Attila Quotes
I shall hurl the first spear at the enemy myself. If any man then does not follow, then he is a dead man.
Attila the Hun. The Romans aided by Theodoric, King of the Visigoths, fought the Huns in the only battle that Attila ever lost which he lost badly. There were 165,000 men killed in an afternoon. The Roman General, Flavius Aetius, had been a boyhood friend of Attila’s and had fought with him against the Visigoths. The Romans had Attila trapped but his old friend let him escape with just a good thrashing to his ego and army as to not upset the balance of power and tilt it in favor of the Goths. Roman foreign policy at the time was to keep all the Barbarians strong enough to fight one another so that none would be dominant but all weaker than Rome. Divide and conquer.
Attila, ?-453, Scythian King, Conqueror & General of the Huns, Scythian King and Conqueror, Statement to his men before the Battle of Chalons, France, 451
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
An example of this was the landing in the beaches of Normandy in WWII. Once on the beaches the allied troops had to win or die. Some of the most heroic fighting in American and English military history occurred on those beaches. Another was the Spanish Explorer Hernando Cortez who after landing in the New World, had his ships burned so that he and his soldiers had to conquer or they would die.
Ataturk was a young major at the time commanding troops of a weak and corrupt Ottoman regime. However a combined English and French (the strongest military powers in Europe) invasion of the Gallipoli Peninsula threatened to capture the Turkish capital, Constantinople. Ataturk alone rallied the Turkish defenders and fought the invaders to a standoff in long drawn out battle with huge casualties on both sides. Ataturk became a national hero. Although Ataturk thereafter was very reluctant to use military force or endanger troops, the thing he always thought worth the supreme sacrifice (including his own) was the independence and sovereignty of the nation. See {584502} for his continuing belief in this type of sacrifice.
Eisenhower was then the Supreme Allied Commander of the Allied Forces.
In a massive terror campaign captured Republican males were shot and the Republican women were raped as a matter of the General’s policy. He would commonly broadcast—see {592113}—what had and would happen to Republicans who remained loyal to the government and continued to fight. It was the actions of men like this that led to the modifications of the Geneva Conventions.
He drove the British into the sea when no one expected that outcome.
Lacedaemonian refers to the ancient Greek city of Sparta,
Attila (/ˈætɪlə, əˈtɪlə/; fl. c. 406–453), frequently called Attila the Hun, was the ruler of the Huns from 434 until his death in March 453. He was also the leader of a tribal empire consisting of Huns, Ostrogoths, Alans and Bulgars, among others, in Central and Eastern Europe.
