Vera Lynn Quotes

My parents were of the generation that lived through the Second World War, but I grew up listening to my mother recounting her dad's tales about his terrible experiences during the Gallipoli campaign in 1915 and later on the Western Front.

I actually love history. I've devoured book after book of stories from World War I and World War II. They're really two sections of world history that really interest me. I knew very extensively a lot about World War I.

My father was in the First World War.

Speaking as somebody who is half English and half Hungarian, World War I still seems to me a familiar and seismic event, as if it had only just ended.

My father belongs to the generation that fought the war in the 1940s. When I was a kid my father told me stories - not so many, but it meant a lot to me. I wanted to know what happened then, to my father's generation. It's a kind of inheritance, the memory of it.

Germany has reduced savagery to a science, and this great war for the victorious peace of justice must go on until the German cancer is cut clean out of the world body.

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

School-leavers unfortunately will come away thinking the First World War consisted simply of 'going over the top' on the Western Front to slaughter in no-man's-land, when the conflict extended so much further, to the collapse of four empires and numerous civil wars.

The Great War was a progressive revelation and disillusionment.

I vividly remember the stories my grandfather told me about the carnage of the First World War, which people tend to forget was one of the worst massacres in human history.

It was quite a European war until 1917, when the Americans joined up. They don't have the same sense of the loss of innocence and the cataclysmic loss of life. A whole generation was wiped out.

How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing.

If the blood of France and of Germany flows again, as it did twenty-five years ago, in a longer and even more murderous war, each of the two peoples will fight with confidence in its own victory, but the most certain victors will be the forces of destruction and barbarism.

Everyone has come to recognize that the Great War [World War I] was utter social insanity, and was a crazy war, and we had no business in it at all.

The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.

I'm a bit embarrassed about how little I know about the First World War. I didn't even know that tanks were used in it.

We have in our heads a pretty well-defined narrative of the First World War, and there are certain events that are obviously key.

I was a lieutenant in World War II.

One thing that was amazing about World War II was that everybody signed up for the duration plus six months. Fliers got to leave combat after 25 missions, or 35 missions, but other than that, you were in it. You were part of the great effort, until, oh boy, six months after it was over.

At the Imperial Conference on December 1, it was decided to make war against England and the United States.

I remember saying that wars must not be glorified, but wars must be remembered.

I was brought up in the War. I was an adolescent in the Second World War. And I did witness in London a great deal of the Blitz.

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

As a child growing up in World War II, I was very moved and stirred by what was going on, but I distanced myself from history. I regarded history as just one more subject.

A military childhood in the 1950s was very much informed by WWII. My brothers and I often heard stories from our dad - and from other kids - about things that had happened to their dads. We constantly played war games and, nearly every Saturday, saw a different WWII movie at the post theater.