Artillery War Quotes & Sayings

Artillery is the god of war. — Joseph Stalin

It will hardly be wise to adopt the suggestion ... that we must stop treating the little sins as though they were big sins. That suggestion means apparently, that we must not worry too much about the little sins, but must let them remain unmolested. With regard to such an expedient, it may be suggested that in the moral battle: we are fighting against a very resourceful enemy, who does not reveal the position of his guns by desultory (lacking purpose) artillery actions when he plans a great attack. In the moral battle, as in the Great European War, the quiet sectors are usually the most dangerous. It's through the "little sins" that Satan gains an entrance into our lives. Probably, therefore, it will be prudent to watch all sectors of the front and lose no time about introducing the unity of command. — J. Gresham Machen

It is with artillery that war is made. — Napoleon Bonaparte

Man with a crossbow in the proper position at the proper time's worth a corps of heavy artillery half an hour late and ten miles down the road from where it should be. — Gordon R. Dickson

You hate it, yes, but your eyes do not. Like a killer forest fire, like cancer under a microscope, any battle or bombing raid or artillery barrage has the aesthetic purity of absolute moral indifference - a powerful, implacable beauty - and a true war story will tell the truth about this, though the truth is ugly. To — Tim O'Brien

Worst of all were the accolades and thanks from people "for what you guys did over there." Thanks for what, I wanted to ask - shooting kids, cowering in terror behind a berm, dropping artillery on people's homes? — Nathaniel Fick

War is not only a matter of equipment, artillery, group troops or air force; it is largely a matter of spirit, or morale. — Chiang Kai-shek

The Northwestern Carpathians, in which I was raised, were a hard place, as unforgiving as the people who lived there, but the Alpine landscape into which Zlee and I were sent that early winter seemed a glimpse of what the surface of the earth looked and felt and acted like when there were no maps or borders, no rifles or artillery, no men or wars to claim possession of land, and snow and rock alone parried in a match of millennial slowness so that time meant nothing, and death meant nothing, for what life there was gave in to the forces of nature surrounding and accepted its fate to play what role was handed down in the sidereal march of seasons capable of crushing in an instant what armies might--millennia later--be foolish enough to assemble on it heights.

And yet there we were, ordered to march ourselves, for God, not nature, was with us now, and God would deliver us, in this world and next, when the time came for that. — Andrew Krivak

Israel uses sophisticated attack jets and naval vessels to bomb densely-crowded refugee camps, schools, apartment blocks, mosques, and slums to attack a population that has no air force, no air defense, no navy, no heavy weapons, no artillery units, no mechanized armor, no command in control, no army and calls it a war. — Noam Chomsky

I proudly served in the United States Army during the Korean War as an artillery operations specialist in the all-black 503rd Field Artillery Battalion in the Second Infantry Division. — Charles B. Rangel

We were lavish of blood in those days, and it was thought to be a great thing to charge a battery of artillery or an earthwork lined with infantry. — Daniel Harvey Hill

The children are designated as "Air Force aides of the Hitler youth" and wear military uniforms and become used to handling the anti-aircraft artillery flak guns. 15 and 16 year old children as warriors! If the war still continues to last for a long time, perhaps the babies will be also employed. Total war!! — Friedrich Kellner

By the last returns to the Department of War the militia force of the several States may be estimated at 800,000 men - infantry, artillery, and cavalry. — James Monroe

It takes a disciplined imagination to acknowledge that the less personal savageries of bombs, missiles, artillery and heavy weapons are, to those blown to smithereens, also barbaric. The main horror of what the coalition is doing is not a matter of the occasional soldier who, in the heat of battle, commits a war crime, but the steady destruction rained on cities, villages, the Iraqi people. This violence is wreaked calmly, from a distance, within the rules of engagement. The war itself is the American war crime. — James Carroll

Infantry, Artillery, Aviation
all that we have
are yours to dispose of as you will ... I have come to say to you that the American people would be proud to be engaged in the greatest battle in history. — John J. Pershing

The idea of aerial military surveillance dates back to the Civil War, when both the Union and the Confederacy used hot-air balloons to spy on the other side, tracking troop movements and helping to direct artillery fire. — Michael Hastings

