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Cornelius RyanSözler ve Alıntılar
Did the man get his information direct from Moscow?
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Voigt had lived seventeen years in Chicago, but he had never taken out naturalization papers. In 1939 his wife, visiting her home in Germany, had been forced to stay because of an ailing mother. In 1940, against the advice of friends, Voigt had set out to bring her home. Unable to reach wartime Germany by regular routes, he had made a tortuous journey across the Pacific to Japan, then to Vladivostok and via the Trans-Siberian railway to Moscow. From there he had traveled to Poland and into Germany. The journey took nearly four months--and once across the border Voigt could not get out. He and his wife were trapped.
Wordsworth Editions
The determined field marshal had taken advantage of every moment. "I have only one real enemy now," he had told Lang, "and that is time." To conquer time Rommel spared neither himself nor his men; it had been that way from the moment he had been sent to France in November 1943. That fall Von Rundstedt, responsible for the defense of all Western Europe, had asked Hitler for reinforcements. Instead, he got the hardheaded, daring and ambitious Rommel. To the humiliation of the aristocratic sixty-eight-year-old Commander in Chief West, Rommel arrived with a Gummiberfehl, an "elastic directive," ordering him to inspect the coastal fortifications-- Hitler's much-publicized "Atlantic Wall"--and then to report directly back to the Feuhrer's headquarters, OKW. The embarrassed and disappointed Von Rundstedt was so upset by the arrival of the younger Rommel--he referred to him as the "Marschall Bubi" (roughly, the "Marshal Laddie")--that he asked Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Chief of OKW, if Rommel was being considered as his successor. He was told "not to draw any false conclusions," that with all "Rommel's capabilities he is not up to that job."
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The wounded were moaning. Men were talking in several different languages--many of them were Poles or Russians. And all the time, the captain, oblivious to the yells of the wounded to "Surrender! Surrender!" fired his machine gun through the single aperture.
Wordsworth Editions
Up to 1942, victory had seemed so certain to the Feuhrer and his strutting Nazis that there was no need for coastal fortifications. The swastika flew everywhere. Austria and Czechoslovakia had been picked off before the war even started. Poland had been carved up between Germany and Russia as long ago as 1939. The war was not even a year old when the countries of Western Europe began falling like so many rotten apples. Denmark fell in a day. Norway, infiltrated from within, took a little longer: six weeks. Then that May and June, in just twenty-seven days and without overture of any sort, Hitler's blitzkrieging troops had plunged into Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg and France and, as an incredulous world watched, had driven the British into the sea at Dunkirk. After the collapse of France all that remained was USSR--standing alone.
Wordsworth Editions
Hitler knew that invasion was inevitable, and now he was faced with another great problem: finding the divisions to man his growing defenses. In Russia division after division was being chewed up as the Wehrmacht tried to hold a two-thousand mile front against relentless Soviet attacks. So, by 1944, Hitler was forced to bolster his garrisons in the west with a strange conglomeration of replacements--old men and young boys, the remnants of divisions shattered on the Russian front, impressed "volunteers" from occupied countries (there were units of Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, Romanians and Yugoslavs, to mention just a few) and even two Russian divisions composed of men who preferred fighting for the Nazis to remaining in prison camps. Questionable as these troops might prove to be in combat, they filled out the gaps.
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Sergeant James Percival "Paddy" de Lacy of the King's Regiment became so emotional listening to the "Rose of Tralee" played on the bagpipes that he forgot where he was and stood up and offered a toast to Ireland's Eamon de Valera for "keepin' us out of the war."
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