Infinite Wisdom

"Those who excel in warfare should suffer the most extreme punishment, those who entangle states in combative alliances the next greatest."

La Triviata

• British nurse Flora Sandes (1876-1956) went to Serbia in 1914 with the Red Cross, but shortly afterwards enlisted in the Serb Army, served in combat, won the Karageorge Cross and was ultimately promoted to captain.
• Initially inclined to be neutral when the Japanese invade Papua-New Guinea in 1942, many Papuans began to side with the Australians partially because of enemy brutality and partially because the Emperor’s troops usually abandoned wounded comrades, which the ‘natives’ thought dishonorable.
• While in an army training camp at Ft. Leavenworth in 1917, learning to be an officer at the hands of a certain Capt. Dwight D. Eisenhower, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a novel, The Romantic Egotist, which proved unpublishable until revised, becoming an instant best seller under the title This Side of Paradise .
• Beginning in 1819 U.S. Army surgeons were required to record weather data for their posts and submit it to the Surgeon General with their regular reports, a duty that was transferred to the “Weather Bureau” of the Signal Corps in 1870, which became a civilian agency in 1890, and in turn became the National Weather Service in 1967.
• In 1929 Marshal of the Soviet Union Mikhail Tukhachevsky proposed that, in planning for any future war, the USSR had to be prepared to produce 122,500 aircraft and 197,000 tanks per year; a suggestion that Stalin found excessive (actual 1941-1945 wartime production was about 100,000 of each).
• Tried for prematurely surrendering Metz and his army to the Prussians in 1870, Marshal Achille Bazaine defended himself by saying, “There was no government, there was no order, there was nothing”; to which the old veteran duc d'Aumale, president of the court martial replied, “There was still France.”
• On March 27, 2012, the National Archives, which holds Hitler’s private multi-volume album of looted art, announced that two long-missing volumes had been recovered from the families of American soldiers who had taken them as souvenirs when they helped capture Der Führer’s Berghof in April of 1945.
• The 21 men who were recognized by the Roman Senate as Emperor from the accession of Maximinus Thrax in March of A.D. 235 to the death of Carinus in July of 285 -- only three or four of whom had a “natural” death -- had an average reign of only 2.3 years.  

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