Al Nofi's CIC
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Issue #210, August 24th, 2008 |
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This Issue...
- Infinite Wisdom
- la Triviata
- Short Rounds
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Infinite Wisdom
"Tell the Germans that if they want Calais, they will have to fight for it."
| -- | Brigadier Claude Nicholson,
30th Motor Brigade, B.E.F.,
Summoned to surrender,
May 25, 1940 |
La Triviata
- Although Uncle Sam sent some two million troops across the Atlantic during World War I, only about 500 were lost to German submarine attacks.
- Supposedly, finding a surgeon from the British 87th Regiment (the Royal Irish Fusiliers) tending a large number of French wounded after the Battle of Talavera (July 28, 1809), Joseph Bonaparte, made King of Spain by his brother, promptly gave the man £100 in gold.
- Of 499 nobles in the Swedish Parliament of 1693, 248 held commissions in the army or navy.
- Mexico’s national anthem, adopted on February 9,1854, was selected as a result of a competition authorized by President Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, perhaps the single most reviled man in the country’s history.
- During the last week of October 1944, 80 percent of all the artillery and mortar rounds fired by the American XX Corps came from captured German stocks.
- In the Spring of 1814, Lt. Franz Xavier Conrad von Hotzendorf, of the Austrian 4th Light Cavalry, was one of the officers who escorted Napoleon from Paris to Toulon to take ship for exile on Elba, and would later go on to father Franz Conrad von Hotzendorf, Chief of the Austro-Hungarian General Staff from 1909, one of the principal architects of the European disaster of 1914-1918.
- In 1908, during a record-breaking trans-Atlantic voyage in which the battlecruiser H.M.S. Indomitable averaged 25.13 knots, the ship’s officers took their turn heaving coal with the "black gang" helping keep steam up, as also the Prince of Wales (later George V), who ranked as a vice admiral and was just along for the ride.
- Reportedly, on August 4, 1943, during a radar-guided predawn air raid against Japanese installations on Kiska, in the Aleutians, a Navy PBY not only dropped several bombs, but also 92 empty beer bottles, for the "disconcerting whistling effect" which they produced.
More...
Portions of "Al
Nofi's CIC" have appeared previously in Military Chronicles,
Copyright © 2105 Military
Chronicles (www.militarychronicles.com), used with permission, all rights
reserved.
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