Adolf Galland Quotes

We... our war began September the 3rd 1939, with the invasion of Poland by Germany, and thereafter the great state of danger in England at that time, with the bombings, necessitated the evacuation of children.

Britain in 1939 and 1940 really thought they were going to lose the war. It looked like they were going to lose. There was bombing every day, and people were literally starving.

If we would have had the 262 at our disposal - even with all the delays - if we could have had in '44, ah, let's say three hundred operational, that day we could have stopped the American daytime bombing offensive, that's for sure.

I had done a lot of reading, relative for a kid, about World War Two, and I thought about Chamberlain a lot.

I flew a full string of 35 combat missions over some of the most heavily defended targets in Europe. We were hitting Hitler's oil refineries, his tank factories, his aircraft factories, his railway yards. Those were our prime targets.

The people Hitler never understood, and whose actions, continued to exasperate him to the end of his life, were the British.

I did my teen-age years in World War II. War news was a constant. We kept the radio on in our house to hear Edward R. Murrow broadcasting from the rooftops of London, describing the blitz.

For me, the making of a documentary to mark the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain was an intensely personal journey. I was born in February 1940, so I was just six months old as the battle raged overhead.

Hitler bombed London into submission but in fact it created a sense of national solidarity.

On December 18, 1940, Hitler signed Directive Number 21, better known as Operation Barbarossa.

My favorite period is World War II, and I'm in the middle of writing my fourth novel set in that era.

At the beginning of June 1944, the war was reaching a climax. German troops had been brutalised by the savagery of the ongoing fighting in Russia, where the Red Army was secretly preparing its vast encirclement of the Germans' Army Group Centre.

World War II... did not happen to everyone, but it happened to most. There were people from Germany who were throwing bombs at us.

When I was first sent from H.M.S. King Alfred to be interviewed by Goodeve in the Admiralty, I was furious. The War seemed to me, in June of 1940, to be desperately serious, and England in imminent peril of invasion.

Everybody has forgotten that Russia helped start the Second World War.

When France resolved, along with England, to lend assistance in the legitimate defense of Poland, the realization burst on us that a conflict of awesome proportions was inevitable.

Of course, the outcome of the war would not have been changed. The war was lost perhaps, when it was started. At least it was lost in the winter of '42, in Russia.

In Hitler’s frantic mental haze Already Hull and Cardiff blaze And Paul’s grey dome rocks to the blast Of air torpedoes screaming past

During the war [WWII] Hitler was de Gaulle’s enemy across the Channel, Churchill the enemy next door.

I have left the obvious, essential fact to this point, namely, that it is the Russian Armies who have done the main work in tearing the guts out of the German army.

Three factors defeated us in the West where I was in command. First, the unheard-of superiority of your air force, which made all movement in daytime impossible. Second, the lack of motor fuel - oil and gas - so that the Panzers and even the Luftwaffe were unable to move. Third, the systematic destruction of all railway communications so that it was impossible to bring one single railroad train across the Rhine.

I studied history at university, so I'm always quite fascinated by the Second World War and France. That's one of my interests.

The colossus of World War II seemed to be like a pyramid turned upside down, and for the moment the whole burden of the war rested on the few hundred German fighter pilots on the Channel coast.

The Battle of France is over. The Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the future of Christian civilisation.

There's an amazing movie, I think the best war movie ever made: it's called 'Come and See.' Soviet film. Made in the Soviet Union. It was about Belarusian and Ukrainian partisans in World War II.