Infinite Wisdom

"I learnt what one ought not to do, and that is always something."

La Triviata

• Although the VD rate in the U.S. armed forces in 1939-1945 was only about a 1/30^th that of 1917-1918, on average 606 servicemen were diagnosed with venereal infections every day during World War II.
• The 39 “Articles of War” adopted by Parliament for the British Navy in 1652, included 12 that permitted the death penalty in punishment for violation, and 13 more that required it.
• One reason French Admiral Jean Darlan (who played such a critical, and ambiguous, role in the Vichy regime) was so hostile to the British was that his great-grandfather had been killed at the Battle of Trafalgar; though not before (his descendant claimed) firing the shot that killed Lord Nelson.
• The Liu-tao, or “Six Secret Teachings”, a handbook for rulers from China’s “Warring States” period (475-221 BC), mandated that three astrologers be included in the command staff of any military expedition.
• About 4,500 people were executed as a result of the July 20, 1944, attempt to kill Adolph Hitler.  
• French casualties from August 14^th through September 12, 1914 (the period of the Battles of the Frontiers and of the Marne) amounted to nearly 20 percent of their total losses for the entire First World War.
• Reportedly, the Roman Emperor Aurelian (r. 270-275) once punished a soldier for seducing the wife of a citizen in whose home he had been billeted, by having two stout pines bent over, tying the man’s legs to the tops, and letting fly.
• In 1938 Hugh Sinclair, head of Britain’s Signals Intelligence Service, decided that the Bletchley Park estate, in Buckinghamshire, would be ideal for a secret code-breaking center, and, when the Treasury refused to purchase the place, did so himself at a cost of  £7,000 (nearly £350,000 today). 

More...