The Assault: Germany Before the Outbreak and England in War-Time
The Assault: Germany Before the Outbreak and England in War-Time
An American journalist's electrifying firsthand account of Europe in the years before the Great War and England under bombardment. Floyd Martin Wile, who spent years working in Berlin and London, offers an outsider's invaluable perspective on a continent sleepwalking toward catastrophe. He documents the atmosphere of militarism spreading through German society, the mounting tensions between nations, and the strange complacency that characterized European diplomacy in the years leading to 1914. The book shifts to wartime England, where Wile witnessed a nation transformed by conflict, its people steeled for a struggle none had imagined possible. This is not a military history or diplomatic chronicle, but something rarer and more valuable: the visceral, day-to-day observations of a journalist embedded in the very cities that would soon become symbols of the war's horror. Wile's account endures because it captures what textbooks cannot the texture of ordinary life in extraordinary times, the rumors and fears and false confidences of people who did not yet know what was coming.
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“It is time for us to realize that we are too great a nation to limit ourselves to small dreams,” he preaches in his inaugural address. “We’re not, as some would have us believe, doomed to inevitable decline. I do not believe in a fate that will fall on us no matter what we do. “I believe in a fate that will fall on us if we do nothing.” *””
— Unknown
“Communism has become an intensely dogmatic and almost mystical religion, and whatever you say, they have ways of twisting it into shapes which put you in some lower category of mankind,” wrote novelist and screenwriter F. Scott Fitzgerald,””
— Unknown
“God had a divine purpose in placing this land between two great oceans to be found by those who had a special love of freedom and courage.”
— Unknown
“Calvin Coolidge, “There is no right to strike against the public safety, by anybody, anywhere, at any time.” In””
— Unknown
“I believe the highest aspiration of man should be individual freedom and the development of the individual. That there is a sacredness to individual rights!””
— Unknown
“the Secret Service is now saying that Hinckley could have been stopped. All it would have taken was for Delahanty and the other Metro Police officers on the rope line to continue facing the crowd as Ronald Reagan departed the Hilton. It is a question that will dog Thomas Delahanty the rest of his life.””
— Unknown
“The assassin is immediately punched in the head by a nearby spectator, then gang-tackled by the crowd. Hinckley is buried beneath several hundred pounds of angry citizens as Secret Service agents try to take him alive. Ironically, their job is to now protect Hinckley with the same vigor they devote to protecting the president.””
— Unknown
“the camera as he talks, looking at notes.””
— Unknown
“If you want to be a happy man,” he will counsel a friend years from now, “just don’t ever cheat on your wife.” Ronald Reagan and””
— Unknown
