PICTURES FROM HISTORY: Rare Images Of War, History , WW2, Nazi Germany: Rare Vietnam War Images: Be there! Part 1

The following war photos were taken by ace war photographer Henry Hyuet. His father was French, his mother Vietnamese. He was omnipresent during the Vietnam war. His pictures shaped public opinion in the US. He worked first for the UPI, then for the AP. He was killed in 1971 when the US helicopter on which he was aboard was shot down by the Vietcong.

Operation Masher 1966. Hassled and tired US soldiers after a day of fighting

VIETNAM WAR QUOTES

You can kill ten of my men for every one I kill of yours, but even at those odds, you will lose and I will win.
--Ho Chi Minh to the French, late 1940s

You have a row of dominoes set up; you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is that it will go over very quickly.
--Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1954

Fresh US soldiers arrive in Vietnam

VIETNAM QUOTES

Now we have a problem in making our power credible, and Vietnam is the place.
--John F. Kennedy, 1961

This is not a jungle war, but a struggle for freedom on every front of human activity.
--Lyndon B. Johnson, 1964

150 miles North of Saigon. 1966. Helicopters carry troops and supplies. The rubber drums have fuel.

VIETNAM WAR QUOTES

Tell the Vietnamese they've got to draw in their horns or we're going to bomb them back into the Stone Age.
--Gen. Curtis LeMay, May 1964

We should declare war on North Vietnam. . . .We could pave the whole country and put parking strips on it, and still be home by Christmas.
--Ronald Reagan, 1965

A reconnaissance unit checks the beach in central Vietnam

QUOTES

I see light at the end of the tunnel.
--Walt W. Rostow, National Security Adviser, Dec. 1967

The war against Vietnam is only the ghastliest manifestation of what I'd call imperial provincialism, which afflicts America's whole culture--aware only of its own history, insensible to everything which isn't part of the local atmosphere.
--Stephen Vizinczey, 1968

An US soldier lies low in a paddy field as the Vietcong fire

VIETNAM QUOTES

Let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.
--Richard M. Nixon, 1969

I'm not going to be the first American president to lose a war.
--Richard Nixon, Oct. 1969

Soldiers under fire in the trench

This war has already stretched the generation gap so wide that it threatens to pull the country apart.
--Sen. Frank Church, May 1970

By intervening in the Vietnamese struggle the United States was attempting to fit its global strategies into a world of hillocks and hamlets, to reduce its majestic concerns for the containment of communism and the security of the Free World to a dimension where governments rose and fell as a result of arguments between two colonels' wives.
--Frances Fitzgerald, 1972

A helicopter lifts the body of a slain US soldier near the Cambodia border

VIETNAM QUOTES

We believe that peace is at hand.
--Henry Kissinger, Oct. 1972

You have my assurance that we will respond with full force should the settlement be violated by North Vietnam.
--Richard Nixon in a letter to President Thieu, Jan. 1973

If the Americans do not want to support us anymore, let them go, get out! Let them forget their humanitarian promises!
--Nguyen Van Thieu, April 1975

A Vietnamese family cowers. Reminds one of Oliver Stone's film Platoon

Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America--not on the battlefields of Vietnam.
--Marshall McLuhan, 1975

Today, America can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam. These events, tragic as they are, portend neither the end of the world nor of America's leadership in the world.
--Gerald Ford, April 1975

Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.
--Michael Herr, 1977

Saving his gun. Mekong Delta. 1968

VIETNAM QUOTES

Vietnam presumably taught us that the United States could not serve as the world's policeman; it should also have taught us the dangers of trying to be the world's midwife to democracy when the birth is scheduled to take place under conditions of guerrilla war.
--Jeane Kirkpatrick, 1979

Some of the critics viewed Vietnam as a morality play in which the wicked must be punished before the final curtain and where any attempt to salvage self-respect from the outcome compounded the wrong. I viewed it as a genuine tragedy. No one had a monopoly on anguish.
--Henry Kissinger, 1979

It's time that we recognized that ours was in truth a noble cause.
--Ronald Reagan, Oct. 1980

A helicopter supplies a 155 mm gun atop a hill during an offensive in 1969

QUOTES

There is the guilt all soldiers feel for having broken the taboo against killing, a guilt as old as war itself. Add to this the soldier's sense of shame for having fought in actions that resulted, indirectly or directly, in the deaths of civilians. Then pile on top of that an attitude of social opprobrium, an attitude that made the fighting man feel personally morally responsible for the war, and you get your proverbial walking time bomb.
--Philip Caputo, 1982

Above all, Vietnam was a war that asked everything of a few and nothing of most in America.
--Myra MacPherson, 1984

Saigon was an addicted city, and we were the drug: the corruption of children, the mutilation of young men, the prostitution of women, the humiliation of the old, the division of the family, the division of the country--it had all been done in our name. . . . The French city . . . had represented the opium stage of the addiction. With the Americans had begun the heroin phase.
--James Fenton, 1985

Night shooting in Vietnam

Quotes about war....

"War grows out of the desire of the individual to gain advantage at the expense of his fellow man."
--Napoleon Hill

"We have failed to grasp the fact that mankind is becoming a single unit, and that for a unit to fight against itself is suicide."
--Havelock Ellis

'Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed."
--Mao Tse-Tung (1893 - 1976)

"I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in."
--George McGovern

"The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic."
--Joseph Stalin

In war, truth is the first casualty.
-- Aeschylus

"The ability and inclination to use physical strength is no indication of bravery or tenacity to life. The greatest cowards are often the greatest bullies. Nothing is cheaper and more common than physical bravery."
--Clarence Darrow, Resist Not Evil

"The victor will never be asked if he told the truth."
--Adolf Hitler

"To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization."
--George Orwell

"Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country."
--Bertrand Russell

Men are at war with each other because each man is at war with himself.
--Francis Meehan

Snippets From History

German Soldiers in Russia: Part 1

Hubert Menzel was a major in the General Operations Department of the OKH (the Oberkommando des Heers, the German Army headquarters), and for him the idea of invading the Soviet Union in 1941 had the smack of cold, clear logic to it: 'We knew that in two years' time, that is by the end of 1942, beginning of 1943, the English would be ready, the Americans would be ready, the Russians would be ready too, and then we would have to deal with all three of them at the same time.... We had to try to remove the greatest threat from the East.... At the time it seemed possible.'

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Battle for Berlin, 1945

'We started to fire at the masses,' says one former German machine gunner. 'They weren't human beings for us. It was a wall of attacking beasts who were trying to kill us. You yourself were no longer human.'

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Berlin after it fell to the Russians, 1945

"Vladlen Anchishkin, a Soviet battery commander on the 1st Ukrainian Front, sums up the horror of the whole event, when he tells how he took personal revenge on German soldiers: 'I can admit it now, I was in such a state, I was in such a frenzy. I said, 'Bring them here for an interrogation' and I had a knife, and I cut him. I cut a lot of them. I thought, 'You wanted to kill me, now it's your turn.'
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Dramatic Pictures: Battle For Stalingrad

"...Effective command no longer possible... further defense senseless. Collapse inevitable. Army requests immediate permission to surrender in order to save lives of remaining troops."
General Paulus' radio message to Hitler on January 24, 1943
"...Capitulation is impossible. The 6th Army will do its historic duty at Stalingrad until the last man, the last bullet..."
Hitler's response to General Friedrich Paulus' request to withdraw from the city