Stephen Ambrose Quotes

If D-Day - the greatest amphibious operation ever undertaken - failed, there would be no going back to the drawing board for the Allies. Regrouping and attempting another massive invasion of German-occupied France even a few months later in 1944 wasn't an option.

Blunders are an inescapable feature of war, because choice in military affairs lies generally between the bad and the worse.

When the Normandy Invasion was planned, a very specific strategic objective was given, and that strategic objective was the basis upon which the plan for the Normandy Invasion was derived.

World War II was a decisive time in our history and June 6, 1944, marked the decisive moment of the war.

Military history shows air action only cannot achieve the goal of defeating an enemy.

Read over and over again the campaigns of Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, Gustavus, Turenne, Eugene and Frederic. ... This is the only way to become a great general and master the secrets of the art of war.

there on the beaches of Normandy I began to reflect on the wonders of these ordinary people whose lives were laced with the markings of greatness.

WHEN we don't get the results we want in our military endeavors, we don't blame the soldiers.

We're facing a very different sort of threat now, a more amorphous threat, al Qaeda, terrorism, and so on. And so the military has abandoned the two-war strategy.

The war with Iraq ... had to be one of the greatest non sequiturs in military history. Attacked by a gang composed largely of Islamic militants from Saudi Arabia, the United States countered by invading an unrelated country, and one of the most secular in the Middle East at that.

The American military will never lose the war in Iraqif lost, it will be lost by a lack of political will.

The first dead man on Omaha Beach must be a sailor!

With growing experience, all skillful commanders sought to profit by the power of the defensive, even when on the offensive.

Life is like invading Russia. A blitz start, massed shakos, plumes dancing like a flustered henhouse; a period of svelte progress recorded in ebullient despatches as the enemy falls back; then the beginning of a long, morale-sapping trudge with rations getting shorter and the first snowflakes upon your face. The enemy burns Moscow and you yield to General January, whose fingernails are very icicles. Bitter retreat. Harrying Cossacks. Eventually you fall beneath a boy-gunner's grapeshot while crossing some Polish river not even marked on your general's map.

Fixed fortifications are a monument to the stupidity of man.

If you entrench yourself behind strong fortifications, you compel the enemy seek a solution elsewhere.

[General James Mattis] a very talented individual. He's - has a personal library of about 10,000 books and he's read most of them on military history and strategy and so forth.

If they listen to the military people, we probably wouldn't be having an ISIS right now.

He [Hitler] seemed very depressed and upset about the Stalingrad disaster. He said that one is always liable to look on the black side of things after a defeat, a tendency which can lead one into dangerous and false conclusions.

We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be; we shall fight on beaches, landing grounds, in fields, in streets and on the hills. We shall never surrender and even if, which I do not for the moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, will carry on the struggle until in God's good time the New World with all its power and might, sets forth to the liberation and rescue of the Old.

In war, the policy of least exertion always risks being paid for dearly.

Through my time in the military and my deployments, I have recognized the importance of having a Commander in Chief who will not only go after those who threaten the safety and security of the American people, but who will also exercise good judgment and foresight in stopping these failed interventionist wars of regime change that have cost our country so much in human lives, untold suffering, and trillions of dollars.

A little while ago I visited Omaha Beach for the second time in my life. In the intervening 26 years, nearly 20,000 tides had come and gone and little remains visible of the greatest military landing in man's history of endless warring. What's to be seen is mostly in a superb museum and a panoramic cemetery. The cemetery memorializes with dignity and grandeur the event and the dead, and moves one deeply. Before they die less precipitously and/or in lesser purpose, Americans who can should visit World War II's Normandy Beach. Such seeing and remembering helps a man's perspective.

The art of war in its highest point of view is policy.

The campaign in Iraq illustrates the continuing progress of military technology and tactics, but if there is a single overriding lesson it must be this: American military power, especially when buttressed by Britain's, is virtually unchallengeable today. Take us on? Don't try! And that's not hubris, it's just plain fact.