Infinite Wisdom

"Sire, I know the British; they will die on the ground on which they stand, rather than lose it."

La Triviata

• During the Second World War, the U.S. Marine Corps trained six of its own divisions, plus a number of miscellaneous formations, in amphibious warfare, and also seven of the U.S. Army’s infantry divisions, the 1^st.  3^rd, 7^th, 9^th, 77^th, 81^st, and 96^th, as well as the 53^rd and 184^th Regimental Combat Teams, and the Canadian 13^th Brigade.
• Intending to make a major splash, in 61 BC Pompey the Great hitched elephants to his triumphal chariot, but when the procession reached the walls of Rome, he found that he had to switch to the more conventional horses, because the beasts were too big to pass through the gates
• West Point was so tough in the 1840s and 1850s that about 55 percent of those admitted failed.
• In the 17 months during which he commanded the Italian Army in World War I (May 1915-October 1917), Gen. Luigi Cardona, sacked 217 generals and shot hundreds of soldiers, seeking to improve the army’s performance in the field, which finally occurred after he was sacked in the aftermath of the disaster at Caporetto.
• At one point during World War II, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, who owned several evening newspapers, was accused by the owners of some morning papers of deliberately releasing information on operations so that the news would appear first in his papers, a charge partly true because by long standing procedure press releases were usually issued in the morning, after the rival papers had already been printed and distributed.
• In 1876, 290 officers who qualified to take the entrance exam for the new French staff college, the École Supérieure de Guerre, of whom only 72 passed.
• So impressed were American troops by Maj. Rafael Martínez-Illescas, who fell at the head of the Spanish Cazadores de la Patria, on Aug. 9, 1898, during the Battle of Coamo, in Puerto Rico, that Maj. Gen. James H. Wilson arranged for his remains to be returned to his family, paid a personal visit on his widow and children, and looked after them until they were repatriated to Spain. 
• Almost 25 percent of men drafted by the U.S. Army during World War I were functionally illiterate in English.
• During World War II about a quarter of the approximately 100,000 women who served with the Yugoslav partisans died in action.

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