CHAPTER 35
Remember, the last episode of the series, began with an aerial shot of Oradour-sur-Glane, the French village where the Waffen-SS massacred the population as a reprisal for partisan activities. Hundreds of villages suffered the same fate on the Eastern Front. The programme did not mention that the officers responsible for the atrocity at Oradour died fighting with fanatical bravery in Normandy, perhaps because it would have pointed to the uncomfortable conclusion that men indifferent to their own survival are unlikely to be respectful of the lives of others. The tone was elegiac, dwelling on human loss but also, through the agency of J Glenn Gray whose important book The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle was published in 1970, seeking to say something profound about conflict. I think it worked well, and I have also used Dr Gray's eloquent words to give structure to what would otherwise be a grab-bag of quotable quotes.
I am a baby-boomer, born ten months after VE day, and my life and career have been dominated by an acute awareness of what J owe to the sacrifices of the two generations before mine. They fought and killed and died in battle so that I should not have to, and for the freedoms we all take for granted. Perhaps they were not, intrinsically, better people than we are, but their times called for sacrifice and heroism and if afterwards they felt a sense of entitlement it is entirely forgivable. Hard cases notoriously make bad law and perhaps the same may be said about whatever conclusions may be drawn from the Second World War. We may not be called upon to find out whether we lack 'moral fibre', or to explore the ambivalence of lethal vengeance, but video footage of 'smart bombs' at work seems to have increased the fascination with destruction that worried Dr Gray so much. Humanity remains much the same and the world has been at war throughout history – it was simply convulsed by it, on an almost unimaginable scale, in 1939–45.
DR J GLENN GRAY
US Army Intelligence Officer and author
War is a study in extreme situations and one's mood does shift at an astonishing rate. You can be scared to death one minute and laughing the next, you can be filled with hatred one minute and filled with love the next. War is excruciatingly boring; I have never been so totally absolutely bored as I was in the Army. But I could also say that I have never been so intensely engaged and involved – a few minutes later, very often.
LEO GARIEPY
Canadian tank commander, D-Day
Sir, I was frightened when I left Canada in 1940 and I didn't stop being frightened until I got back home in 1945.
DR GRAY
I noticed different soldiers had different relations to death. One of the more common was that of a coward's relation, for him death is the greatest enemy. I had a friend called Mac who was convinced that every German was out to lull him personally and that every spot of earth where he was, was going to be the target for a shell or a bomb. He died a thousand deaths in my presence. He used to sleep beside me and he could tell even in his sleep when incoming shells landed within a mile or two. That kind of relation is negative. The opposite perhaps is the dare-devil soldier who almost courts death. In our southern France landing I was cowering under our Jeep because German shells were landing all around our boat, and I watched through the mass of harness and gear an American captain smoking a cigarette and flicking the ash off into the water, and I watched his hand, fascinated. It wasn't even quivering as much as mine is right now. I had the most irrational desire to creep through the gear and put my arms around him and embrace that fellow – although I've never wanted to embrace a man in my life.
SERGEANT BILL BECKETT
Sherwood Foresters group, Nottingham pub
We were in the front line at Anzio and there was somebody, one of his pals got sniped, got hit by a sniper, and he just grabbed his rifle and just went charging out of his position straight across into no man's land trying to find the bloke that had done it. I think Jerry stuffed about fifty bullets in him before he dropped. Everybody just stood there looking at him as he went crazy. A young chap. This is the kind of thing that people would never believe if you tell them. You know you've got to see these things happen to believe them.
