Geoff Dyer Quotes

At the beginning of June 1944, the war was reaching a climax. German troops had been brutalised by the savagery of the ongoing fighting in Russia, where the Red Army was secretly preparing its vast encirclement of the Germans' Army Group Centre.

I have left the obvious, essential fact to this point, namely, that it is the Russian Armies who have done the main work in tearing the guts out of the German army.

Of course, the outcome of the war would not have been changed. The war was lost perhaps, when it was started. At least it was lost in the winter of '42, in Russia.

The repeated announcements that the Russian resistance was definitely broken have been proved to be untrue.

The Russian myths of the Second World War are still intact.

We both agreed that Stalin was determined to hold out against the Germans. He told us he'd never let them get to Moscow. But if he was wrong, they'd go back to the Urals and fight. They'd never surrender.

Week after week, the heads of Red Army Intelligence received updates on the Wehrmacht's preparations.

Everybody has forgotten that Russia helped start the Second World War.

The Soviet Union was a very useful ally in the defeat of Nazi Germany.

If you look back at the history of the twentieth century, Germany alone had practically destroyed Russia several times.

In Hitler's launching of the Nazi campaign upon Russia we can already see, after less than six months of fighting, that he made one of the outstanding blunders of history, and the results so far realized constitute an event of cardinal importance in the final decision of the war.

On December 18, 1940, Hitler signed Directive Number 21, better known as Operation Barbarossa.

The Second World War claimed tens of millions of victims.

Not since June 1941 has the Russian military stood as perilously close to ruin as it does now.

In 1942, the Germans were running out of fuel. They were advancing so fast across the grasslands, the hot grasslands of south Russia, and the Russians were running out of tanks. And so both of them turned to cavalry, and there were great cavalry battles on the grasslands.

Twenty-six million Russians died in the defense of their homeland against the Nazis.

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.

Sixty years ago this week Hitler invaded Poland. This led to the creation of The History Channel.

If Britain wins wholly, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and perhaps even Bolshevik Russia will disappear.

We and our allies owe and acknowledge an ever-lasting debt of gratitude to the armies and people of the Soviet Union.

I had done a lot of reading, relative for a kid, about World War Two, and I thought about Chamberlain a lot.

To those who are incapable of presenting the historic truth in an honest way, I want to say that Poland was not a perpetrator but a victim of World War Two.

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

After Barbarossa and Pearl Harbor, the war tide slowly turned against the Axis.

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.