|
c4a3039
|
In the Commons, Churchill defended his cutting back on the imprisonment of young offenders by drawing Members' attention to the fact that 'the evil only falls on the sons of the working classes. The sons of other classes commit many of the same offences. In their boisterous and exuberant spirits in their days at Oxford and Cambridge they commit offences--for which scores of the sons of the working class are committed to prison--without any ..
|
|
|
Martin Gilbert |
|
75f2680
|
We must learn to draw from misfortune the means of future strength.
|
|
|
Martin Gilbert |
|
ae5450d
|
Within seven months, more than 600,000 Armenians were massacred. Of the 500,000 deported during that same period, more than 400,000 perished as a result of the brutalities and privations of the southward march into Syria and Mesopotamia. By September as many as a million Armenians were dead, the victims of what later became known as genocide, later still as ethnic cleansing. A further 200,000 were forcibly converted to Islam.
|
|
|
Martin Gilbert |
|
08e59f4
|
That winter the son's need for his father's love was again disappointed. On November 10, three weeks before his twelfth birthday, he wrote to him, 'You never came to see me on Sunday when you were in Brighton.' This was the second time his father had been in Brighton but had not gone to see him.
|
|
|
Martin Gilbert |
|
045e782
|
ten thousand Soviet evacuees had been drowned off Tallinn, and twenty-three thousand Hungarian Jews murdered at Kamenets Podolsk, in the same three day period. But these were far from the only deaths in those few August days.
|
|
|
Martin Gilbert |
|
c99a66d
|
The woman crawled on the earth, took hold of his boot and pleaded for mercy. But the soldier took the boy and hit him with his head against the wall, once, twice, smashed him against the wall.
|
|
|
Martin Gilbert |
|
fd0d1b1
|
In one day alone, at the end of December, as a result of frostbite, more than fourteen thousand German soldiers had been forced to submit to amputation. Not all of them survived the operation.
|
|
|
Martin Gilbert |
|
49b0d26
|
Ludendorff and Hindenburg explained to the Kaiser that the problem was not only the German soldiers' will and ability to fight, but also President Wilson's deep reluctance to negotiate in any way with the Kaiser himself or his military chiefs. Grasping not only the nettle of military defeat, but also that of political democratisation, the Kaiser signed a proclamation establishing a Parliamentary regime. In the space of a single day, Germany..
|
|
|
Martin Gilbert |
|
da43ba4
|
on November 6: in the rapidity and confusion of the advance, Douglas MacArthur, commanding an infantry brigade, was taken prisoner by his own side. Thinking he was a German officer, vigilant American sentries brought him in at pistol point. The mistake was quickly discovered, once MacArthur had taken off his unusual floppy hat and long scarf.
|
|
|
Martin Gilbert |
|
50740ee
|
the slave labour system, already applied to Jews, was extended to Poles, just as it already applied to Czechs. 'A hundred thousand Czech workmen', Churchill told a public audience in Manchester on January 27, 'had been led off into slavery to be toiled to death in Germany.' But what was happening to the Czechs, Churchill added, 'pales in comparison with the atrocities which, as I speak here this afternoon, are being perpetrated upon the Pol..
|
|
|
Martin Gilbert |
|
ed6a898
|
On June 3, Britain, France and Italy announced their full support for Polish, Czech and Yugoslav statehood. On the following day, encouraged to do so by the British, Dr Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader, met the Emir Feisal, the leader of the Arab Revolt, near the port of Akaba, and worked out with him what seemed to be a satisfactory Arab support for a Jewish National Home in Palestine. A senior British general noted after the meeting tha..
|
|
|
Martin Gilbert |
|
4e7ba60
|
in towns and villages throughout the Ukraine, several thousand Jews were being murdered by anti-Bolshevik Whites, whose historic anti-Semitism, combining with a new hatred of the noted Jewish presence among the Bolshevik leadership, renewed the violent pogroms of a decade and a half earlier.
|
|
|
Martin Gilbert |
|
cc578df
|
It was five months since Haig had told the British War Council: 'The machine gun is a much over-rated weapon and two per battalion is more than sufficient.' He was once again being proved terribly wrong.
|
|
|
Martin Gilbert |
|
688f8c1
|
Of the 850,000 Indian soldiers who left the subcontinent during the First World War, 49,000 were killed in action. India also made her contribution to the material aspects of the Allied struggle, including the manufacture of 555 million bullets and more than a million shells. Over 55,000 Indians served in the Indian Labour Corps, as butchers, bakers, carpenters, shoemakers, tailors and washermen. Many did menial work within range of the ene..
|
|
|
Martin Gilbert |
|
f7e996e
|
If the war was to be over by Christmas, as many believed, or at the latest by Easter 1915, tens of thousands of soldiers might be killed or wounded before the guns fell silent. Every army believed that it could crush its opponents within a few months.
|
|
|
Martin Gilbert |
|
1493e66
|
For the first time since 1815, Russia was denied control of the Polish capital. It was a signal triumph for the Central Powers. The Germans now set their long-term sights on Finland, Russia's province since the Swedes had been driven out in 1808.
|
|
|
Martin Gilbert |
|
f90f6b1
|
His finest hour was the leadership of Britain when it was most isolated, most threatened and most weak; when his own courage, determination and belief in democracy became at one with the nation.
|
|
|
Martin Gilbert |
|
a382e45
|
Even if the tutoring was only for one hour a day, he told his mother, 'I shall feel that I have got to be back at a certain time and it would hang like a dark shadow over my pleasure'.
|
|
|
Martin Gilbert |
|
b282258
|
Indian Corps and the 4th Corps will push through the barrage of fire regardless of loss, using reserves if required.
