Infinite Wisdom

"Tis the soldiers' life To have their balmy slumbers waked with strife."

La Triviata

• By the end of World War II, the Army held title to over 95,000 square miles of real estate in the U.S., an area roughly equal to Michigan.
• One reason the great Helmuth von Moltke started his career as a topographical officer was that he could not afford a horse, and it was the only staff assignment that did not require a mount, although he did contract to translate Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire into German in the hopes of raising the money for one.
• During the operations of the British Fourteenth Army in Burma in 1944-1945, aircraft were used to move some 130,000 wounded personnel from the front lines to the rear, in what remains the largest medevac operation in history.
• By 1812, Napoleon’s headquarters, traveling cabinet, personal staff, and security detail had grown to some 4,000 personnel, so that an entire transportation battalion was required just to move the necessary tentage, and once, when everyone was drawn up for inspection they were mistaken for a division.
• During World War I, 34.5 out of every thousand ethnic Germans from Bohemia died in military service, compared with 27.7 of every thousand ethnic-Germans in the rest of Austria, and 27.8 of every thousand Germans from Germany.
• Between Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first inaugural address, on March 4, 1933, and the outbreak of the European War on September 1, 1939, 106 new vessels were commissioned in the fleet, and over 100 were laid down, despite the fact that not a single combatant had been authorized during the administration of his predecessor, Herbert Hoover.
• “Giovanni Acuto” the nickname given the mercenary John Hawkwood (1320-1394), was not a mangled Italian rendering of his English name, but rather a tribute to the man’s wiliness, for it means “Sharp John.”
• The last surviving man who ranked as a general at the beginning of World War I in 1914 was probably Herrmann von Kuhl, who, born on November 2, 1856, had been promoted to generalmajor in 1912, and served as chief-of-staff to various armies and army groups during the Great War, to retire in 1919, and lived on until November 4, 1958.

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