Recently, I finished reading Alex Kershaw’s “The Liberator” which was about the U.S. Army officer Felix Sparks and his journey throughout Europe during World War 2. Here are some of the most impactful quotes that I took from the book and my thoughts on them.
Overall Thoughts
As a whole, this book is incredible. If you’re even remotely into WW2 history I would highly recommend it as it paints a great picture of what took place from one officer’s perspective. To be more specific, I enjoyed Kershaw’s cohesive writing throughout the entire book. It can be easy to get lost in all of the details and events but he did a great job of finding the right place for the events that occurred.
“Early that May of 1943, Sparks held Mary in his arms. The baby was showing. She had been told she could not travel after seven months and had to return to her family in Tuscon, where she would have the baby. They clung to each other and kissed good-bye, knowing they might not see each other again. Would he get to see his child? What would happen to Mary and the baby if he didn’t make it back?”
As a man, imagine having to go to war knowing you might never come back to meet your baby. Imagine your wife having to say bye to you knowing that she probably won’t ever see her husband again. Most families had to go through this separation during WW2 and many of them did not return home. This keeps things in perspective for me when I think I’m having a bad day.
“‘They used to say God only takes the good’, a still-traumatized Kaczorowski would say more than sixty years later. ‘Maybe that’s why I’m still here—because I’m rotten.'”
I never really thought about how it must have felt for a soldier to come back home after the war when so many of his friends and fellow soldiers had died. It must be a constant question of why your friends died and why you had lived.
“But one of the many things he had learned from Colonel Ankcorn in Sicily was that he should always appear calm and collected. Indeed, good leaders were often good actors, able to convince their men if not themselves that they would somehow prevail. ‘The truth of the matter was I was scared shitless but my men didn’t know it,’ Sparks later confessed. ‘Sometimes you just have to take care of business. Just do it, get through it. That’s all.'”
I love the fact that even if your leaders are scared their job is to appear as though they are not. Any leaders job is to control their emotions and take care of business. I think many of today’s leaders can learn from this.
“Eisenhower entered the room, pale and tense, chain-smoking as usual. He took one look at his despondent staff, huddled in their coats, forced a smile, and then announced confidently: ‘The present situation is to be regarded as one of opportunity for us and not disaster. There will be only cheerful faces at this conference table.'”
In other words, the obstacle became the way. This meeting took place at a time when everything seemed impossible, but Eisenhower used that to his advantage and decided instead of focusing on the negative, to turn the negative into a positive. We all have this ability every single day and should work on using it more often. We can’t always control what situations come our way, but we can control how we react to them.
“More than five million German dead littered the battlefields of a devastated Europe, especially in the east. Ninety percent of all German combat deaths had in fact occurred fighting the Soviets, who had suffered and sacrificed most to defeat Hitler: an astounding 65 percent of all Allied fatalities.”
This speaks for itself.