Infinite Wisdom

"It is only in reading the past that one can foresee the future."

La Triviata

• During the devastating Scottish defeat of the English at Bannockburn on June 24, 1314, Sir Giles of Argentan led the stunned King Edward II to safety and then, saying that he was “not accustomed to running away,” returned to the fray, in which he was killed.
• About 56.5 percent of the 620,000 Soviet personnel in Afghanistan in the period 1980-1988, suffered from various infectious diseases
• Until the twentieth century, the largest English-speaking army ever to take the field was the Army of the Potomac, which, with the accompanying Ninth Army Corps, totaled over 120,000 effectives in the Spring of 1864.
• Although a staple of ancient wall carvings from many cultures, and a commonplace of Hollywood sword and sandal epics, apparently the only occasion on which scythed chariots actually proved effective was in the Battle of the River Amnias, in 88 BC, when some 25,000 cavalry, light infantry, and chariotry under the Pontic general Archelaus, caught some 50,000 infantry and 6,000 cavalry under King Nicomedes IV of Bithynia on an open plain and routed them.
• During the first phase of the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), the French Army’s 36 field hospitals admitted 64,036 wounded, of whom 4,819 died, for a mortality rate of 7.5 percent, slightly better than that in British Army field hospitals during World War I, which ran 7.6 percent.
• At the height of the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), some 1,500 military entrepreneurs were in the business of raising mercenary forces throughout Europe.
• By the end of World War II more than 400,000 German and Italian prisoners-of-war were being held in the United States, some of whom were employed on civil engineering projects and others more or less been “paroled” to work in agriculture or industry.
• In 1980 it was discovered that due to improper “norming,” the ASVAB (Armed Services Vocational Abilities Battery), a series of tests designed to determine the aptitude and intelligence of potential recruits, had been inflating scores by nearly 50-percent, thus admitting to the services many unacceptable personnel, which was a major cause of the disciplinary and performance problems in the armed forces was during the 1970s.

More...