Infinite Wisdom

"Every officer and soldier will constantly bear in mind that he comes to support the laws, and that it would be peculiarly unbecoming in him to be in any way the infractor of them."

La Triviata

• By some accounts, early in the First World War, German soldiers who shot down "enemy" carrier pigeons were given leave.
• Not until September of 1943, 22 months after plunging into war with the United States and Britain, did the Japanese army staff schools and war college shift the focus of theoretical training from a conflict with the Soviet Union to one with the West.
• When Carthage surrendered to the Romans in 149 B.C., the city yielded some 200,000 weapons and sets of armor, including some 2,500 war engines.
• About 40 percent of the nearly 4 million German soldiers, sailors, and airmen killed during World War II were married men.
• The only surviving example of “The Badge of Military Merit,” America’s first military decoration, instituted by George Washington in 1782, of which only three are know to have been awarded before it was forgotten in the aftermath of the American Revolution (to be revived in 1932 as the Purple Heart), is in the Museum of the Society of the Cincinnati, in Exeter, New Hampshire.
• During the Second World War, the U.S. Army discharged 1,225,300 troops as permanently disabled due to non-battle injuries, tropical diseases, or psychiatric disorders incurred in combat zones.
• Formed in 1917, the U.S. Navy’s Coast Defense Reserve attracted so many draft-dodgers and sunshine patriots that it was shortly nicknamed the “Slackers’ Corps,” since the volunteers were not obligated to serve overseas, a development which led to its eventual dissolution.
• During the Pacific War, Japanese Adm. Isoruku Yamamoto commanded his forces from the bridge of a battleship, while Adm. Chester W. Nimitz commanded his from a villa in Hawaii.

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