Infinite Wisdom

"Victory is the beautiful bright colored flower. Transport is the stem without which if could never have blossomed."

La Triviata

• During the Crimean War, disease accounted for about 70 percent of total British and French deaths, combat for about 12-15 percent, and the rest accidents, especially drownings, plus murder, exposure, and other causes.
• Following a severe reverse during an attempt to drive the German trench lines back from Soissons on January 8-14, 1915, French Generalissimo Joseph Joffre sacked every general and most colonels in the 5^th Group of Reserve Divisions.
• During Japan’s “Boshin War” (1868-1869), between the forces of imperial restoration and those of the Shogun, a platoon of some 30 women – the Joˆshigun – joined the fight for the latter, and, reinforced by additional women, perished in the defense of Turugajô Castle.
• In 1690, the 15,000 strong Spanish Army of Lombardy, supporting Piedmont against the French, was suffering a disease rate of about 10 percent, so that medical costs were running about 2,000 Milanese lire a day, equal to the per diem pay for 8,000 infantrymen.
• Gaius Octavius – later Augustus – seems to have first engaged in combat when he was about 16, serving with what later became the legio VI Ferrata, in the Battle of Munda (Mar 17, 45 B.C.), during his great uncle Julius Caesar’s Second Spanish Campaign.
• During 1811, provost marshal patrols – often consisting of whole cavalry regiments – managed to sweep up something like 100,000 deserters or draft dodgers in Napoleonic France.
• On the eve of the outbreak of the Pacific War, in December of 1941, the Japanese Imperial Navy’s Air Force was larger than that of the Imperial Army.
• From the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789 to the end of 1791, some 6,000 French officers fled aboard.
• Having been elected to the Reichstag in 1926, Hermann Goring accepted a monthly "subsidy" of 1,000 marks to lobby for the interests of Lufthansa, given by one of the airline's directors, Erhard Milch, whom The Fat One would later reward with a marshal's baton in the Luftwaffe.
• By one estimate, during the Napoleonic Wars, perhaps half of all men newly recruited by the Royal Navy were brought in by impressment, and nearly another quarter by other forms of coercion, including criminal sentences, vagrancy violations, and similar measures.

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