Infinite Wisdom

"As military officers advance in rank, they find themselves increasingly surrounded by men who, mirabile dictu, defer to their opinion."

La Triviata

• Having been caught in U.S. ports at the outbreak of World War I, over 100 German merchant ships -- including several of the greatest liners of the day -- ended up ferrying the American Expeditionary Forces to Europe.
• During the First Punic War (264-241 BC), Roman losses may have amounted to as much as 17 percent of the citizen body, as the census of 264 BC counted 294,000 male citizens while that of 240 found only 260,000.
• Lawyers totaled 250 of the famed “Thousand” (actually 1,087) with whom Giuseppe Garibaldi began the liberation of Sicily in 1860, and physicians accounted for another hundred.
• Apparently, about 32 percent of Japanese aircraft that sortied on kamikaze missions, succeeded in hitting an Allied vessel, each hit causing an average of about ten killed or wounded.
• In 1796, Lazare Carnot, effectively France’s war minister, proposed landing some 5,000 “convicts and deserters” well supplied with weapons and booze in Wales and Cornwall, to “strike terror into the hearts” of the British by “murder, rape, and robbery,” in support of an invasion of Ireland.
• During World War I, French Africa sent 450,000 native troops to fight in Europe, as well as 135,000 men to work in agriculture and industry.
• An old tradition in the Worcestershire Regiment (now incorporated in the Mercian Regiment), requires that two officers, the Captain of the Week and the Subaltern of the Day, wear their swords at all times, even in the mess, to commemorate an attack by supposedly friendly Native Americans on the regiment's officers while dining in 1746.
• During the reign of Louis XIV (1643-1715) about 32 percent of all French males seem to have performed military service.
• Arriving on the Madrid Front in February of 1937, a battalion of newly recruited Canadian and American volunteers for the Spanish Republic proved rather too enthusiastic about soldiering, prompting some veterans of a more seasoned American battalion to sneak into their camp, swipe their bugle, and stomp it flat, since its excessive use served primarily to disturb everyone's sleep, not to mention alert the enemy to activity in the Loyalist lines.

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