The editor of this anthology, who took part and was wounded in the last war to end war, hates war and hates all the politicians whose mismanagement, gullibility, cupidity, selfishness and ambition brought on this present war and made it inevitable. But once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in a war.

Regardless of how this war was brought on, step by step, in the Democracies’ betrayal of the only countries that fought or were ready to fight to prevent it, there is only one thing now to do. We must win it. We must win it at all costs and as soon as possible. We must win it never forgetting what we are fighting for, in order that while we are fighting Fascism we do not slip into the ideas and ideals of Fascism.

For many years you heard American people speak who admired Mussolini because he made the trains run on time in Italy. It never seemed to occur to them that we made the trains run on time in America without Fascism.

We can fight a total war without becoming totalitarians if we do not stand on our mistakes to try and cover them; our military; our political and our naval mistakes; and learn from the winners; rather than copy the methods of the losers because they have been at the business of losing for so long.

The Germans are not successful because they are supermen. They are simply practical professionals in war who have abandoned all the old theories and shibboleths which had accumulated to such a point that military thought had completely stagnated, and who have developed the practical use of weapons and tactics to the highest point of common sense that has ever been reached. It is at that point that we can take over if no dead hand of last-war thinking lies on the high command; and we can thank the enemy for having done all this preliminary work for us.

— Ernest Hemingway, editor, Men At War, 1942

#Hemingway #history #quotes

Here is a running list of all the tags used at “Taking Thoughts Captive.” Clicking on any of them will take you to a page with all the posts having that particular tag, just like an index.

#Bradbury #culture #devotional #Evangelicalism #festivals #Hemingway #history #hymnody #Lent #Lewis #Luther #Lutheran #life #links #miscellanies #OConnor #philosophy #politics #prayers #psalms #quotes #reading #Reformed #sacraments #TFCC #theology #Tolkien #worship