Abbey Lincoln Quotes

Aeroplanes interested me, and at the outbreak of the Second World War, I joined the RAF as a volunteer reservist. I took the opportunity of studying the books which the RAF made available for radio mechanics and looked forward to an interesting course in radio.

In the Second World War, I was a little girl. I was evacuated in my country.

When we went into World War II, I was a tractor driver then. I drove tractors on the plantation. So when they start calling people my age, 18, up, I was one they called.

I was 20 years old at Pearl Harbor. I was in the Navy about a year and four months before the war.

At 11, I passed the scholarship - only just; I wasn't very good at maths - to Ilford County High for Girls. When the Second World War started we were evacuated, first of all to Ipswich, and then to Aberdare, Queen of the Valleys, in south Wales.

My own grandfathers were a submarine commander and a 'desert rats' tank operator in the Second World War.

I was a soldier in WWII. The last couple of months of the war I was actually in combat.

The one thing that I'm most proud of, during the Second World War, I worked on airplanes in a defense plant.

I could not have the honour of being a German soldier because of my imprisonment in the First World War. And in this world war the Fuehrer refuses to allow me to serve as a soldier.

My dad was my hero. He was part of the D-Day landings and came back to Reading in 1945 - I was born in 1946 - so the house was full of soldiers who'd been to war and that was obviously the main topic.

You know, my dad was a lieutenant colonel at Ft. Lewis on the 3rd of March, 1941. Fifteen months later, he was commanding a theater of war.

The Second World War claimed tens of millions of victims.

If it hadn't been for Bill Macdonald's book 'The True Intrepid,' I might never have found out about the women who went down to work in secret in New York for our own spymaster Sir William Stephenson in the Second World War.

To those who don't know the historical truth, I would like to say today, Poland was not an aggressor but a victim during the Second World War.

I actually collect old First and Second World War memorabilia.

I was born in Breslau on October 5th, 1930. At that time, Breslau, now called Wroclaw, belonged to Germany, and only German was spoken there. After the Second World War, Breslau became Polish, and the original German population was almost completely replaced by a Polish one. I have never visited Wroclaw after the war.

I got married and I had children because of the Second World War, as all of us did, exclaiming, 'Oh, no, we are never going to bring a child into this wicked world,' but we had children by the dozen and got married.

I grew up in a family full of strong women. A great aunt on my mother's side had been a matron on a hospital ship in World War II, and one on my father's side had served in the Women's Royal Naval Service.

My father, who had lost a brother, fighting on the Austrian side in World War I, was a committed pacifist.

My father was in the First World War.

During the Second World War, evacuated to non-Jewish households, I encountered Christianity at home and in school.

The first time I ever saw people of any color was when D-Day left from my hometown in England, to go and free Europe from the war. And there was every color you could imagine, and I'd not seen that in England.

My mother learned that she was carrying me at about the same time the Second World War was declared; with the family talent for magic realism, she once told me she had been to the doctor's on the very day.

It was 1943. The U.S. had already entered World War II, so I decided to join the army.

As a soldier, I survived World War I when most of my comrades did not.