Infinite Wisdom

"An army is of little value in the field unless there are wise counsels at home."

La Triviata

• In 1871 the Prussian General Staff, which between 1864 and 1871 had scored three successive triumphs, against Denmark (in 272 days), Austria (70 days), and France (295 days), numbered just 70 officers, a figure that by 1914 had risen to 650, on the eve of a much less successful undertaking.
• Between 1942 and 1952 an estimated one million foreign-born persons – almost all women, but a few men as well – entered the United States as the spouses of American service personnel.
• While both were in exile in London in 1850 an ideological dispute arouse between August von Willich and fellow-revolutionary Karl Marx, which, in the true “spirit of fraternal socialism”, caused the future Union brigadier general to challenge the “Father of Communism” to a duel, that unfortunately never took place.
• As a way of uniting his kingdoms, in the spring of 324 BC, Alexander the Great presided over the mass marriage of his senior officers to Persian noblewomen, himself wedding Statira, daughter of the late Shah Darius III, whom he had defeated.
• By the end of the Chaco War (1932-1935), Paraguay held over 30,000 POWs, against only 3,000 held by Bolivia.
• During the Revolutionary War, state navies, which varied from fairly large fleets to as little as one vessel, were maintained at various times by Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, New Hampshire, and New York.
• At its maximum strength, in 1944-1945, the British Fourteenth Army, which ousted the Japanese from Burma, numbered over a million troops, the largest army in British history, and apparently the largest number of personnel of any nation to serve under a single army command.
• During World War I American production of smokeless powder grew from an average of about 14,750 pounds a day to about 2.5 million pounds, an increase of nearly 170 times increase, and would have risen to 3.5 million pounds a day by the end of 1919, were it not for the end of the war.

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