DR GRAY
After a few weeks in the line I got away one afternoon and climbed up into the Apennines, and met the old hermit. I think he was significant for me, a perspective on the war. Here was an old man who was curiously uninvolved, remote from the war. I had been totally cut up by the war and couldn't imagine anybody who wasn't so. And the old hermit had a simplicity, a kind of naivety that enabled me to raise my consciousness. I happened to be reading War and Peace at the time and discovered that Tolstoy had found a few Russian peasants that never knew what Napoleon's army was doing in Russia or that it was even a foreign army. This doubled the perspective that I, a hundred years later, should meet somebody in Italy who didn't know that there was a war on, and what it was all about, gave me a kind of perspective and an insulation against the total involvement that hitherto had been my lot. He was sitting smoking dried Italian grass and I gave him a bowlful of my own good tobacco. I came from a farm and feel at home with farmers and country people. His donkey was near by and he had a little grass hut where he slept. We sat down and began to talk and of course the artillery in the valley below opened up and he began to ask me questions about the war and I gradually became aware that he didn't know what was going on. My attempts to explain faltered, not only because of my rather poor Italian but because I suddenly realised that I couldn't explain to him why Americans and Britishers were fighting in Italy against Germans, with Italians on both sides. It seemed an impossible task. Even had he been speaking my own language I wouldn't have been able to tell him what the war was about because I really didn't know myself in any deeper sense. It was one of those strange, curious experiences that enable one to step back, so I've never forgotten that old Italian.
BILL MAULDIN
American cartoonist with Stars and Stripes
The British 56th Division was still taking Salerno when we moved into it, that is our little group moved in to publish a newspaper. We took over this apartment, which I guess belonged to one of the local-government officials because he'd left, and it was a large and very elegant apartment. One room had a piano in it and I was sitting at the piano playing with one finger and sort of noodling around trying to think up a cartoon idea and this British soldier, I mean you couldn't have made a better cartoon of a typical British infantryman – he was grimy, he was dirty, he had his helmet on, he had his rifle, he had grenades all over him, and he had this young fifteen-year-old Italian chick with him, who was a very buxom lass who did not look inexperienced in spite of her age – and he nodded very politely and then ignored me totally and went to the cupboard in the corner and found some nice lace table napery, whatever it is. He found a doily which he placed on the floor – he was very delicate because the room was full of plaster dust – and proceeded to co-habit with this girl on the doily. And meanwhile I'm sitting there picking out a tune on the piano, watching the whole thing. They never gave me a chance to leave, really, and so then they left and the girl smiled over her shoulder at me and the soldier said, 'So long, Yank,' or something like that and went back out, back to battle. It was the weirdest and most sort of dreamlike thing I can remember out of the whole war, this little episode, which lasted all of five minutes.
DR GRAY
I experienced, all the way through in Italy and in France, the most amazing paradoxes, the contrast between the miseries of war and the insistencies of love. This kind of contrast made me think that love and war are indissolubly linked to each other in ways that haven't been dealt with sufficiently since the early Greeks – the very first documents of Western civilisation have dealt with the marriage of love and war, of Aphrodite and Aries. The women brought, specially in Italy and France but also in Germany, an element that was in striking contrast to the hideous experience of the day and I think many of the women themselves were tremendously moved by this experience. There was tenderness in these affairs that we found totally lacking in our ordinary military experience. The two complimented each other, often made possible soldiers day-to-day advances; I couldn't overemphasise the importance of the element that women brought. Many of the affairs were casual, much of it simply the kind of sexual outlet, but I was impressed by a deeper element of tenderness, of seriousness, softness, kindness – one felt awfully grateful to the girls in those days for the experience of joy that they brought in an otherwise joyless existence.
DAME VERA LYNN
Popular singer and. 'The Forces' Sweetheart'
I was trying to get over this togetherness bit, trying to bring the separated parties closer together. It was very difficult for a lot of the wives and sweethearts to actually write to their men folk what they really thought and what they felt, and by my singing the kind of songs that I did I was doing it for them, in a way that they could understand. The songs were simple, the lyrics were straight to the point and in a way interpreting their thoughts for them. I think that was what happened. In days of crisis there's always this feeling, this sentiment, which of course is nostalgia for the future. I had a set plan, and I hope it worked, and I think it did, just to bring separated beings together.
