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T. R. Fehrenbach Biography

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“Near the end of his life, Franklin Roosevelt said, "We have learned we cannot live alone, in peace; that our own well-being is dependent on the well-being of other nations, far away. We have learned that we must live as men, and not as ostriches, nor as dogs in the manger. We have learned to be citizens of the world, members of the human community." The American people, in general, had learned no such things. They had learned that the oceans were shrinking, and that demons who had seemed far away in 1941 could be dangerous. It was not a sense of responsibility, but the shock of fPearl Harbor that brought the United States out into the world. If Americans had suddenly become the watchmen on the walls of freedom, it had been caused by necessity, never by choice.”

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Author:T. R. Fehrenbach
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“Millions of Americans, even in the middle of a war, were unwilling to accept what they called "power politics" as an international way of life. This feeling could not be faulted in American moral terms. But its existence showed a remarkable misunderstanding of the world's peoples and governments. Too many Americans still saw the world at large in American terms, or considered the aims, morals, aspirations, and ideals of the English-speaking nations as universal. The man in Zanzibar was not much different from the man in Zanesville, Ohio, to this school of thought; therefore a consensus could easily be reached between the two. The same people tended to regard Hitler and Nazism not as recognizable human manifestations, but as some kind of aberration. Their rejection of history, including their own, was profound.”

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“A people [America] that does not prepare to fight should then be morally prepared to surrender. To fail to prepare soldiers and citizens for limited, bloody ground action, and then to engage in it, is folly verging on the criminal.”

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Book:This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War
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“The man who will go where his colors go, without asking, who will fight a phantom foe in the jungle and mountain range, without counting, and who will suffer and die in the midst of incredible hardship, without complaint, is still what he has always been, from Imperial Rome to sceptered Britain to democratic America. He is the stuff of which legions are made. His pride is in his colors and his regiment, his training hard and thorough and coldly realistic, to fit him for what he must face and his obedience is to his orders. He has been called United States Marine.”

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Book:This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War
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