Infinite Wisdom

"Train hard, fight easy."

La Triviata

• During World War II the prostitute population of Fayetteville, North Carolina, site of Fort Bragg, rose from a “normal” level of about 200 to occasional peaks of some 5,000, as the number of troops stationed there rose and fell.
• Of 523 West Point graduates who fought in the Mexican War, 452 received brevets for gallant conduct, several of them as many as three times.
• The Roman Emperor Claudius (A.D. 41-54), was the first to declare that members of the Army's auxilia, recruited from non-citizens, were to receive the citizenship upon  completion of 25 years' of service, to include their wives and hitherto illegitimate children.
• During World War I some 55,000 enlisted National Guardsmen, about a ninth of the force, were commissioned as reserve officers by the US Army, figures that rose during World War II to an estimated 75,000 men, about a quarter of the Guard’s rank-and-file.
• During 1944 and 1945, British anti-aircraft battalions in France and Germany frequently included large numbers of female personnel.
• Rather than use a sloop-of-war or a frigate, when Rear-Adm. David Dixon Porter was named to head the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron, on October 12, 1864, he hoisted his flag on the small, lightly armed, but fast steamer Malvern, a former blockade runner, which permitted him to move about in his sprawling area of responsibility without weakening the blockading forces at any point, effectively inventing the command ship.
• Although Hitler believed that "a woman's place was in the home" and publicly vowed that women should not work in factories and such, from his accession to power in early 1933 until the end of 1939 the number of women employed as industrial workers rose by nearly 55 percent, from about 1.2 million to over 1.8 million.
• By 1918 the Pigeon Service of the Royal Engineers Signal Service had a strength of 90,000 men, not to mention tens of thousands of birds.

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