DR GRAY
I speak of the lust of the eye, a biblical phrase which I particularly like because much of the appeal of battle is simply this attraction of the outlandish. But there is an element of beauty in this. Soldiers learn to experience in warfare a kind of ecstasy which literally means getting outside oneself. I try to think of it in terms of an adjoining, one could be drawn into, absorbed by a spectacle, I think especially of southern France, the terrific bombardment. Our planes coming over, I literally expected the coast to detach itself and go into the ocean. But to watch this was to forget you had to get into landing boats and make off the shore. It was just a terrific spectacle in which, I think everybody, including myself, was drawn into it, so we forget all about ourselves and it's not quite right to say we enjoyed it, we were totally absorbed, lost in the spectacle.
PROFESSOR ALICJA IWANSKA
Warsaw-uprising survivor, exile and sociologist
I have lost some dear friends but I still think that in comparison with other ways of dying, in particular with Poles of Jewish origin who were lulled in the gas chambers, or in comparison with Poles executed by state execution, or death by accident, I think it's a great privilege to be killed for something. I think everybody would feel that way. There's nothing worse than impersonal death, it's not connected, you know. When you lose connection between merit and when you lose the idea of guilt then there is nothing left, you stop being human.
TOM FITZPATRICK
9th Australian Division, Eighth Army
The war was a turning point in my life in many ways. I think I was probably a self-centred man before the war, had a rather high idea of my own importance. But serving, in the junior ranks particularly, that may have helped. I was just one of millions of men whereas up to the war I felt that I was something more exclusive – that's hardly the word, but I do feel perhaps it gave me a sense of humility.
GUARDSMAN SHEARER
Scots Guards group, Glasgow pub
Although we were all as thick as thieves, we were so preoccupied with the business of eating, sleeping, fighting, surviving that we didn't really find time to have the sort of conversation that we might have now, sitting here. I certainly never remember discussing the outcome of the war or whether the Germans were right or we were right or anything like that at all. I mean it was just day-to-day honest-to-goodness living together, and very pleasant it was.
WYNFORD VAUGHAN-THOMAS
BBC radio broadcaster
The strange thing about war, it was awful, miserable, burning cities, unbelievable squalor, a horror that no civilisation could go through, yet when you look back you don't remember the horror so much. The fact that there was somebody beside you who went through it all with you, and who occasionally took the burden on himself, was braver than you, who steadied your nerves, who was prepared to take risks that you weren't prepared to take, and a feeling of comradeship is the one thing that emerges out of any war. I know it's a cliché but it's there and it's what takes you through the war. That's really why I've become far more sympathetic to the British Legion. When I was young I couldn't understand why people would want to go to Cenotaph ceremonies. I go now, I am proud to go and I remember the people who don't come back. Perhaps the younger generation don't want to know about the war, but they darn well should know that there were people as young as themselves who died and sacrificed themselves, and out of it comes this terrible feeling in my mind of waste, and yet of proud comradeship.
PRIVATE WHITMORE
Sherwood Foresters group, Nottingham pub
We were all one big happy family, there was no doubt about that, and what was yours was mine and what was mine was yours sort of thing. It helped to broaden your outlook on life a bit, especially someone like myself who'd never seen the sea till I was in the Army. I didn't realise there was such things as Geordies and Scousers and all that sort of thing. I suppose it did us all good in one sense – it'd perhaps do some of them good today to go in the Army.
DR GRAY
It's something less than friendship, it's one of the basic kinds of community, people who have been together in danger – exposed, hardship – have a certain feeling for each other, a dependency on each other that is very strong, a very intense emotion, much of it unconscious, unreflective at least, but very real. This deserter has lost his comrade and felt that he lost a particular part of himself. I couldn't exaggerate the importance of comradeship, it's what we mean by morale. In the Army, soldiers train together who fight together, eat and sleep together, begin to feel their egos are social and communal, no longer are they contained within their own skins. They can re-create this experience and these experiences are something at least I avoid as I would the plague. There's something very artificial about it if you have ever been to a Legionnaire convention, these middle-aged balding pot-bellied men, trying to behave as they did in the war and don't succeed – it's very sad, very pathetic. Perhaps one should say this experience of comradeship is something very different from friendship, it's real, it's intense, but it's brief and it's related to the context of the experience. There's no such thing as re-creating it; you can't have a buddy after you have been long enough in civilian life.