|
|
|
Martin Gilbert |
|
65895fa
|
He never flinched, he never cringed, but he died as one would wish all Englishmen to die--quietly and undramatically,
|
|
|
Martin Gilbert |
|
5e2d24a
|
the Germans were 'picking out the revolutionists and Liberals from the many Russian prisoners of war, furnishing them with money and false passports and papers, and sending them back to Russia to stir up a revolution
|
|
|
Martin Gilbert |
|
f1aeb40
|
Hitler's entourage quickly learned what he had in mind. On September 9 Colonel Eduard Wagner discussed the future of Poland with Hitler's Army Chief of Staff, General Halder. 'It is the Fuhrer's and Goering's intention', Wagner wrote in his diary, 'to destroy and exterminate the Polish nation. More than that cannot even be hinted at in writing.
|
|
|
Martin Gilbert |
|
2111c1a
|
Mind you true tragedy, supreme tragedy are not the worst in life, far from it: the squalid morass of unattempting impotence is the stifling of the soul and hope of man.
|
|
|
Martin Gilbert |
|
895239f
|
Para Hitler, a propria vida nao importava. "Conduzi o povo alemao a grandes feitos, muito embora sejamos objeto de odio do mundo exterior", disse ele, decidido a viver de forma a "nao se envergonhar" caso viesse a morrer. "Sairei vitorioso desta luta ou cairei nela", concluiu. "Nunca sobreviverei a derrota de meu povo."
|
|
|
Martin Gilbert |
|
be4d1d2
|
He rejected the policy of seeking a direct accommodation with the Nazis at the expense of the smaller states of Europe.
|
|
|
Martin Gilbert |
|
ba12037
|
The full extent of Nazi persecution was evidence, as he saw it, that there would never be any meaningful accommodation between Nazism and Parliamentary democracy.
|
|
|
Martin Gilbert |
|
98787cc
|
From the earliest successes of the Nazi movement, even before 1933, he expressed his repugnance of Nazi excesses, and he continued to do so after 1933, despite repeated German protests at his articles and speeches.
|
|
|
Martin Gilbert |
|
7e1455a
|
Nothing could persuade him to accept the possibility of compromise with evil at the expense of others, or to abandon his faith in the rule of law, the supremacy of elected Parliaments and the rights of the individual.
|
|
|
Martin Gilbert |
|
0266aae
|
In his continued forecasts of the potential German air strength, Churchill has often been accused of exaggeration.
|
|
|
Martin Gilbert |
|
bbc9c36
|
Although the Government and the Air Ministry sought to weaken the impact of Churchill's warnings by accusing him of exaggeration, within four years they were forced to recognize that the true situation was as he had forecast.
|
|
|
Martin Gilbert |
|
fbf993e
|
How often I find myself called wrong,' Churchill had written to his wife on 17 April 1924, 'for warning of follies in time.
|
|
|
Martin Gilbert |
|
c21073e
|
The Government's repeated response, however, even after October 1938, was to continue to attack his motives and judgement, and to seek to minimize the importance of his information.
|
|
|
Martin Gilbert |
|
a6642a6
|
No doubt it is not popular to say these things,' Churchill had written to his wife on 26 September 1935, 'but I am accustomed to abuse and I expect to have a great deal more of it before I have finished. Somebody has to state the truth.' During
|
|
|
Martin Gilbert |
|
1dd87c8
|
led Churchill to work with many disparate groups to try to influence public opinion towards the need for greater vigilance in defence of democracy, faith in the moral tenets of the anti-totalitarian cause,
|
|
|
Martin Gilbert |
|
0cc4f3a
|
The passivity of the present Govt is beyond belief.
|
|
|
Martin Gilbert |
|
cb04a05
|
Hatred of him was aflame', and he added: 'No insults were too gross to hurl at him. One, of course, the Dardanelles fiasco, regarded as his particular crime, was always brought up.... The opposition were determined to shout him down. He was always admirably self-controlled and good-tempered, and he never failed to quell the opposition and get a hearing.' Whenever Churchill spoke, he was confronted by a vociferous group of hecklers, whom he ..
|
|
|
Martin Gilbert |
|
b9bf086
|
Don't imagine I am running away from the Dardanelles. I glory in it.'41 On
|
|
|
Martin Gilbert |
|
6a3188d
|
presented
|
|
|
Martin Gilbert |
|
1ab3209
|
When Hogg asked Churchill directly: 'Is there a shadow of truth in any of the accusations made against you,' Churchill replied: 'Not the slightest. From beginning to end it is a monstrous and malicious invention.' Douglas
|
|
|
Martin Gilbert |
|
75af21a
|
recalled how his visitor stepped from her car and exclaimed,
|
|
|
Martin Gilbert |
|
869d2d0
|
it is only experience and disillusionment that make me cautious.
|
|
|
Martin Gilbert |
|
7cf69ed
|
Judged by every standard which history has applied to Governments, the Soviet Government of Russia is one of the worst tyrannies that has ever existed in the world. It accords no political rights. It rules by terror. It punishes political opinions. It suppresses free speech. It tolerates no newspapers but its own. It persecutes Christianity with a zeal and a cunning never equalled since the times of the Roman Emperors.
|
|
|
Martin Gilbert |
|
c90335e
|
I watched the daylight slowly creep in through the windows, and saw before me in mental gaze the vision of Death.
|
|
|
Martin Gilbert |
|
50fd1f0
|
The British offered Herzl a territory in Uganda, to be under the sovereignty of the British crown, into which a million Jews could immigrate and settle. The territory would be administered by the Jews and have a Jewish governor. When Nordau protested that Uganda was not Palestine, Herzl replied that, like Moses, he was leading the people to their goal via an apparent detour.
|
|
|
Martin Gilbert |