Infinite Wisdom

"A ship contains a set of human machinery, in which every man is a wheel, a band, or a crank, all moving with wonderful regularity and precision to the will of its machinist."

La Triviata

• In 1636 Moslem pirates raided the Scilly Isles, off the southwest coast of Britain, carrying several people off into slavery.
• The defender of Bataan and Corregidor in the spring of 1942, who later spent over three years as a prisoner-of-war, Lt. Gen. Jonathan M. Wainwright (1883-1853), was one of the few survivors in his military family, being the grandson of Cdr. Jonathan M. Wainwright II (1821-1863), killed in action at Galveston on January 1, 1863; the nephew of Cdr. Jonathan M. Wainwright III (1849-1870), who died of wounds sustained fighting pirates off the Mexican coast on June 19, 1870; and the son of Maj. Robert Powell Wainwright (1852-1902), killed in action in the Philippines on November 19, 1902.
• An estimated one million firearms, mostly breech loading rifles, are believed to have been sold to native peoples in Africa between 1885 and 1902.
• On February 15, 1760, when the 90-gun ship-of-the-line HMS Ramillies was wrecked off Bolt Head, near Plymouth in England, all but 21 of her crew of some 850 perished.
• In 1940, the 134 men who would command U.S. Army divisions in combat during World War II ranged in age from 33 to 58, with the average being 47.
• The sixty-some vessels that comprised the Union naval squadron during the attack on Fort Fisher, off Wilmington on January 13, 1865, was the largest concentration of American warships for a combat operation until the Second World War.
• Between 1804 and 1918, 4,044 commoners serving as officers in the Austrian and Hungarian armies were raised to the nobility, some as high as count.
• In March of 1945, Lt. Luigi Durand De La Penne of the Royal Italian Navy was awarded the Medaglia d’oro de Valor Militare for leading an intrepid team of “frogmen” into Alexandria harbor on the night of December 18-19, 1941, sinking two battleships and a tanker and damaging a destroyer; the decoration being pinned on him by British Commodore Sir Charles Morgan, who had captained the battleship H.M.S. Valiant during the attack.

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