Al Nofi's CIC
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Issue #119, February 8, 2004 |
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This Issue...
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Infinite Wisdom
"The side which remains inside its fortifications is beaten."
La Triviata
- Only two states never had a battleship or equivalent warship named after them, Montana and Hawaii, ships intended to bear those name were never completed, in Montana's case twice!
- When the French captured Cordoba, Spain, in 1810, they plundered the tomb of Gonzalo Fernandez de Cordoba, El Gran Capitan, who had soundly trounced them in the Campaign of the Garigliano, in Italy, in December of 1503.
- Rutherford B. Hayes, who rose to brigadier general in the Volunteer Army during the Civil War, with a brevet for major general, was wounded in combat five times, once nearly fatally, a record for any man who ever subsequently served as president.
- In a truly aberrant moment in the history of naval aviation, on January 29, 1929, during Fleet Problem IX, the carriers Lexington and Saratoga, assigned to opposing sides, having accidentally come within about 8� miles of each other, engaged in the only known instance of "surface combat" between carriers in history, using their 8-inch main batteries to "fire" on each other.
- During World War I the birth rate in Belgian was only a third the pre-war rate.
- Abraham Lincoln's grandfather, also named Abraham, served as a captain in the Virginia militia during the Revolutionary War, and was later killed by Indians in Kentucky
- One of the earliest proposals for the use of balloons in war seems to have been made in 1784 by the Englishman Thomas Martyn, who suggested they be used for communications, barely a year after their invention.
- In the course of World War II the U.S. provided about $30 billion in Lend Lease aid to Britain and about $11 billion to the U.S.S.R., the equivalent today of perhaps $400 billion and $125 billion in current dollars, albeit arguably repaid with interest at places like Alamein and Stalingrad..
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