Leon Askin Quotes

Hitler bombed London into submission but in fact it created a sense of national solidarity.

I often compare myself as a kid to my own grandchildren, who are around 11 and 14 now. That's the age kids usually read my book. And I remember myself; we'd gone through a world war. My father was an army officer so I was aware of what was going on. But I wasn't bombarded with images of catastrophe like many kids are today.

Winning the Revolutionary War, or the Civil War, or World War II were the turning points in our history, the sine qua non of our forward progress.

History demonstrates that previous military drawdowns invited aggression by our enemies. After World War I, America drew down forces until the U.S. Army had fewer than 100,000 men in uniform. That weakness invited Nazi aggression in Europe and the imperial Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor.

I had just turned 10-years-old when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and plunged America into World War II.

The memory of the Second World War hangs over Europe, an inescapable and irresistible point of reference. Historical parallels are usually misleading and dangerous.

My graduate study was interrupted, like that of many others, by World War II.

But in 1941, on December 8th, after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, my mother bought a radio and we listened to the war news. We'd not had a radio up to that time. I was born in 1934, so I was seven years of age.

I met my wife in Washington, D.C. I was a senior in college. WW II was about to descend upon us. Jobs were starting to open up after a prolonged depression.

Lexington did launch its air group when a Japanese carrier was reported.

Pearl Harbor caused our Nation to wholeheartedly commit to winning World War II, changing the course of our Nation's history and the world's future.

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.

The Revolution produced the American people, the Civil War the American nation, and World War II the epiphany of Americans’ identification with their country

Probably, had World War II not come along and intervened, I would have tried to be a doctor. My son's a doctor, and I still take some medical journals to this day.

Our country vanished from the map of Europe after the attack of the Soviet Union against Poland. That is our history. It is a very difficult one.

I had a question. "Why does the name Pearl Harbor sound so familiar?" The lieutenant colonel's eyes narrowed. "Pearl Harbor is the most famous U.S. military base in the world," he said crisply. "It's the only place on U.S. soil that has been attacked in a wars, since the Revolutionary War." None of this was ringing a bell, but you already know I'm totally uneducated. Gazzy leaned over to whisper, "It was a movie with Ben Affleck." Ah. Now I remembered.

I never slept as soundly as the night following Pearl Harbor. For I knew that The American Race would now be entering the war and it would never be the same.

The United States comes in 1945 and we basically blow the whistle.

Australia and New Zealand are now threatened by the might of the Imperial Japanese forces, and both of them should know that any resistance is futile.

In one sense, I have always felt glad to have had the war [World War II] in my childhood, because, as a result, nothing that has happened in the world since then has ever seemed quite so bad. On the other hand, I never entirely got over my feeling of being cheated when the promised era of peace in a wonderful "post-war world" failed to materialize. I could not understand how, after all that, people could ever even think of fighting again. And I still can't.

Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free, and life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fall, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age... Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.'

My family suffered very major losses during the Second World War, that's true. In my father's family, there were five brothers. I think four of them died. On my mother's side the picture was pretty much the same. Russia has suffered great losses. And of course we can't forget that.

Today, 9 May, exactly forty-nine months and three days after the Fascist attack on Yugoslavia, the most powerful aggressive force in Europe, Germany, has capitulated.

Hitler's Europe Yes, welcome to Hitler's Europe... Come on, human race - for our children's sake if not our own. This is wakey, wakey time.