Jan Smuts: Quotes about war

“I don't suppose any first-class work in science is done now outside of the war work … Of course … science has fallen into discredit. It has brought no solution to our human problems, and has added greatly to our engines of destruction in this war. Not that science is to blame for this misuse, but people judge by results, and by that standard science has a heavy account to liquidate. Science so far has had far too much to do with the things of sense and of matter, and the things of the spirit have been by-passed.”

Jan Smuts

As quoted by W. K. Hancock in SMUTS 2: The Fields of Force 1919-1950, p. 395

War , People , Problem , Sense

“… the Jameson Raid was the real declaration of war.”

Jan Smuts

Smuts on the Second Boer War, as cited in Antony Lentin, 2010, Jan Smuts – Man of courage and vision ISBN 978-1-86842-390-3

War

“… I fail to believe that Hitler's war – the most terrible in history – was merely due to economic causes, and not to something deeper and more sinister in human outlook and beliefs. … It was an ideology and not merely materialism. It was an ideological obsession, a madness, which can operate as disastrously in nations as in individuals. …”

Jan Smuts

Addressing the Canada Club in Ottawa on 29 June 1945, after the United Nations Charter was finalized, as quoted by Louise W. Holborn (ed., 1948) in War and Peace Aims of the United Nations, p. 719

War , History , Madness

“The groans of the dying and the blanched set faces of the dead … were enough to drive away all unwholesome feelings of exultation, and to remind one of the grim reality that war is. And even though these were the faces and the sufferings of our enemy, one had … a deeper sense of the common humanity which knows no racial distinctions.”

Jan Smuts

Smuts in Memoirs of the Boer War, p. 151, as cited in Antony Lentin, 2010, Jan Smuts – Man of courage and vision, p. 15. ISBN 978-1-86842-390-3

War , Feeling , Reality , Sense

“It is the cleanest, neatest, most sudden and spectacular victory of the war, and in size is quite comparable to the German defeat before Stalingrad.”

Jan Smuts

At the conclusion of the North African Campaign in May 1943, as quoted by W. K. Hancock in SMUTS 2: The Fields of Force 1919-1950, p. 380

War , Victory

“At the vital moment there seems to be a failure of leadership, and also a failure of the general human spirit among the peoples. I hope I am wrong, but I have a sense of impending calamity, a fear that the war was only the vanguard of calamity … I cannot look at that draft treaty without a sense of grief and shame.”

Jan Smuts

Smuts to Mary Murray, wife of Gilbert Murray, on the Treaty of Versailles, 2 June 1919, as cited in Antony Lentin, 2010, Jan Smuts – Man of courage and vision, p. 106. ISBN 978-1-86842-390-3

War , People , Fear , Hope

“The war was fought throughout and ultimately won, not only by the usual military weapons in the narrower sense, but by the whole economic, industrial, and financial systems of the belligerent Powers. Food, shipping, metals and raw materials, credit, transport, industries and factories of all kinds played just as important a part as guns, rifles, aeroplanes, tanks, explosives and gas, warships and submarines.”

Jan Smuts

The League of Nations - A Practical Suggestion, C: The League and World-Peace, Hodder and Stoughton, 1918

War , Food , Sense , Parting

“Some of you will not come back. Some of you will come back maimed. Those of you who do come back will come back changed men. That is war!”

Jan Smuts

When seeing off young South Africans in World War II, as cited in Antony Lentin, 2010, Jan Smuts – Man of courage and vision, p. 138. ISBN 978-1-86842-390-3

Men , War , Change