Infinite Wisdom

"Let no man be so rash as to suppose that, in donning a general's uniform, he is forthwith competent to perform a general's function."

La Triviata

• During World War II the U.S. Army recruited some 50,000 pigeons, mostly supplied by racing clubs and hobbyists, many of which went on to carry messages in virtually every theater of operations. 
• In 1908, at a time when the U.S. Army had not a single active division (though the Pennsylvania and New York National Guard each had one), the War Department had plans for the "immediate" activation of 17 divisions in the event of a national emergency, between Regulars and Guardsmen.
• The Olympic Torch Relay was inaugurated by Carl Diem, Secretary General of the Organizing Committee of the 1936 Games, held in Berlin and better known as the “Nazi Games.”
• Sir Henry Clinton, who commanded British troops in the American Revolution, began his military career as a “captain lieutenant” in the New York provincial militia while his father, Adm. George Clinton was governor of the colony (1741-1751).
• The U.S. supplied more than half of the small arms and artillery propellant used by the Allies during World War I.
• During World War II approximately 1,700 American airmen were interned in Switzerland after landing their damaged aircraft there or having reached there after escaping from adjacent German-held territories. 
• The four years during which a young man served as a cadet and midshipman in the German Imperial Navy, and his first four years as a junior officer, required his family to lay out about 7,000 marks above his base pay, the equivalent of nearly 5½ years’ of an industrial worker's wages.
• During the Civil War, Confederate commerce raiders captured or destroyed only 263 American flag merchant vessels, for a total of 105,000 gross tons, no more than 5 percent of the pre-war merchant fleet, but enough to encourage nervous ship owners to transfer to foreign flags nearly 1000 vessels totaling some 800,000 gross tons, nearly 40 percent of the pre-war fleet, a blow from which the U.S. merchant marine never recovered.

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