Infinite Wisdom

"I offer neither pay nor quarter nor provisions; I offer hunger, thirst, forced marches, battles and death. Let him who loves his country in his heart, and not his lips only, follow me."

La Triviata

• Even in 1918, when two Marine brigades were in France – one heavily engaged at the front – fully 15-percent of the officers in the Corps were involved in one or another of the “Banana Wars” in the Caribbean.
• Among a number of gifts given during World War II by the British colony of Uganda to the light cruiser of that name was a permanent supply of fine coffee.
• The frumentarii, Imperial Rome’s intelligence agents, had their origins in the personnel charged with supervising the supply of grain – frumentum – to armies in the field, because their foraging skills made them so adept at collecting information.
• During World War II (1939-1945) there is only one recorded instance of a submarine sinking an enemy submarine in a surface gunfire action, when the Italian Enrico Toti did in the British Triad on the night of October 15, 1940, in the Ionian Sea, about 60 miles southeast of the “toe” of Italy.
• The first formal proposal for the use of aerial bombardment by American forces was made in 1846, by aeronaut John Wise of Pennsylvania, who published an elaborate plan to bombard the Mexican fortress of San Juan de Ulua by dropping “percussion torpedoes” on it from a balloon, to hasten the capture of Vera Cruz.
• During the Second World War approximately 7,000 Australian women married American servicemen.
• Serving as the Dutch representative to the Russian Fleet operating against the Turks in the Aegean in 1771, Count Pasch van Krienen found time to discover many ancient Greek ruins on the Island of Ios, in the Kykládes, including, he claimed, the tomb of Homer, which, he then supposedly accidentally destroyed.
• Upon the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, 26-year old Friedrich Nietzsche attempted to volunteer to fight, only to discover that, having taken Swiss citizenship in order to accept a professorship in classical philology at the University of Basel, he was not eligible, and so joined the military nursing service.

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