Presumably, the bells of the Church of the Ascension had been reclaimed by the Bolsheviks for the manufacture of artillery, thus returning them to the realm from whence they came. Though for all the Count knew, the cannons that had been salvaged from Napoleon's retreat to make the Ascension's bells had been forged by the French from the bells at La Rochelle; which in turn had been forged from British blunderbusses seized in the Thirty Years War. From bells to cannons and back again, from now until the end of time. — Amor Towles

If I live, I mean to spend the rest of my life working for perpetual peace. I have seen war and faced artillery and know what an outrage it is against simple men. — Tom Kettle

It can be argued, for instance, that war is grotesque. But in truth war is also beauty ... Like a killer forest fire, like cancer under a microscope, any battle or bombing raid or artillery barrage has the aesthetic purity of absolute moral indifference- a powerful, implacable beauty- and a true war story will tell the truth about this, though the truth is ugly — Tim O'Brien

Artillery raining fire on his tiny village Jabla on the Line of Control (LoC). War has numbed him, so has devastation. Yet nothing had prepared him for the havoc of Saturday morning. He was taking a nap, having had his pre-dawn Ramzan meal. At first there — Anonymous

Artillery is more essential to cavalry than to infantry, because cavalry has no fire for its defence, but depends on the sabre. — Napoleon Bonaparte

I do not have to tell you who won the war. You know, the artillery did. — George S. Patton

And there are Ben [Jonson] and William Shakespeare in wit-combat, sure enough; Ben bearing down like a mighty Spanish war-ship, fraught with all learning and artillery; Shakespeare whisking away from him - whisking right through him, athwart the big bulk and timbers of him; like a miraculous Celestial Light-ship, woven all of sheet-lightning and sunbeams! — Thomas Carlyle

Our approach is very simple we have nothing to negotiate ... We have the Minsk format and we need immediately just a ceasefire and the withdrawal of heavy artillery and weapons and tanks from the touchline, the solution is very simple - stop supplying weapons ... withdraw the troops and close the border. Very simple peace plan. If you want to discuss something different, it means you are not for peace, you are for war. — Petro Poroshenko

What a pity!" said Combeferre. "What hideous things these butcheries are! Come, when there are no more kings, there will be no more war. Enjolras, you are taking aim at that sergeant, you are not looking at him. Fancy, he is a charming young man; he is intrepid; it is evident that he is thoughtful; those young artillery-men are very well educated; he has a father, a mother, a family; he is probably in love; he is not more than five and twent at the most; he might be your brother." "He is," said Enjolras. "Yes," replied Combeferre, "he is mine too. Well, let us not kill him." "Let me alone, it must be done." And a tear trickled slowly down Enjolras' marble cheek. — Victor Hugo

It's like guerrilla warfare. If you reveal your location, all it does is allow your opponent to improve his artillery bearings. It's better to move quietly, with stealth, under cover of night. You've got two choices: You can wear cammies and shimmy along on your belly, or you can put on a red coat and stand up for everyone to see. It comes down to whether you want to be the British army in the Revolutionary War or the Viet Cong. History tells us which tactic was more effective. — Ralph E. Reed Jr.

Great battles are won with artillery. — Napoleon Bonaparte

Jones described what followed in his official report:
All the oil, the tanks, barrels,engines for pumping, engine-houses, and wagons- in a word, everything used for rising, holding, or sending it off was burned. The smoke is very dense and jet black. The boats, filled with oil in bulk, burst with a report almost equaling artillery, and spread the burning fuel down the river. Before night huge columns of ebony smoke marked the meanderings of the stream as far as the eye could see. By dark the oil from the tanks on the burning creek had reached the river and the whole stream was a sheet of fire. A burning river, carrying destruction to our merciless enemy, was a scene of magnificence that might well carry joy to every patriotic heart.- General William E. " Grumble" Jones — Clint Johnson

My great-grandfather and his two brothers fought at Gettysburg. They were in artillery, and they survived the war, thank goodness. So I revere what they did. I think their motivations were honorable when they undertook the war and participated in it along with other Southerners. — Jimmy Carter

No wonder the summer solstice had been such a fun day in northern Europe before Christian missionaries arrived from the sunny south. If priests had not driven sex underground, what would the north have been like? Would art have flourished in the absence of sexual repression? What about artillery and fortification? The Reformation? The Thirty Years War? The French Revolution? The final perfection of murder as blood sport at Verdun and Dresden and in the Gulag?

