Al Nofi's CIC
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Issue #109, March 3, 2003 |
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This Issue...
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Infinite Wisdom
"War without fire is as worthless as sausages without mustard."
La Triviata
- For a time during the immediate post-Vietnam Era, the United States Army tried to avoid use of the word "combat", preferring the amusing term "violence processing".
- In the eighteenth century, it was estimated that half of any given group of horses being moved by sea across the Atlantic would die, while the rest would require several weeks of rest and exercise before they could take to the field.
- During the Civil War, Union Maj. Gen. George McClellan's staff evaluated the qualifications of women to serve as spies by means of phrenology, a nineteenth century pseudo-science that studied the bumps on a person's skull to determine his intellectual, moral, and artistic abilities.
- Between August 1914 and January 1917 the Russian Army lost approximatley 63,000 officers killed in action, plus a further 27,000 dead of wounds, as well as about 17,000 taken prisoner, not to mention some 88,000 wounded or otherwise injured, from an officer corps that began World War I at about 40,600 and never numbered more than about 155,000.
- During the Russo-Turkish War of 1828-1829 a Russian Army of 65,000 men took the field in the Balkans accompanied by 6,000 transport wagons, 5,400 of which were to carry personal goods of senior officers.
- The launching of the Japanese super-battleship Musashi on November 1, 1940, caused a 120-cm (c. 47-inch) wave that flooded some low lying districts of Nagasaki Harbor.
- Although they consituted only about 4-percent of the army, British officers during World War I amounted to some 8-percent of the dead.
- By 1903 U.S. coast artillery was covering 28 locations with70 forts equipped with 79 8-inch, 110 10-inch, and 87 12-inch guns, plus 192 12-inch mortars, making it the most extensive coast defense system in the world.
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