Infinite Wisdom

"Out of the sky came a vicious assault by a skillful and determined enemy, and ere it ended, a representative of the Democratic Party who was President, became our President."

La Triviata

• Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory, who commanded the Allied Expeditionary Air Forces for D-Day, was the younger brother of the famed mountaineer George Herbert Leigh Mallory, who disappeared attempting to summit Mt. Everest in June of 1924.
• The protracted Mexican War for Independence (1810-1821) seems to have caused the deaths of some 600,000 people, about a tenth of the country’s population, mostly from disease, privation, and hunger.
• Although some politicians and military officers in the United States thought otherwise until well into the 1920s, it appears that by about 1910 most of their counterparts in Britain had decided that war between the two countries was unthinkable, which led the Royal Navy to significantly reduce its presence in American waters.
• From October of 1794 to October of 1795, in a regimen common to his career, Capt. Hugh Pigot of HMS Hermione flogged nearly 90 of the 220 men in his crew, including a midshipman guilty of a minor offense; which may help explain why, on the night of September 20-21, 1797, his crew massacred him and his officers and defected to the Spanish.
• In 1914, the German Army required the services of some 200,000 telegraph and 100,000 telephone workers to issue mobilization, deployment, and movement orders for the start of World War I.
• Not until the Second World War did the Dominions of Australia and New Zealand find it necessary to establish government-to-government relations, exchanging "High Commissioners" (the intra-Commonwealth term for ambassadors) to help coordinate the war effort.
• On January 9, 1904,When Samuel B. M. Young, the first Chief-of-Staff of the U.S. Army, retired, he presented his lieutenant general’s stars to his successor Adna Chaffee, with a note that read “From Private Young, Co. K, 12^th Pennsylvania Volunteers”; a reference to the unit in which Young had enlisted on April 25, 1861, after which he continued on active duty for a total of 15,599 days.
• By the end of World War I, although the U.S. Army Tank Corps had over 20,000 troops, only three battalions of American tankers actually saw combat, all using British or French equipment.

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