stalin made many changes, then signed it. The order was to be read to all troops in the Red Army. ‘Panic-mongers and cowards must be destroyed on the spot. The retreat mentality must be decisively eliminated. Army commanders who have allowed the voluntary abandonment of positions must be removed and sent for immediate trial by military tribunal.’ Anyone who surrendered was ‘a traitor to the Motherland’. Each army had to organize ‘three to five well-armed detachments (up to 200 men each)’ to form a second line to shoot down any soldier who tried to run away. Zhukov implemented this order on the Western Front within ten days, using tanks manned by specially selected officers. They followed the first wave of an attack, ready ‘to combat cowardice’, by opening fire on any soldiers who wavered. Three

Miss Rudy, the former Harmony librarian, had single-handedly held off a siege of the town council bent on cutting her funds. She had locked the library doors and hid the only key in her bra, living on water from the toilet tank after the town had shut off water to the building to drive her out. She ate paste to keep up her strength. Oh, they had underestimated her. On the fourth day, the men of the council had capitulated, apologizing for cutting the funds, begging her to open the doors and come out. But she had stayed in the library an extra day, just to show them one could live on books, then marched out at noon on the fifth day, her head held high, and three pounds heavier. She had gained weight! When word got out, her picture made the cover of American Libraries magazine. Admiring letters poured in from librarians around the world – beaten down, beleaguered librarians who had drawn strength from her bravery. She answered each one in flowing, Palmer-method, handwritten script.

Zhukov was stunned. Unlikely as it might seem, most of the Leningrad tank force was made up of motionless decoys, nailed together by Shostakovich’s colleagues in the set-design team at the Mariinsky Theater.

People marching on streets, or standing in squares, or camping out in the public eye. People standing in front of tanks, people laying garlands of flowers around the muzzles of automatic weapons, people linking arms. People who sat down when told to stand up. People who stood up when told to kneel. People who sang songs, people who asked questions, people who wrote, people who created art. People who played cello in a city under siege. People who had done brave things before the time I was in, and people who had done brave things after I was there, and all of the people yet to come. Injustices are countered by acts of courage. We create Brave wherever we are brave.

Sigismund lowers his blade as the tanks roll past him on either side. For a moment, he feels respect for the enemy’s resolve. They have not broken or run. Their ranks unstitched by raging fire, they have remained resolute. They are Astartes still, some shred at least. Then he corrects his thinking. It’s not Astartes courage. It’s stupidity. It’s the obstinate arrogance of a battle group that has become too used to being superior to anything and everything it meets on the field.

One of the comforts of firing a big gun during a siege must be the satisfaction of watching the results at long range. Inside a tank or behind an M107, a smudge of smoke against a building can be marked off against a map coordinate. The blood and shattered bones at the other end of the trajectory have no physical contact with the gun. But Randal and I were driving towards the other end of the trajectory, back to west Beirut, where the casualty statistics marked the other side of the concave mirror through which armies fight their wars.

In the summer of 1982, while Israeli armored tanks and gunships imposed a siege of another age on rampartless Beirut, cutting off the water supply and food shipments, the modern catapults, the air force, leveled residential buildings, destroyed all infrastructure, and, amazingly, bombed the synagogue of Beirut's Jewish neighborhood. There is no contradiction.

For destructive purposes—well, when it came to warfare, there wasn’t much a mounted elephant couldn’t do. The siege engines of the day, a fully armored elephant with spikes mounted on its tusks and a fortified howdah tower on its back could also function like a Sherman tank. Able to achieve speeds of up to twenty miles per hour, and covered with a hide that could absorb dozens of arrows and musket shots alike, a trained war elephant was more than capable of breaking even the most stubborn of enemy lines, trampling infantry and skewering cavalry horses on its bladed tusks. They provided an elevated vantage point for commanders, and a well-angled shot for mounted archers and snipers. A full complement of military elephants was essential for