Dwight D. Eisenhower Quotes

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.

It was then customary to return with the head of a killed Samurai which would be made up as if in life so the dead man could be recognized. That way, the victor received more recognition with the importance of the Samurai who he defeated.

This would be like an American President firing the congressional chaplains. However this is only one small, but telling, example of Atatuk’s secularization of the nation which had a great deal to do with Turkey becoming a modern great power—by far the strongest and most developed of the Islamic world.

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.

Even as he was being executed for his many war crimes, the Field Marshal exhibited the mental perspective of Germanic patriotism that had brought Europe as well as Germany itself so much death and ruin.

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.

A Federal Naval flotilla was preparing to attack South Carolina Forts Beauregard and Walker in the area of Hilton Head and Port Royal. The navy took both forts the next day with their naval bombardment so powerful that the Confederate Rebels had to abandon both forts gaining a kind of revenge for the Confederate capture of Fort Sumter at the war’s beginning.