JIMMY THOMAS
Merchant seaman
What I found when I came home, and I've been disgusted with myself ever since, was that the readjustment to their kind of life, the life that I'd led before myself, was virtually impossible because however much you hate being in a war the things you come back to seem very, very trivial. The local council talking about a new gents' lavatory and things like this don't seem to matter at all. And of course these things matter to the people around you so I shut up and shut myself in for about a year. I must have behaved extremely badly. I'm well aware of it and I've never forgotten it and never cease to feel sorry for it because I think it must have made life pretty intolerable for people around me. But it was just that I couldn't communicate. I had lost my sense of communication with people that I'd known all those years because I'd begun to understand an entirely new breed of people who were all sewn together – being in a common thing, I think that was it. A lot of people I know, when I've mentioned this have said exactly the same thing. I couldn't be bothered to talk to my family at table or anything and I just kept getting up and walking out of the house and not coming back for hours. I think they were very upset.
DR NOBLE FRANKLAND
Bomber Command navigator, historian and Director of the Imperial War Museum
It is extremely various: lots of people are maimed completely, either mentally or physically, but I suppose the majority of those who survive, survive apparently intact. But there must be marked effects and I think in some ways the effects are very good on people because they feel that, to a certain extent, they've been able to fulfil themselves and I think a lot of people go right through life without ever feeling a sense of fulfilment. But those who take part in hectic war operations usually get a sense of fulfilment, especially if they believe in what they're trying to do, which I think in war people tend to do very readily. On the other hand there are very bad effects, perhaps one of the less obvious ones is that people who undertake these operations have a tendency to feel afterwards that society owes them something very special. And when the war is over they tend to go home and expect people to look up to them and to look after them, which is not what people are going to do at all. And I think that's one of the very bad effects of war; this produces a frustrated feeling in the man, and he feels society's cheated him and his effort was in vain and not worth while, which is tragic.
HERMAN PHEFFER
Disabled US service veteran
We had this orthopaedic surgeon from Baltimore and he gave the definition that I've used all these years about sympathy for the disabled. He says, 'Son, you know where you find sympathy? You find it in the dictionary between shit and syphilis.' I was very fortunate that friends of mine who came to visit with me brought along a fellow who had both arms off in World War One, plus his buddy who had both legs off, also in World War One, and he showed me his appliances and the way they were made in those days – he had a couple of nude bathing beauties stuck on this appliances. He said, 'You're not going to dance, you're not going to roller-skate but you're going to do anything you ever want just as much as you want to do it – but', he says, 'you're the one who's going to do it, no one else.'
GUARDSMAN SHEARER
There was one time during the advance, approaching Minister, we were driving through the woods and demolition experts had set the charges and the trees would drop down. And, lo and behold, coming cycling along as large as life was the fellow who had set them off, on a pedal cycle, and behind him the trees were just dropping and he cycled towards us. He couldn't care less. What happened after that I'd better draw a blank over. He didn't finish the war.
