Recent quotes:

Liveblogging World War II: March 12, 1945: "I Saw Anne Frank Die" (Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality...)

I have a dim memory of Anne Frank speaking of her father. She was a nice, fine person. She would say to me, ‘Irma, I am very sick.’ I said, ‘No, you are not so sick.’ She wanted to be reassured that she wasn’t. When she slipped into a coma, I took her in my arms. She didn’t know that she was dying. She didn’t know that she was so sick. You never know. At Bergen-Belsen, you did not have feelings anymore. You became paralyzed. In all the years since, I almost never talked about Bergen-Belsen. I couldn’t. It was too much.
#World-War-II #Anne-Frank - bradford-delong.com

Liveblogging World War II: February 19, 1945: Battle of Iwo Jima (Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality...)

Wikipedia: Battle of Iwo Jima: After the heavy losses incurred in the battle, the strategic value of the island became controversial. It was useless to the U.S. Army as a staging base and useless to the U.S. Navy as a fleet base. However, Navy Seabees rebuilt the landing strips, which were used as emergency landing strips for USAAF B-29s. The Imperial Japanese Army positions on the island were heavily fortified, with a dense network of bunkers, hidden artillery positions, and 18 km (11 mi) of underground tunnels. The Americans on the ground were supported by extensive naval artillery and complete air supremacy over Iwo Jima from the beginning of the battle by U.S. Navy and Marine Corps aviators. Iwo Jima was... the only battle by the U.S. Marine Corps in which the American casualties exceeded the Japanese, although Japanese combat deaths numbered three times as many American deaths. Of the 22,000 Japanese soldiers on Iwo Jima at the beginning of the battle, only 216 were taken prisoner, some of whom were captured because they had been knocked unconscious or otherwise disabled. The majority of the remainder were killed in action, although it has been estimated that as many as 3,000 continued to resist within the various cave systems for many days afterwards....
#World-War-II #Iwo-Jima - bradford-delong.com

Liveblogging World War II: February 13, 1945: Firebombing of Dresden (Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality...)

From Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse-Five: Billy [Pilgram] thought hard about the effect the quartet had had on him, and then found an association with an experience he had had long ago. He did not travel in time to the experience. He remembered it shimmeringly—as follows: He was down in the meat locker on the night that Dresden was destroyed. There were sounds like giant footsteps above. Those were sticks of high-explosive bombs. The giants walked and walked. The meat locker was a very safe shelter. All that happened down there was an occasional shower of calcimine. The Americans and four of their guards and a few dressed carcasses were down there, and nobody else. The rest of the guards had, before the raid began, gone to the comforts of their own homes in Dresden. They were all being killed with their families. So it goes. The girls that Billy had seen naked were all being killed, too, in a much shallower shelter in another part of the stockyards. So it goes. A guard would go to the head of the stairs every so often to see what it was like outside, then he would come down and whisper to the other guards. There was a fire-storm out there. Dresden was one big flame. The one flame ate everything organic, everything that would burn. It wasn’t safe to come out of the shelter until noon the next day. When the Americans and their guards did come out, the sky was black with smoke. The sun was an angry little pinhead. Dresden was like the moon now, nothing but minerals. The stones were hot. Everybody else in the neighborhood was dead. So it goes.
#World-War-II #Kurt-Vonnegut #Dresden - bradford-delong.com

Liveblogging World War II: February 11, 1945: Yalta (Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality...)

Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston S. Churchill, and Iosif V. Stalin: Joint Statement: We have considered and determined the military plans of the three Allied powers for the final defeat of the common enemy. The military staffs of the three Allied Nations have met in daily meetings throughout the Conference. These meetings have been most satisfactory from every point of view and have resulted in closer coordination of the military effort of the three Allies than ever before. The fullest information has been interchanged. The timing, scope, and coordination of new and even more powerful blows to be launched by our armies and air forces into the heart of Germany from the East, West, North, and South have been fully agreed and planned in detail.
#World-War-II - bradford-delong.com