Infinite Wisdom

"Avoid not only an enemy force of superior strength, but also one of equal strength."

La Triviata

• During the 1890s and early 1900s, the U.S. Navy was paying $2,000 apiece for license-built Whitehead torpedoes, at a time when average income of an American family was about $450 a year.
• The last victory memorialized on Napoleon’s Arc de Triomphe is Ligny, on June 16, 1815, just two days before Waterloo.
• Having been twice captured by the Americans during the Revolutionary War, and later exchanged for Rebels officers, Col. Richard Prescott, commanding the British 7^th Regiment of Foot (today part of The Royal Fusiliers), and later a lieutenant general, was for a time nicknamed “Continental Currency.”
• Apparently the first formal “discharge papers” were issued by the Roman Emperor Claudius (A.D. 41-54), who ordered that retiring soldiers were to get an official "diploma" certifying their service and outlining their benefits and privileges.
• During one week in July of 1945, the Third Army, on occupation duty in Bavaria and the Sudetenland, lost 70 soldiers killed and some 500 wounded from mishandling German weapons and ammunition.
• In the period 1879-1888, Britain launched 160,700 tons of battleships, about 61 percent of the combined total of 262,900 tons by France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, and the United States, a ratio that was slightly bettered during the following decade, 1889-1898, 363,300 and 578,500, despite the fact that the “new navies,” Germany, Japan, and the U.S. undertook major expansions.
• During the Franco-Prussian war, some French wag proposed arming women-of-easy- virtue with poisoned needles so that they could kill German soldiers, the poison of choice being, of course, prussic acid.
• Surprisingly although Tsar Nicholas II (1894-1917) held honorary rank as an admiral or field marshal in most European countries, in his own he never ranked higher than colonel of the Guards.

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