Roswell Hawkes Lamson Quotes
We must beat them tomorrow and I have no doubt but we will do it though probably many of us will not hear the cheer of victory. Every man should feel the highest personal responsibility to do his duty to the last extremity, and see the ‘Stars and Stripes’ flying over the rebel forts or sink in the effort to place them there.
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.
Roswell Hawkes Lamson, 1838–1903, United States Naval Officer, Address to his sailors, November 6, 1861
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
He always appeared in a military uniform after that.
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.
At that point the Japanese were losing the war on every front. It is not clear whether Hirohito would actually have done such and not tried to escape in the end, however he certainly expected his subjects, military and civilian to do so. That expectation and the behavior of the Japanese troops fighting to the death on many islands was a powerful factor in leading Truman, Marshall and other key American leaders to use the Atomic Bomb. See Marshall: {641063}
The first two lines of the song became the slogan a few years later of veterans of the Normandy invasion of WWII.
Reports were widespread that General Grant was an alcoholic and was frequently drunk in the field. Lincoln was under pressure to relieve Grant of his command in the West. To a Pennsylvania politician he explained:
This quotation gives us a concept of the WWII home front effort where virtually everyone in American society was personally involved on a daily basis in the war. See also {637440}. This was so dramatically different from the home fronts for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq where most of the American public had no direct contact with the war effort and was not called upon or even needed to do anything.
Ataturk had been a military hero, but was very much opposed to war and military adventurism not unlike the Dwight Eisenhower and Colin Powell type leaders. However, the one thing that he thought worth the sacrifice of his own and other Turkish lives was Turkish independence and sovereignty. Historically, the Ottoman Empire which Ataturk finally ended, had dominated half of Europe and all of the Mid East at the cost of sovereignty of other nations and Ataturk saw no more important virtue with dying for than national sovereignty. See {125322} and {584501}.
Quintus Horatius Flaccus
In the attack on Fort Wagner, the color bearer was killed as was the Commanding Officer, Colonel Shaw. Carney raised the flag and led the men up the sand wall into the Confederate midst. They were vastly outnumbered and then retreated. Carney was the first Black to win the Medal of Honor.
After hearing that Speaker Thomas Reed's bid for the presidential nomination was thwarted by Mark Hanna in favor of William McKinley, Fessenden remarked to Joseph Homan Manley, chairman of the Republican National Committee:
