Infinite Wisdom

"Victories in the field count for little if the right decisions are not taken at home."

La Triviata

• Though he later rose to marshal, on August 21, 1792, Louis-Alexandre Berthier, a general of brigade and chief-of-staff of the French Army of the North, was suspended from his duties and demoted to private, and only narrowly avoided a date with Mdm. Guillotine.
• From the time of its release in 1941, Winston Churchill’s favorite film was Alexander Korda’s Lady Hamilton, starring Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier, which he saw on numerous occasions, each time reportedly weeping upon the death of Nelson.
• The Austro-Hungarian Orden der Eisernen Krone (Order of the Iron Crown), was actually established by Napoleon in 1805 as the Coronne de Ferro in his role as King of Italy, and taken over as “war booty” when the Hapsburgs annexed Lombardy-Venetia in 1815.
• From the onset of the Allied spring offensive in Italy on May 11, 1944, to its conclusion in late summer, engineers of the British Eighth Army built 856 Bailey Bridges, some of which remained in use for years.
• During World War I, 20 Royal Navy “Q-Ships,” disguised merchant cruisers intended to destroy enemy submarines by looking like easy targets, were lost to German u-boats, while accounting for only 10 of the enemy.
• On July 16, 1941, Hitler flatly declared, “we must never permit anyone but the Germans to carry arms,” though just nine days later Heinrich Himmler authorized the recruiting of Slavs and other untermenschen into the SS-police apparatus.
• Invited by his great-uncle, Caesar, to serve on campaign in Spain in 45 B.C., 18-year old Gaius Octavius, later the emperor Augustus, put together a small party of friends to accompany him, but had to reject one volunteer who wanted to go along in order to look after him, Atia, his mother.
• On the outbreak of World War I, the Imperial German Army had 36,693 officers, of whom only 625 were assigned to general staff duties, of whom only 352 were actually members of the General Staff Corps.

More...