All the despair, terror and anguish of hundreds of souls passing into eternity composed that awful cry.
After noting that Germany’s submarine campaign had sharply reduced traffic from America, Churchill told Runciman: For our part, we want the traffic—the more the better; and if some of it gets into tro...
A single German submarine, Unterseeboot-9—U-9, for short—commanded by Kptlt. Otto Weddigen, had sunk all three ships, killing 1,459 British sailors, many of them young men in their teens.
We are always personally under an agitating pressure and cloud of anxiety. And Olmsted himself had grown increasingly susceptible to illness. He was sixty-eight years old and partly lame from a decade...
Paper, at least, it reported to Adm. Henry Francis Oliver, the Admiralty’s chief of staff, a man so tight-lipped and reticent he could seem almost mute, and this—given the British navy’s predilection...
Most sailors still held the belief that there was no point in knowing how to swim, since it would only prolong your suffering. Turner
Chronic anger
A new phrase was making the rounds in Berlin, to be deployed upon encountering a friend or acquaintance on the street, ideally with a sardonic lift of one eyebrow: Lebst du noch? Which meant, Are you...
[B]eing broke didn't disturb me in the least. I had started with nothing, and if I now found myself with nothing, I was at least even. Actually, I was much better than even: I had had a wonderful time
William Stead recognized the power of the fair immediately. The vision of the White City and its profound contrast to the Black City drove him to write If Christ Came to Chicago, a book often credited...
What I have now at your generous hands is infinitely precious to me. It would kill me to part with it,—I could not and I hope you could not. And I will be patient, patient without end, to see what, if...
Undersecretary of State Robert Lansing, number two man in the State Department, tried to put this phenomenon into words in a private memorandum. It is difficult, if not impossible, for us here in the...
Torpedoes were expensive, and heavy. Each cost up to $ 5,000— over $ 100,000 today— and weighed over three thousand pounds, twice the weight of a Ford Model T.
To produce the kind of landscape effects Olmsted strived to create required not months but years, even decades. I have all my life been considering distant effects and always sacrificing immediate suc...
There existed at this time a widespread perception that Hitler's government could not possible endure. Germany's military power was limited... And Hitler himself had begun to seem like a more temperat...
The world, he said, must face the sad fact that in an age when international cooperation should be the keyword, nations are farther apart than ever.
The smell of peace is abroad, the air is cold, the skies are brittle, and the leaves have finally fallen. I wear a pony coat with skin like watered silk and muff of lamb. My fingers lie in depths of w...
The outcome was clear to Dodd well before the votes were counted. He wrote to Roosevelt, The election here is a farce. Nothing indicated this more clearly than the vote within the camp at Dachau: 2,15...
The next day Phipps wrote about Göring’s open house in his diary. The whole proceedings were so strange as at times to convey a feeling of unreality, he wrote, but the episode had provided him a valua...
Responsibility has already changed the primary leaders of the Party very considerably, he wrote. There is every evidence that they are becoming constantly more moderate.