Infinite Wisdom

"Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it."

La Triviata

• When the Prussian sail training corvette Amazone foundered in a storm off the Dutch coast in 1861, she took with her an entire class of naval cadets, which resulted in a shortage of officers in the new Royal Prussian Navy for nearly a decade.
• Either as a journalist or soldier, and sometimes both, Winston S. Churchill served under fire in five wars; the Cuban Revolution (1895), the Malakand Campaign (1897), the Sudan (1898), South Africa (1900), and World War I (1916)
• During the latter half of 1940, the bodies of many German airmen who had bailed out over the Channel while attempting to return to France, only to drown in the sea, and of many Kriegsmarine personnel slain in nocturnal clashes between light forces, washed ashore along the south coast of England, igniting rumors that the expected Nazi invasion had already been beaten off, which persisted into the postwar years.
• Between 1930 and 1937 five men served as directors of the Soviet Naval Academy, each of whom ended his tour by being executed.
• Although trapped like the rest of Parisians by the Prussian siege of 1870-1871, the members of the French Academy of Sciences continued to meet regularly, during which they promoted the development of the famous balloons that helped the city maintain communication with the rest of France, examined suggestions for stretching the food supply, and entertained proposals for revolutionary new weapons that would drive off the enemy.
• At peak strength during World War II, Switzerland had 850,000 men under arms, roughly 40 percent of the country’s total male population, about half of whom were on active duty at any time.
• Of the countries that fought throughout World War I, that is, from August of 1914 until November of 1918, Germany lost an average of 1,025 men killed per day, France 888, Britain 577, Serbia and Montenegro 80, and Belgium 65; figures for Austria-Hungary do are not available as the Dual Monarchy disappeared at the end of the war.
• In 1928 the U.S. Navy calculated that at 14,000 yards (c. 6.9 nm) a 14-inch gun firing three rounds a minute would have about a 26 percent chance of hitting its target, giving an American battleship with twelve such guns about 9.3 hits per minute.  

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