DR GRAY
It's human nature, you notice it with boys who love to break windows to hear the glass tinkle, but there are a great many soldiers who take a pleasure in destroying people, wasting things and would kill beyond any kind of necessity. They took a delight in shooting anything that moved. I find this aspect of human nature is not discussed enough but it is one of the causes of warfare. I don't know what the limits are but I did know certain soldiers, killers, who are very distinct from ordinary soldiers who kill only when they need to, and who never become killers. It isn't all that different I suppose from the delight hunters have in killing antelope or deer. I discussed it as one of the appeals of battle in addition to the lust of the eye and appeal of comradeship. It threatens our whole civilisation and we in America have this kind of thing now in civilian life. I think it is an extreme in human nature where you can't simply go back and regret a few minutes later, it grows on you. And if you get experienced killers such as some of the SS were, and I'm afraid some of our own paratroops, no, you can't revert very quickly to regret. I don't say that people are incurable or anything but they tend to be pretty joyless types. I noticed them in rest camp: they would sometimes simply attack the locals, they were notoriously restless and even their own officers were often afraid of them. I don't know about artillery men and pilots. Pilots are people who kill at a distance but have a great delight in implements and in precision bombing and so on. But the further you are from the target the less likely you are to have any kind of real understanding of what devilry your weapons arc causing. We're all unable to imagine what people are feeling a few hundred yards away. Lack of imagination is one of the greatest human weaknesses, I think.
DR FRANKLAND
There are always unhealthy members of society, this is one of the perennial problems of life, but I take, in general, the opposite view that it's unhealthy not to study these events; it's much better to come to terms with these dreadful things that have happened rather than try and sweep them under the carpet and pretend they didn't happen. I think children who confront these situations in the right way, at the right stage in their life, are far more likely to grow up as healthy citizens than those who, for perhaps idealistic reasons on the part of their teachers or parents, arc denied the opportunity. I think this leads to much more complex psychological results than simply studying the facts and bringing them out into the open.
HARRY MITCHELL
British 50th Division, Eighth Army
I was a stretcher-bearer, I had no rifle or anything like that and I was frightened, running about in a sweat, and we eventually got into these holes and tried to find out who was where. There was this Italian lying above the ground outside this hole with not a stitch on where the blast had caught him. I realised there was no good my going to him and I got in the hole with a friend of mine, another stretcher-bearer, and we decided to have a smoke, open our Players and have a cigarette and talk of the sort of thing we'd gone through, you know, how horrible it was. And there was this Italian laying on top of his trench and all he kept saying was, 'Mamma mia, mamma mia'. After an hour or so everything was so quiet and eerie that he got on people's nerves and along somewhere one of our fellows hollered out, 'I'll give you mamma mia in a minute, mate,' typical Cockney expression. And he still said 'Mamma mia' and the next thing we heard was a .303–rifle shot and the 'Mamma mia' stopped – that was his lot, you know.
DR KONRAD MORGEN
SS investigating magistrate
I can still remember a conversation I had with the Reichs Doctor SS, Professor Dr Grawitz, in Berlin just before I went to Auschwitz. Dr Grawitz had a good reputation in Germany and in the learned international circles, and in particular his father was a great humanist and his son had a classical education. This highly intelligent man said to me, in relation to the dental gold, whenever he slept he dreamt about it, and he could feel little men who were hammering on his teeth and then he had to think of the dental gold that was disappearing in Auschwitz. But the fact that millions of human beings, daily, hourly were losing their lives – he didn't think about that, that didn't cost him any sleepless nights. The only human feeling one can credit this man with is that he had considered how one could kill people painlessly. In fact his biggest problem was that not just the killing itself should be painless but also that the victims should have no mortal fear beforehand. Death must come unexpectedly and suddenly. And this man had thought it all out, from apparently humane motives, but it transpired in practice that the cunning way they camouflaged and hid the truth was the only reason that this whole system ran so smoothly without a hitch on this enormous scale.
WYNFORD VAUGHAN-THOMAS
Belsen made me a stupidly determined optimist because you cannot believe that humanity is like this. If you do that, there's nothing ahead of us. If this is what lies underneath all our minds, if you take the lid off and there's a Belsen underneath, what are we talking about? I can't believe it, I mustn't believe it, I will not believe it.
