Until we go through it ourselves, until our people cower in the shelters of New York, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles and elsewhere while the buildings collapse overhead and burst into flames, and dead bodies hurtle about and, when it is over for the day or the night, emerge in the rubble to find some of their dear ones mangled, their homes gone, their hospitals, churches, schools demolished - only after that gruesome experience will we realize what we are inflicting on the people of Indochina.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the need for personal experience to truly understand the devastation of war.
William L. Shirer highlights the profound impact of war on human life by illustrating the horrors faced by soldiers and civilians alike. He suggests that only when individuals witness the destruction in their own lives will they comprehend the suffering inflicted upon others, such as those in Indochina, and recognize the gravity of their actions.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the impacts of war on civilians.
In our new age of terrifying, lethal gadgets, which supplanted so swiftly the old one, the first great aggressive war, if it should come, will be launched by suicidal little madmen pressing an electronic button. Such a war will not last long and none will ever follow it. There will be no conquerors and no conquests, but only the charred bones of the dead on and uninhabited planet.
No class or group or party in Germany could escape its share of responsibility for the abandonment of the democratic Republic and the advent of Adolf Hitler. The cardinal error of the Germans who opposed Nazism was their failure to unite against it.
Like a baseball game, wars are not over till they are over. Wars don't run on a clock like football. No previous generation was so hopelessly unrealistic that this had to be explained to them.
Sometimes, in the trenches, you get the sense of something, ancient. One trench we held, it had skulls in the side, embedded, like mushrooms. It was actually easier to believe they were men from Marlborough's army, than to think they'd been alive a year ago. It was as if all the other wars had distilled themselves into this war, and that made it something you almost can't challenge. It's like a very deep voice, saying; 'Run along, little man, be glad you've survived
If men make war in slavish observance of rules, they will fail. No rules will apply to conditions of war as different as those which exist in Europe and America...War is progressive, because all the instruments and elements of war are progressive.
In listening to the narratives of the Congolese, I came to terms with the extent to which their bodies had become battlefields.
So many nurses had turned into emotionally disturbed handmaidens of the war, in their yellow-and-crimson uniforms with bone buttons.
From now on we shall bomb Germany on an ever-increasing scale, month by month, year by year, until the Nazi regime has either been exterminated by us or - better still - torn to pieces by the German people themselves.
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