Infinite Wisdom

"War to the knife!"

La Triviata

• Of 645 graduates of the U.S. Army War College between 1934 and 1940, 65-percent went on to serve as general officers.


• In the 35˝ years between the time he joined the Royal Navy at the age of about 12˝ to his death at Trafalgar in 1805 just a few weeks after his 47th birthday, Horatio Nelson spent nearly 28 at sea.


• During the American Civil War the troops were so fond of coffee that some models of the Sharps Carbine had a little coffee mill built into the stock.


• Perhaps as an expression of his contempt for the sister service, Adm. Osami Nagano, Chief of the General Staff of the Imperial Navy from April of 1941 to February of 1944, was wont to nap during conferences with the leaders of the Imperial Army.


• One-in-three of the troops in the Soviet armed forces during the Great Patriotic War (i.e., World War II) were neither Russian, Byelorussian, nor Ukrainian, but of the two million officers who served, only one-in-twenty was not a member of one of these three ethnic groups.


• In January of 1758, at the height of the Seven Years’ War, the French Army, some 300,000 strong, was commanded by no less than 16 marshals, 172 lieutenant generals, and 176 major generals, yielding a ratio of about 824 men per general.


• By mid-1943 the Electric Boat Company was completing a new submarine every two weeks at its main yard, in Groton, Connecticut.


• During World War I the German Army, had only c. 2000 Protestant chaplains, several hundred Catholic chaplains, and a handful of Jewish chaplains, while during World War II a much larger army had only about 480 Protestant chaplains, very few Catholics ones, and no Jewish ones.

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