Infinite Wisdom

"Now an army may be likened unto water, for just as flowing water avoids the heights and hastens to the lowlands, so an army avoids strength and strikes weakness."

La Triviata

• Sent to Providence, Rhode Island, in 1942 to take command of a new frigate, the British novelist Nicholas Monsarrat was given HMS Perim,  though he thought commanding her sister-ship might have been more amusing, HMS Montserrat.
• By the end of the Fourteenth Century it appears that about 10 percent of the troops in the army of Ming China were armed with guns, perhaps 120,000 to 130,000 men.
• Between 1914 and 1918, 27 percent of all French men between the ages of 18 and 26 died in military service.
• Some time in the First Century, the Greek word for the Roman cohort, originally "taxeis", was replaced by "speira", formerly used for the long-obsolete maniple, a change first recorded, oddly enough, in Chapter 10 of The Acts of the Apostles.
• During the final years of peace in the late-1930s Britain required some 60 million tons of food, raw materials, and finished goods per year to survive, yet through extraordinary conservation, maximum exploitation of domestic resources, careful management, and stringent rationing, by 1944 this had been reduced to only 27 million tons, despite the demands of a global war.
• Although already in negotiations for an Armistice, on November 6, 1918, the Imperial German Army issued what would be its final call for conscripts, dipping once more into a very depleted pool of available manpower.
• One effect of the Great Depression on the Armed Forces was that the quality of personnel rose, as large numbers of men attempted to join the services, permitting greater selectivity; by the mid-1930s more than 85-percent of enlisted men had completed some high school, with the result that most of the younger personnel were actually better educated than their NCOs.
• Although not reported in the press, during the “Punitive Expedition” into Mexico in 1916, John J. Pershing arranged for the army to establish brothels for the troops, with the result that the incidence of venereal disease was extremely low, a measure he failed to take during World War I, with significant consequences.

More...