Douglas Brinkley Quotes

I was in the invasion of Normandy in southern France.

In the spring of 1984, I went to the northwest of France, to Normandy, to prepare an NBC documentary on the 40th anniversary of D-Day.

You've gotta understand: in July of '44, the Allies were still contained on the peninsula in western France and the destruction of Europe had not really begun. War had not really touched the European continent at that point.

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

My father, a captain in the 5th Battalion of the Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders, landed in Normandy the day after D-Day.

'What if?' history is a tricky game, but there is no doubt that the senior planners of D-Day - including Eisenhower and the British general Bernard Montgomery - believed that the Double Cross operation had played a pivotal role in the victory.

I must give a most emphatic warning, in the interest of our common cause, of the grave danger with which further delay in opening a second front in France is fraught

I know a lot about the Battle of the Bulge, and a lot about World War II from 'Saving Private Ryan.'

That road to V-E Day was hard and long, and traveled by weary and valiant men. And history will always record where that road began. It began here, with the first footprints on the beaches of Normandy.

Churchill strikes a note in my life because my father worked on Mulberry Harbour, which was the code name for the temporary concrete harbours which were towed across the Channel to make the D-day landings in France possible.

Eric Ashcroft, a gentle, kind, popular man with a wicked sense of humour, was always modest about his wartime exploits, but eventually, with much prompting from his persistent son, he told me of his terrifying experience on D-Day.

We learned the value of research in World War II.

Mom's dad was in the army, stormed the beach at Normandy, fought through the French hedgerows, the Battle of the Ardennes, the Battle of the Bulge, and liberated concentration camps at the end of the war.

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.

In World War II in Germany, we had a ration for one U.S. soldier, or one allied soldier for every twenty inhabitants. The ratio in Iraq is about one for a hundred and sixty.

I have left too many white crosses across north Africa, Italy, and France, and I’ve seen too many young men wounded and maimed not to be in complete sympathy with any policy that designs to eradicate, root and branch, the evil force, Nazism, that loose this holocaust on the world.

Britain and America won the last world war. We will win the next world war.

The communists are our allies in this war. That's the Nazis we are fighting. Go look at them.

D-Day will be a reminder of what can be accomplished when allies work together and when everyone understands what’s at stake.

The men who died at D-Day did not die shoulder-to-shoulder with their French comrades. They died to liberate the French from a sinister and brutal occupation.

My father, Reginald Francois, was a D-Day veteran. He never submitted to bullying by any German, and neither will his son.

Jack Buck fought through Europe during World War II.

I suppose that I just grew up knowing, in a very vivid way, that if it hadn't been for the men who fought in the Second World War, we'd all be living in a very different world now.

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.