Infinite Wisdom

"Every battle is a skein of personal crises only loosely joined by a plan of operations."

--	Geoffrey Wawro

La Triviata

• Although submariners constituted only about 2-percent of the U.S. Navy’s personnel in World War II, they comprised 10-percent of the Navy’s war dead, approximately 3,500 of the 35,000 who died.


• In 1916 the German Army, believing that adherents of the Hebrew faith were shirking their duties, conducted what it called a “Jew Count, the results of which were not published, because the figures proved that there were proportionately more Jewish personnel in military service than those of any other faith.


• During China’s Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-A.D. 220), male peasants were liable to conscription for military service from the age of 20 to 65.


• In August of 1848, shortly after the end of the Mexican-American War, Secretary of State James Buchanan turned down a request from Mexican diplomat Francisco Arrangoiz that the U.S. "lend" Mexico 3,000-4,000 troops, to assist in suppressing several uprisings against the central government, for which the troops would be paid at the same rates that prevailed in American service.


• In the course of World War I, the Army Nurse Corps went from fewer than 500 women to 21,480, of whom over 10,000 were serving in Europe with the A.E.F.


• During the Cairo Conference in November of 1943, at which F.D.R. and Churchill planned strategy for their coming meeting with Stalin in Teheran, the conferees, their political, military, and journalistic entourages, and their security details consumed a daily average of a thousand packs of cigarettes, 75 cigars, and 20 ounces of pipe tobacco, plus 40 bottles of Scotch, 40 of other whiskies, 34 of gin, and a dozen of brandy; oddly, there’s no record of champagne consumption, although Churchill was in the habit of downing a bottle or so most days.


• Since its creation in 1913, the phonetic alphabet used by the U.S. Armed Forces, which has since been adopted by NATO, has undergone at least four major revisions, so that the only letters that have remained the same throughout are Mike and X-Ray.


• As the Wehrmacht closed in on Moscow in 1941, it carried with it a list of the loot that was to be brought back to the Reich, which included Lenin's brain, so that it could be studied by Hitler's pseudo-scientists.

More...