Al Nofi's CIC
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Issue #102, January 10, 2003 |
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This Issue...
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Infinite Wisdom
"Do you wish an invincible, unconquerable regiment? Then organize it, administer it, train it, and fight it . . . with a pride that scoffs at danger. Inspire it with a soul of intrepidity and honor and make it to know that its defeat is impossible, that it may be killed but that it cannot be conquered.
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| -- | Col. Ulysses Grant McAlexander,
30th Infantry, 1917 |
La Triviata
- The 73 British warships and 370 transports and cargo vessels that sailed into New York harbor in July of 1776, constituted the largest fleet ever to cross the Atlantic until World War II, and comprised 45-percent of the maritime resources of the British Empire at the time.
- The famed Mihail Tukhachevsky, boy genius of the Red Army and founder of its armored forces, was arguably the heir of the Medieval Counts of Flanders, which perhaps explains why he was purged by Stalin in 1937,
- Internal explosions accounted for nearly one-sixth of the battleships and battlecruisers sunk during World War I, six of 36 vessels.
- During the mid-eighteenth century, 58 scions of the von Kleist family lost their lives in the military service of Frederick the Great.
- In 1783, the final year of the American Revolution, total U.S. casualties were one man killed, eleven wounded, and one captured, in nine enggements.
- During the early part of World War II, U.S. Navy regulations required that a woman officer be addressed as "Sir," a bureaucratic stupidity that was fortunately completely ignored in favor of "Ma'am."
- The homicide rate in Nazi Germany, 1933-1939, was 0.75 per 100,000 people per year, while the U.S. figure was 5.84 per 100,000, excluding, of course, officially sanctioned murders.
- Although France scrapped her last wooden ship-of-the-line in 1883, one managed to survive until 1947, when the Royal Navy honorably scuttled HMS Implacable, formerly the 74 gun Duguay-Trouin, captured in 1805.
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