Infinite Wisdom

"The principles of tactics are well known, but the art of making suitable use of them is the real test of a great field commander."

La Triviata

• By March of 1917, approximately 40,000 to 50,000 French troops were on leave in Paris at any given time, plus additional numbers of Allied personnel, mostly British.
• Chelmsford, some 30 miles northeast of London, seems to have been where the Emperor Claudius accepted the surrender of eleven kings during his brief (i.e., 16 day) “campaign” in Britain in A.D> 43, as the town, know to the ancients as “Caesaromagus,” a Latin-Celtic fusion meaning “Field of Caesar”, was for several centuries the only place in the province to bear an imperial designation.
• During 1914-1915 Russian submarines operating in the Baltic made 22 torpedo attacks on Germany shipping, and scored not a single hit
• In 1840 Col. John H. Sherburne, a Massachusetts militia officer and political ally of Secretary of War Joel Poinsett, made what appears to be the first formal proposal for the adoption of balloons by the United States Army, during the Second Seminole War (1835-1842), suggesting that nocturnal ascents would be very useful in locating the enemy by his campfires, an idea that died as a result of bureaucratic inertia, despite some interest expressed by other officers.
• From about 1666 until at least 1906, the French armed forces almost continuously had plans on file or under development for an invasion of Britain.
• In January of 1820, just five years after the end of the Second War with Britain, Rep. Newton Cannon of Tennessee proposed that the army be reduced by half, to about 5,000 officers and men, and that the construction of coast defenses be ended.
• Between 1865 and 1885 nearly 95-percent of officers in Prussian cavalry regiments were nobles, while the proportion of middle class officers commanding infantry regiments had risen from about 5-percent to about 45-percent.
• During the American Revolution, the Ringwood Furnace, at Stirling, New York, cast some 3,000 light iron cannon, mortars,  and swivel guns for the Patriots' cause.

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