In short, where would we be without Jesus? — Charles McCarry

The World War demonstrated the importance of Field Artillery. The majority of casualties were inflicted by the arm. — John J. Pershing

He was telling her here, in this cellar, as he kissed her feet, he had understood love for the first time - not just from other people's words, but in his heart, in his blood. She was dearer to him than all his past, dearer to him than his mother, than Germany, than his future with Maria ... He had fallen in love with her. Great walls raised up by states, racist fury, the heavy artillery and its curtain of fire were all equally insignificant, equally powerless in the face of love.. He gave thanks to fate for allowing him to understand this before he died. — Vasily Grossman

I move we get more wine,' Alistair said. 'What does the panel think?' ...
It was obvious that the entire war could be solved in this way. The trick would be to reach for a corkscrew instead, every time some brass hat ordered artillery. — Chris Cleave

During the day on Monday, Washington time, the airport at Saigon came under persistent rocket as well as artillery fire and was effectively closed. The military situation in the area deteriorated rapidly. I therefore ordered the evacuation of all American personnel remaining in South Vietnam. — Gerald R. Ford

I have observed that baseball is not unlike a war, and when you come right down to it, we batters are the heavy artillery. — Ty Cobb

The devil steps up to the podium, clears his throat and taps out time with his baton: in come the monstrous iron kettle drums of artillery, joined by a woodwind section of whistling bullets and shrieking shells, the ever-crackling light percussion of rifle fire. — Matthew De Abaitua

God is on the side with the best artillery — Napoleon Bonaparte

Marines have a cynical approach to war. They believe in three things; liberty, payday and that when two Marines are together in a fight, one is being wasted. Being a minority group militarily, they are proud and sensitive in their dealings with other military organizations. A Marine's concept of a perfect battle is to have other Marines on the right and left flanks, Marine aircraft overhead and Marine artillery and naval gunfire backing them up. — Ernie Pyle

In a curious failure of comprehension, I looked alertly about me for possible targets for all this artillery fire, not, apparently, realizing that it was actually ourselves that the enemy gunners were trying for all they were worth to hit. — Ernst Junger

No matter what the cause, even though it be to conquer with tanks and planes and modern artillery some defenseless black population, there will be no lack of poets and preachers and essayists and philosophers to invent the necessary reasons and gild the infamy with righteousness. To this righteousness there is, of course, never an adequate reply. Thus a war to end poverty becomes an unanswerable enterprise. For who can decently be for poverty? To even debate whether the war will end poverty becomes an exhibition of ugly pragmatism and the sign of an ignoble mind. — John T. Flynn

Screaming Meemies: This is partly onomatopoeic, partly rhyming in origin. The term is first recorded in 1927 with the meaning drunkenness, but sources suggest it dates from World War I, when it referred to a certain kind of German artillery shell that made a screaming sound, approximating meem or meemie. Soldiers, hearing too many of those artillery shells, experienced shell shock, and were said to have the screaming meemies. The term later evolved to refer to drunkenness, becoming synonymous with delirium tremens (the DTs or acute alcohol withdrawal). — Shannon Power

A magnificent fireworks began: magnesium flares blindingly white, yellow, and then red, like dying stars; straight bright red streaks of machine-gun fire; elegant and clear lines of bullets traced like fugitive neon light; and scarlet, sinister rugged patches from antiaircraft artillery. Then the noise: after the solemn, promising silence of the flares came the mad disorderly reaction of the inhabitants of the earth to the regular, obstinate sounds of the invisible motors in the sky.
The airplanes replied to the nervous coughing of the machine guns with great battering blows that shook the earth. It was a celebration in honor of death. — Albert Memmi

The worse the troops the greater the need of artillery. — Napoleon Bonaparte

Awakened by artillery fire, the frightened Confederate recruits ran out of town, some still in their bedclothes. The Federals gave this embarrassing retreat the derisive nickname of "The Battle of the Philippi Races. — Clint Johnson

Good infantry is without doubt the sinews of an army; but if it has to fight a long time against very superior artillery, it will become demoralized and will be destroyed. — Napoleon Bonaparte

Busty' Roberts had joined the Royal Artillery in 1914 and since then had steadily risen to the rank of Gunner. Now the crunch: someone with a perverted sense of humour made him a Lance Bombardier. Roberts went insane with power. The war now consisted of two people, him and Hitler. — Spike Milligan