URSULA GRAY
Dresden resilient, post-war wife of author J Glenn Gray
I will always remember a couple under the next tree were quarrelling and it seemed to us so unbelievable. You are fighting for your life, you don't know if the next minute you are still on this earth and here they are quarrelling. It impressed me so deeply, we talk often about it, how people even under circumstances of despair still are basically the same. I'll bet these people were quarrelling at home and it made no difference that they are here in an air raid and next minute they might be dead. I have a very strong feeling that this should never happen to people. If they do not get any better for something like that there's just nothing we can hope for.
DR GRAY
It was a silly sight, when I first saw it everything was destroyed, his house and all of his premises, the fence even. The only thing left was the gate that was only partially destroyed and as I went by he was repairing the gate. I laughed but later I began to feel that this urge for preservation was a great contrast to the love of destruction and I've learned to cherish this preservation love because it is one of the few dependable enemies of warfare. After the war in Germany I noticed the Germans were building houses that seemed destined to last for a hundred years when they couldn't be sure that actually the houses would last for five years and I ask myself why do they build so solidly. The only answer is a deep impulse in man to build for the future, it gives them a kind of assurance that peace will last.
DR FRANKLAND
One of the greatest effects of war on people who take part in it is the extent to which it tends to cut them off from both their elders and their own children. One's parents, when one is at war, really either don't want to know, or are unable to know because warfare developed so rapidly and they can't envisage the circumstances that their sons are in. And the same thing applies in a different way between father and son. In my own relationship with my parents at the time, and with my children today, they in a sense neither can nor wish to envisage the circumstances in which we lived in the war. And we have a rather arrogant sort of feeling that they ought to understand these dreadful things that happened to us, but they don't. Now I think people are cut off from these generations. There is a generation gap under any circumstances but I think war, as in so many aspects of life, tends to emphasise those sort of considerations, and very much so in creating and nourishing a generation gap.
ALBERT SPEER
Nuremberg defendant
I think the consequences of Hitler's life are still obvious to everybody, not only in Germany but in the whole world, and many things we are suffering from are the direct result of Hitler's activities. So when I am saying that I can't have any land of feelings about him, that's because of what he did to the world. And I am thinking too what he did to my family and myself, because to lose twenty years of lifetime and for children to grow up without their fathers is something which is caused by Hitler.
PRIVATE ROBERT REED
2nd New Zealand Division, Eighth Army
I thought we were part of the British effort – one British effort. In my own case when the war broke out I realised that it had to be fought and in my own heart it was a privilege to serve your country in its time of need.
J B PRIESTLEY
English author and broadcaster
I don't think I'm sentimentalising if I say that, to me – and after all I've lived a good long time now – the British were absolutely at their best in the Second World War. They were never as good, certainly in my lifetime, before it and I'm sorry to say I think they have never been quite so good after it.
GENERAL MARK CLARK
Commander United Nations in Korea
I'm not trying to get sentimental but as I've reached a ripe old age and look back on my experiences in World War Two, where as a comparatively junior officer I was catapulted into High Command, which was hard because I passed over a lot of older, equally capable friends of mine. But I think my greatest feeling of satisfaction was being associated with the British troops. I found them to be fine soldiers, perfectly willing to die if need be to accomplish their mission. We had our differences at times, as you naturally would, but when I was given command of your Fifteenth Army Group, a British Army Group with a completely British headquarters – in the middle of the night notified by Mr Churchill – I think that was my crowning period of happiness and pride. And I did take over the Fifteenth Army Group and I led it until the end of the war and took the surrender, as commander of the Fifteenth Army Group, of the German forces in Italy. I'll always be proud of the privilege of having that opportunity.
MICHAEL FOOT
Left-wing Labour MP
It is impossible to minimise the extent of how the whole public mind seemed to awake people with a great sense of community spirit during the war. It was the nearest thing that I've seen in my lifetime to the operation of a kind of socialist state – a democratic, socialist state of citizens believing that they could influence by their actions, speedily, what was going to be done, and that the whole world could be changed by the way they operated. They saw the world was changed by their actions in the war and they thought that could be translated into political action as well. It was extremely exciting but some of the political leaders, maybe because they were so deeply involved in their own pursuits, they didn't appreciate what was happening.
NORMAN CORWIN
American 'Poet Laureate of the radio'
World War Two shook us up – it made literally a melting pot of us. Men who had shared antagonisms and hostilities and distrust found themselves together on the same transports, in the same units, in the same trenches and in the same operations. The beginnings of racial integration I think can be traced back to that war.
BRIGADIER GENERAL LEON JOHNSON
Awarded the Medal of Honor for leading the attack on the Ploesti Romanian oilfields in August 1943
One thing you have to bear in mind – we did win the war. Maybe we made mistakes: I think you could say, well, you could have put this division against that division, this division did a great job and that division didn't do as well, or you could say this force did well and that force did less well. I think there's enough glory to go around – and enough pain and enough effort. You know, war is a nasty business. I'm not even sure who wins the wars. I don't know how you lose a war but it's awfully hard to know when you've won one. But the main point is that put together, working together, the Allies – and I bring in too the Poles and the Czechs and all the other people that belonged to the RAF, the RAF itself, the Free French – all those people, working together with the United States and the Canadians, did a very successful operation with a lot less loss than we had in World War One. We did accomplish what was set out to be done.
DR GRAY
I don't believe in collective guilt exactly but one of the things that seemed to cause most guilt in World War Two was this failure to discriminate between combatants and non-combatants. I felt even then, as many other soldiers did, that we were guilty of indiscriminate, terroristic harming. Many soldiers had to (particularly artillery men and flyers) kill innocent women and children. In this sense there is such a thing as collective guilt in so far as this was the decision made at the highest levels and approved by many people. It seems to me there's been a great deterioration in modern warfare in moral sense, because in the old days there was a sharp distinction between soldiers and civilians. More and more you see this distinction disappearing.
GROUP CAPTAIN HAMISH' MAHADDIE
Bomber Command Pathfinder Force
I'm frequently asked what my attitude was at the end of the war. Well, quite apart from an enormous feeling of relief, my own viewpoint was that the war for me had been a complete failure, because of the sixty million square-headed bastards still living.
PRIVATE DENIS GUDGEON
British serviceman, Japanese prisoner of war
Oh, no, they weren't normal human beings, they were definitely bestial. I personally have no time for them, never will. I've always felt that when that B-29 dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, it has always been my regret that the bomb didn't have sufficient power to cause all four Japanese islands to disappear into the Pacific Ocean. That's been my view and it still is.
LORD SHAWCROSS
Chief British prosecutor at Nuremberg
I think the main lesson of the trial is that all men in public life should appreciate that those who are in a position to control the destinies of governments and states are themselves personally responsible for the actions into which they lead the states they control. Hitherto that was not the case, but now it must be realised by those who participate in government that they share a collective and individual responsibility for any wrongful acts, criminal actions, actions in breach of international law which their governments may take.
AIR CHIEF MARSHAL SIR ARTHUR HARRIS
Commander-in-Chief RAF Bomber Command
People don't like the idea of getting bombs down the back of their neck, especially politicians. The only people who make war in this world, after all, are the politicians. The public doesn't make war, it's the politicians and for the first time those who make wars realise that they'll be the first to get hit in the neck – and a damned good thing.
PRIVATE NOEL GARDINER
2nd New Zealand Division, Eighth Army
We fought because we thought it was right to fight in the circumstances and we would fight again in the same circumstances, but we hope there won't be any further wars. The way the world's being handled at the moment I have my doubts about it, but I still think you've got to be optimistic and positive about these things.
GRAND ADMIRAL KARL DÖNITZ
I think that I now have said enough about the war, which is past now for over twenty-five years. I bow in reverence before the memory of the men who lost their lives in this war on both sides, and I think that we all hope that we never shall have such a war again.